Laos: Endangered Languages, Education, International Aid, 21st Century Communism and Buddhism

Yeah, this post has a long title, and everything mentioned in it is covered in this relatively brief article that I've posted via Medium.com, for those of you who aren't regular subscribers to Ogmois (the slightly obscure journal of the Foundation for Endangered Languages).

https://medium.com/p/1e7232a1e3a4

I'll try to relay news of any other articles (formal or informal) that I've got coming out, both here (on this blog) and via my rarely-used twitter account: twitter.com/eiselmazard

Interview with 東蓮覺苑 (Tung Lin Kok Yuen) in Hong Kong

I provided an interview to the Hong Kong publication of the Tung Lin Kok Yuen foundation (東蓮覺苑).

http://newlotus.buddhistdoor.com/en/news/d/31356

The questions (and the illustrations) largely concern the situation of Theravāda Buddhism within Yunnan (云南) but the answers cover a great deal of ground, both about my own research into Pali, about the historical and current situation of the religion in Southeast Asia, and so on.  Politics are not omitted from the discussion.


It is credit to the editor that this was published (in a conservative, Buddhist newsletter) without censorship.  This is another interesting example of an openly-religious publication being more willing to print both criticism and controversy than "secular Buddhist" publications are, in my experience.

The Opposite of Nostalgia (Laos, Cambodia, Thailand)

I never wake up and wish I was back in Laos.  Never.

I had a conversation in Lao a few weeks ago --the first conversation I'd had in the language for several years.  The man I spoke with asked when I planned to go back, where I most desired to go back to, and so on.

Although I was limited (and out-of-practice) in the answer that I could offer, one of the first things I said was along the lines of, "Everywhere in the world, people have problems; everywhere you go, life is a struggle".  He was astonished at this answer (perhaps because it was a ponderous contrast to how poorly I was able to communicate in the language).  He pressed further, asking about specific towns in both Laos and Isan.  I confirmed that I had been to these places he named, but that I didn't expect to return, and I didn't particularly want to see any of them again.

It is interesting that the guy speaking to me expected me to feel this type of homesickness at all.  I suppose his expectation might be the result of having so many conversations (in his own language) with Lao expatriates and exiles here in Canada, yearning to go home, even if it is politically impossible for them to do so.  Of course, one of the first subjects of conversation was my attempt to explain that for me, also, it is politically impossible to return to the country.  I suppose he may have previously met a small number of white men who learned Lao as a language and who regard the place as paradise, or who at least recall it wistfully.

I'm neither Lao nor an expatriate, but I was exiled from Laos.  I never did regard the place as paradise --neither when I lived and worked there, nor in retrospect.

My years in Asia were a large percentage of my adult life, but they don't add up to all that much, from the perspective of someone born and raised in the region.  Still, the lack of stability that I found elsewhere (from Cambodia to Canada) makes the comparison very clear.  Although it was by accident rather than by design, Laos really was the only home that I ever had.  Still today, it is the only home that I've ever known.

I remember visiting a colleague's apartment in Cambodia, and remarking on a set of jars he had arranged along a wall: small efforts like that had become alien to me (to decorate one's own home, to settle down or settle in) because I had lived for so long out of a backpack, never expecting to stay in the same apartment (nor the same country) for any length of time.

That kind of chronic uncertainty surrounded me from the day that I was exiled from Laos.  My situation within Laos had been so bad that it seemed inevitable that I could find more stability thereafter in China, Thailand, or Cambodia.  That proved to be untrue.  I was in China during the Olympic terror (an especially hard time to be a foreigner doing paperwork in the P.R.C.) --and, of course, I arrived there as a sort of refugee (speaking only Lao, and not knowing one word of Chinese).  Subsequently, things didn't get any easier in Thailand or Cambodia.

The exile itself is a funny story, if told in a funny way, but the bare facts are grim: I was exiled with nothing but my backpack and a bicycle, after receiving death threats from a Communist Party official.  The threats were followed by my formal condemnation as a thought-criminal at a meeting (held with the big portraits of Marx and Lenin on the walls).  At this meeting, my former co-workers (at a Belgian-government-funded charity) were each required to read a statement aloud apologizing for not having denounced me earlier.

I was told that I would never be allowed to re-enter the country --but I was forced to test the veracity of this threat (eventually) because the only money I had was in a bank account inside Laos.

I received an array of responses from my contemporaries (both Lao and foreign).  For the most part, people were indifferent, often justifying this with reference to past examples of people whom they had heard of in similar straits.  Everyone had a story about someone being kicked out of the country for no good reason at all (sometimes, the story told was about themselves, and their eventual "rehabilitation" within the government).  They said these things to make my circumstances seem commonplace, but the comparisons were always facile.  The purpose of these stories was, for the most part, to dismiss me (and whatever my situation might really be).

In general, people wanted to believe that I was secretly wealthy (despite my obvious poverty) or else secretly powerful (despite my obvious powerlessness) --and, as a sub-set, several people said to my face that they believed I was working for the C.I.A.  I don't know if others believed this without announcing it.

Conversely, one Lao woman who had formerly believed that I was a C.I.A. agent interpreted the circumstances of my exile as proof that I had never been working for the agency.  Perhaps this was because nobody had come to my aid.  Perhaps, in her eyes, the whole mess demonstrated that I really was a hapless Pali scholar, trying to examine stone inscriptions and palm-leaf manuscripts, while volunteering for humanitarian work, and so on.

Although both perspectives (on my supposed C.I.A. status) were simply stupid, I thought there was something slightly ingenious on the part of the woman who reversed her opinion in light of the facts.  I suppose there must be some strange optimism amongst people who believe that the C.I.A. would employ someone to study Pali, and so on.

My lack of nostalgia for Laos doesn't have much to do with the circumstances of my exile (nor with what happened after that).

I adored the language, especially the written language, and I cherished the opportunity to pursue (i) philology, (ii) fieldwork, and (iii) humanitarian work of some kind, simultaneously, in a setting where each of the three inspired more of the other two.

My own education (so much mired in Cold War politics) was useful in the Communist setting in a way that it couldn't be anywhere else (except, perhaps, North Korea, etc.).  Although other people regard the place as exotic, I found it easier to understand Laos than Hong Kong, Bangkok, or Taiwan --perhaps easier than anywhere I had lived before.  The combination of political science and Pali that I brought to Laos seemed tremendously useful in that cultural setting --and I gorged myself on the history and politics of the place.  However, my time was spent at the libraries: I never drank alcohol nor ate meat, and these were simple but insuperable barriers between myself and the people around me.  I didn't pretend to have anything in common with the culture I was studying.

Most of what I liked about the country couldn't be described as "good" --and much of it is tragic.  The potential to do good in a place where it was needed was inspiring, but the reality of that need is nothing to be nostalgic about.  My agency handed out sacks of rice to people who really were suffering from "seasonal starvation" and malnutrition; although memorable, it would be impossible to be wistful about the experience.  Likewise, the situation for scholarship of any kind (Pali included) was parlous; I enjoyed decoding the mix of propaganda and misinformation that surrounded me, but I can't glorify that experience in retrospect, either.

All the while, the basics of food, shelter, and finding enough silence to sleep in were very hard to manage.  Everywhere I went it was very, very difficult to get a full night's sleep: natural sources of noise pollution (roosters, dogs, etc.) were competing with unnatural ones (loud music at all hours, etc.).

My official identity card as a "foreign expert" in the employ of the Lao government was issued to me on the same day that I was informed of my denunciation and deportation (i.e., exile) from the place.  Likewise, my ability to really communicate in spoken Lao had only started to amount to something useful during my last few months in the country --and then, suddenly, I was gone, and I could never expect to return.

I never wake up and wish I was back in Laos.

I never wake up and wish that I was in Cambodia or Thailand, either.

I miss the opportunity to do meaningful work, but, aside from that, there's nothing for me to miss there.

I don't think there's anyone in Laos who misses me, either.  There may still be some memory that there once was a man who came to study Pali in Laos --and that he ended up being exiled by the Lao government, on the same day that they issued his paperwork to certify him as a "foreign expert".

When Buddhist Monks Arm International Terrorists

 [The Rights to the Photograph Above Belong to Gary Jones]

The immortal Ian Baird has published an article on the subject that "everybody" knows about, but nobody ever talks about: Buddhist monks who raise money to support international terrorism.  Yeah, I said it.  The following quotation involves exotic locales that may be unfamiliar to my readers such as Edmonton (埃德蒙顿) and Winnipeg (温尼伯) --thus I've added links throughout to avoid confusion.


The 65-year-old abbot of the Lao Buddhist temple in Edmonton, Canada, and I sat on the floor. […]  [After fleeing Laos in 1975] Achan Sounthone stayed at a temple in Kalasin province, northeastern Thailand, for the next five years. […] After being regularly hassled by Thai government officials, however, the monk decided to register as a Lao refugee and enter the Lao refugee camp in Ubon Ratchathani province in 1979.  But he soon found himself disgusted with the corruption in the camp, and he became increasingly convinced that the cause of the insurgents was just.  So in 1980 he moved to a village in Thailand on the edge of the Mekong river where one of the main "white Lao" groups […] was headquartered. […]  He spent over eight years treating injured insurgents […] and training medics. […]  In 1988 when the Chat[i]chai Choonhavan government announced its policy to transform "battlefields to marketplaces," making it difficult for insurgents opposed to the Lao government to continue operating from bases in Thailand, he entered the Lao refugee camp at Napho.  From there, he ended up being sponsored by the Lao Buddhist temple in Winnipeg, Canada, where he arrived in December 1990. […] [The monk stated:] "Since 1995 I have been sending money to an insurgent group that still lives in the forest in Southern Laos," […] [After discussing the monk's moral justification for this, Baird comments:] A thought came to mind.  Wasn't the monk's justification for providing insurgent groups with money similar to the legitimization that many monks give for consuming meat even if they are not allowed to kill animals? […]

[Source:] The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 71, No. 3, August 2012, p. 655 et seq., "Lao Buddhst Monks' Involvement in Political and Military Resistance to the Lao People's Democratic Republic Government Since 1975", by Ian G. Baird.

Robert Jay Lifton and the self-directed cult

Robert Jay Lifton has researched a remarkable diversity of cults, with an enduring focus on methods of mind control, from the techniques used in the universities of Communist China in the 1950s, to the methods of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo (Youtube has immortalized a lecture of his on this subject).  That, in itself, is interesting to me: my own work has dealt with both Buddhism and Communism, but I can't say that I have (yet) devoted much attention to the cult aspects of either one.

Lifton's approach has made the central question of cult analysis the paradox of how it is (procedurally) that sane adults lose their own powers of decision-making.  I do not say this as a criticism, but merely to point out that the centrality of brainwashing reflects Lifton's professional interest in the witness to history as a patient in recovery thereafter.  In contrast to an historian examining the same phenomena, Lifton is naturally more interested in changes that transpire when people escape from these cults, and regain their powers of decision-making, and reflect back on the prior events.  In terms of the history of politics and/or/as religion, this puts an unusual emphasis on personal motivations, and subjective perceptions of institutional goals (as opposed to outcomes).  Lifton is a psychiatrist, not an archivist, and, accordingly, he deals with a separate set of questions in looking at the history of China than, say, Frank Dikötter (in Mao's Great Famine).

That isn't a problem, but it is something interesting for me to reflect on, precisely because my own approach to history (having variously fallen under the headings of political science, philology, or otherwise) would naturally tend to marginalize the most blatantly cultic aspects.  I also do not interview people in the status of patients, nor in a process of recovery; in almost any other setting, people who are critical of Communism in the present tense are likely to describe themselves (and the history they witnessed) as if they had been critics all along.  Likewise, people disillusioned with Buddhist cults (or Buddhism in general) will tend to retrospectively insert critical attitudes into their narratives.  In this way, the true-believer disappears from the recollection of history, although, in fact, the mentality of the true-believer is often something of decisive importance in understanding why the events happened in the first place.

For cultural outsiders (such as myself) discussing the history of the Khmer Rouge (formally writ Democratic Kampuchea) the last thing on anyone's mind would be the mentality of the true-believers (i.e., the attitudes or beliefs of the people who sincerely subscribed to the cult of Pol Pot, and who really believed that the regime would deliver on its promised goals).  There is a natural tendency to either focus on the suffering of the great majority of the people, or else to give voice to the sorrows of the enemies of the regime who were persecuted.  The minority (be it large or small) who really believed in the doctrine of the cult are marginalized by every approach to the history except for Lifton's school of cult-analysis.  In many contexts, it would seem startling and perverse if someone were to approach the same chapter of history in terms of the suffering of the true-believers --and in terms of their psychological recovery after leaving the cult (i.e., their sorrows in losing their faith in Pol Pot).

The study of cult methods does have some significant applications to Buddhism in the 21st century, but there are also limitations that result from the (natural and inevitable) preoccupation of the discipline with apocalyptic cults in particular, and with cults that exercise a great deal of hierarchical control over their members (both in terms of suasion and coercion) rather than those that allow followers a high degree of self-direction.

I do not think that the concept of a self-directed cult is contradictory; it seems to be one of the principle refinements of the religious mentality, i.e., that the devotee takes responsibility for their own devotions.  Perhaps this aspect is clearer in various forms of Buddhism that do not shift responsibility onto a monotheistic deity (nor a magical agent of fate, etc.) and more clearly burden the practitioner with doing the work of their own salvation.  What is perhaps most sad (and most significant) about the cult mentality is that it can arise in the absence of  coercion: people can (and do) lose the ability to make their own decisions without someone else taking it from them.

One of the more obvious elements of Lifton's influence is the direct imitation of his numbered lists (iterating "criteria" for the cult mentality, often linked to concepts that are important for treatment and recovery therafter).  I have now seen several authors propose their own lists of the distinctive aspects of cult mentality (often as observed amongst the members of a specific cult) in contrast to (or expanding upon) Lifton's list in his 1961 tome, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism.  One of the things that is (prima facie) remarkable about this influence of Lifton's earliest work is that the psychology of Maoism (perhaps a uniquely 20th century "religion"?) has become a template for the analysis of fundamentally different cults (some claiming ancient origins, others based on new revelations, and so on).  I'm not complaining: I genuinely do see common elements to Communist and Religious authoritarianism in the 20th and 21st centuries --and their common ground may derive from the scientism of the era (and not from commonalities in the specific soteriological content of the competing doctrines).  However, while Lifton's analysis may have broad applicability (and his definitions of terms, categories, etc., have provided the vocabulary for a sort of miniature social science specialized in this subject) there is an inevitable incommensurability of the things being analyzed.  The loss of the individual's capacity to make decisions may be an important phenomenon in many different religious settings; however, it may also be the only thing that various cults have in common.

My ulterior motive in writing this article, I note, is that I may inspire a few of my colleagues to send me recommended reading on this subject (as I have seen very little analysis of 21st century Buddhism along these lines).  As I was reading more and more of the analysis of the cult mentality, I started to sketch out what I thought were the aspects that were absent in the approaches I've seen so far (but that are significant to the world as I've known it).  Obviously, this is not a rebuttal of any of the works I've been reading (and, thus, I don't cite them) but just reflects the real differences in the religions that the respective authors have been studying --and, perhaps, differences in the historical periods concerned, even if they are only separated by a few decades.

(1) One of the broadest assumptions I've noticed is that cults operate through active recruitment and conversion rather than the passive attraction of people who already agree with the cult's doctrine.  The growth of communications technology has massively expanded the scope of the latter mode of operation: any group (political or religious) can now create a crossroads for people who are already like-minded or who already agree with some portion of whatever the doctrine may be.  In the 1960s, such a passive approach would have hardly connected strangers within a single city or university campus; today, it can connect people across continents.  The increasing ease of finding people who are already sympathetic to a cult's cause may well result in a decreasing effort to make any kind of convincing (or even coherent) account of what the doctrine is supposed to be for an audience of unsympathetic or skeptical outsiders.

As simple as it may sound, there is a world of difference between a group that presumes its members will sign up (by e-mail or telephone) to attend a conference in advance, and a group that has to actively invite strangers and skeptics to attend its rituals, lectures, and so on.  The latter was a ubiquitous part of American campus life in the 1960s (everyone from the Communist Party to Satanists were actively seeking converts) but this is obviously an exhausting and frustrating experience for the true-believers themselves, and it often resulted in an asymmetry between the "public doctrine" used by the cult to recruit outsiders, and the "private reality" of what was believed and practiced amongst longstanding members.  As with many other forms of marketing, we may now see the decline of the "cold call", simply because it has become easier to create a crossroads for people to meet at who have at least some interest in (or some prior agreement with) whatever the cult is offering.

The function of "conversion" may not involve convincing anyone of things they don't already believe, but merely of organizing people who are already disgruntled with other religious/political movements, and who are attracted to the cult on the basis of whatever common ground they perceive themselves to have with it (prior to contact).

(2) I find that the cult mentality is signaled by the refusal to admit of any distinction between expert and amateur opinion, and this may be of increasing significance in the 21st century context, with the increasing ease of consulting reference books, looking up scientific facts of various kinds, and so on.  There was a time, simply, when it was much easier for the believers in a miracle cure to ignore the facts of medicine; those facts have become embarrassingly easy to check; ingredients with complex Latin names have become much easier to decode.

Real devotees of Communism regard economics as the "magical science" of dialectical materialism; and yet, for that same reason, they cannot cope very well with the unmagical facts of economics (that occupy so much newsprint from day to day).  Either the experts must be demonized (as believers in crackpot therapies will vilify the entire medical establishment as a conspiracy against their own cult, etc.) or else the distinction between expert and amateur must disappear.  The latter is a slippery slope, and it goes a long way down: it is fairly easy for someone to convince themselves that they know more about economics than the opinion pieces in the local newspaper, but, soon enough, they have come to imagine themselves as knowing more than all the most respected authors in the history of the subject --and, of course, the cult rewards and re-enforces this mentality.

Francis Bacon would remind us that we should measure knowledge in terms of "operation" (our ability to do things for ourselves, and to discover things for ourselves), rather than in terms of quoted dogma.  Although the convert to Communism may be convinced that they understand the economy much more profoundly than the editors of the Financial Times, they cannot, in fact, do the math themselves.  Within the cult mentality, the fact that the true believer cannot read a simple chart (nor interpret the statistics and facts offered by the detractors of the cult) are things that are easily dismissed; outside of the cult mentality, they are impossible to ignore.

I think there is an important distinction to be made between the Communist who believes merely that Communism has its own science of economics somewhere (i.e., that someone in an office in Moscow knows better than the Financial Times, or that the ghost of Lenin knows things that mere mortals cannot fully know) and the Communist who has come to regard himself (or herself) as being at no disadvantage to the experts.  What I encounter, in our era, is that the believer convinces himself that he understands the only true science of economics, and refuses to recognize himself as a mere amateur (in contrast to experts of any kind, be they sympathetic or antithetical to the cult).  The Christian Creationists memorize factoids about geology and physics that (supposedly) favor their case, and the Communists memorize factoids about fractional reserve banking; in both cases, the effect on the believer is not that they regard the researchers who discovered these things as extremely intelligent, but that they feel very intelligent themselves.  The conceit is not that someone like Lenin knows better than the experts, but that the followers individually know better than the experts (and, thus, debunking Lenin has no effect on their faith in their own expertise).  Although I won't digress into the application to Buddhism: it isn't difficult to find people in Taiwan who are convinced that a very casual acquaintance with one short text by Nāgārjuna makes them equal to any or all specialists who draw their knowledge from the prolix literature extant in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit and Pali.  I think this is a crucial aspect of the self-directed cult: the reliance on authority of any kind diminishes, as the follower becomes more and more convinced of their own infallibility, in their unmediated relationship with the invisible forces that they believe define the world around them.

This attitude seems to have been facilitated by the transition to the internet, as it allows people to censor their own reading more than ever before, and to selectively engage only with sources that will re-enforce their own delusions.  By contrast, if you take a series of economics textbooks off of a library shelf, and glance through them to select the one you prefer, the vast majority of what you're looking at may challenge your preconceptions, and may challenge your sense of your own expertise.  The latter experience is, quite rightly, humbling, and it is not humbling for the science of economics only.

(3) Another signal of cult mentality that is not new but is perhaps exacerbated by the same changes in the technology of learning is the refusal to admit distinctions of scale in social phenomena.  Modes of reasoning that create categories of "everyone" and "no-one" have always existed, but the erasure of the distinction between a few hundred people and a few hundred million is made easier through the same cycle of self-selected information alluded to.  It seems to me noteworthy that Western Communism in the 1960s and 1970s offered complex justifications as to why a cult-like organization of just a few hundred members could have the significance of millions, but this was still predicated on an awareness of the fact that they were a tiny minority, and that they needed to offer some justification for this fact, and for their self-perceived historical significance.  This is a different thing from the delusion that the hundreds really are millions, or the delusion that a movement existing only in a few odd places actually occupies the entire world.  Although some people will tell me that I'm reporting nothing new here, please keep in mind that cult members can now see short film-clips sent in by followers all over the world (via Youtube, etc.).  This is a mode of auto-propaganda that did not exist a few decades ago, and a few dozen followers scattered around various continents can give the impression of a mass movement where there is really none at all.

I don't have much to say about this, except that it is a delusion that I meet "face to face" often enough.  When I have spoken to true-believers in cults of various kinds, I have been able to address this type of belief through the most simple sort of Socratic method: I would simply ask about exceptions to their dogmatic assertions, and allow them to answer in their own terms.  For Buddhists, in general, it is extremely painful for them to admit (or, perhaps, to realize) that the very sect they would dogmatically assert to be helping the poorest of the poor everywhere is, in fact, only seeking out a small number of the wealthiest overseas Chinese communities (in California, etc.).  I recall a long (and not at all confrontational) dialogue with a true-believer of this kind, who had this realization after I asked him some very simple questions, such as "What about Haiti?"  He had apparently never questioned his organization's own claims about their geographic extent (and priorities) before, and he had never reflected on the fact that they had never even made any attempt to help (or speak to) the black population within the cities of the United States they were headquartered in.

(4) Following the same pattern is the refusal to admit the sources of knowledge, which is, likewise, an aspect of cult mentality exacerbated by the fact that sources can now be checked so rapidly and easily.  This, also, is very different from former generations who would openly admit that they only knew something because their grandparents explained it to them in that way, and they might be satisfied to say that they can provide no account of their grandparents' reasons for having such confidence.  Perhaps the collapse of traditional authority (or the belief in tradition simply because it is tradition) is more fundamental than technological change in this case, but the ease of checking facts and comparing alternative explanations is certainly a significant catalyst.

I should clarify that by "sources of knowledge" I do not mean published works only: the refusal to admit the source of something known includes (e.g.) the refusal to admit that something was revealed in a hallucinatory experience (even if this was part of the original doctrine of the cult).  It may be a refusal to admit that one doctrine was set down as a substitute for another that failed to get results, or any other disavowal of the process of discovery (magical or otherwise) that produced the thing now known.

Of course, Lifton's enduring idea of the thought-terminating cliché comes to mind in this context: routinely, some catchphrase is offered to settle the matter, so that the question of how we know what we are all supposed to know does not emerge.

However, I do think there is a generational difference in this pattern: part of the refusal to admit or examine the sources of doctrines is an embarrassment that surrounds their revelation.  The problem is one of believing in a doctrine, but not believing (sufficiently) in the conditions that produced the doctrine (be it secular or sacred).

I have met people who live on a sort of religious tightrope, because they believe in the doctrines that were revealed through hallucinations, and yet they do not believe that hallucination is a reliable source of doctrines (and I think they do not trust their own hallucinatory or meditative experiences, while still wanting to believe in the given doctrine).  This tension is no less true for the Communists, who may want to believe in the doctrines of dialectical materialism (as isolated tenets) but who are deeply embarrassed by the origins of those doctrines (that are neither scientifically valid, nor marked by any religious miracle to set them above the scrutiny of science), and even more embarrassed by the committees that redefined them as time went on (Karl Popper caused a great deal of this embarrassment in his books The Open Society and its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, precisely by drawing attention to the "sources of knowledge" that Communism relied upon).

The generational change, I think, is precisely the reluctance to propound hallucination simply as hallucination, and, as I have already said, the reluctance to rely on tradition simply as tradition.  There is no longer a pervasive (cultural) sense that hallucinations couldn't possibly be deceptive, nor that one's ancestors would be inerrant in setting down principles for the next generation.  Historically, the belief in things seen and heard is very much of the opposite tendency: if you're willing to believe in what people have seen, then you're willing to believe in ghosts (the refusal to believe in ghosts requires criteria that are quite a bit more complicated than validating what is merely seen).  The assumption that elaborate hallucinations are a source of real knowledge is not incompatible with bare empiricism, because people really do see the things that they hallucinate; by contrast, an awareness of epilepsy as a medical condition (that has produced hallucinations in every era of history) profoundly erodes anyone's willingness to rely on such testimony, no matter how honest it may be.

(5) Bundled up with all of the above, I think there's a coeval refusal to admit the distinction between a principle and its outcome.  Although some might say there's nothing new about this minor paradox, I do think this has been changing with the passage of generations: a crypto-religious group like Alcoholics Anonymous now must assert that their principles are good unto themselves (as if the principle itself were the product) precisely because there are no measurable outcomes that would validate their practice (and, on the contrary, statistics show the method to be a failure).  Likewise, of course, Communists now attempt to dodge the question of the outcomes of their revolutions by arguing that (somehow) revolution itself is good in principle (and so on for a long list of other Communist principles that had terrible outcomes in actual fact, but that they can still seek to glorify in the abstract, as if the goodness of the principle itself were the only valid question).

I had a long discussion (in which I did very little talking) with a Sinhalese man who wanted to convince me that his practice of a certain form of Buddhist meditation had resulted in mosquitoes refusing to bite him.  He explained the principle of the thing at length, to which I responded simply, and with a smile, "Yes, but mosquitoes still bite you."  He then presented a synopsis of all the same principles, insisting on how pious and good the theory of the thing is, and that people should refrain from killing mosquitoes, with the confidence that the mosquitoes will reciprocate these sentiments.  I replied by saying in almost the same words again, "Yes, but if we go into the forest now, mosquitoes will still bite you."  I think the friendliness of my manner melted his resolve somewhat: he offered me a third defense of the thesis, with rather less emphasis on his former claim that the efficacy of this meditation was verified by the refusal of mosquitoes to bite him, memorably claiming "…and the mosquitoes never, ever bite me, except only sometimes…".  Alas, I'll never know how different my career might have been if I had spent more time in Sri Lanka than in Laos.

Although this is a lighthearted example, the same matter extends to matters of life and death, most obviously when medical care is refused on account of such a principle.

If the question should arise as to whether or not a particular practice of meditation produces the supposed (medical or psychological) outcomes that are promised, the cult mentality is signaled by a refusal to examine what the outcomes are, to instead return to insisting on the goodness of the principle being taught.  The principle itself is the product: the outcome cannot be thought of as a separate category in the mind's eye of the believer.

The generational change I would infer here is, simply, the greater accessibility of social science methods (that are, after all, a commonplace source of newspaper column fodder, even if it is in an extremely simplified form).  Although not all claims can be verified so simply as sleeping in the woods without a mosquito net, there is now a broad understanding that medical claims can be measured against the outcomes for people who undergo the treatment, and even psychological "benefits" (such as those claimed by Alcoholics Anonymous) can be compared to measured outcomes of some kind.  There is a sort of preclusion of skepticism in just asserting that the principle of the thing is valid unto itself, and admitting of no distinction between it and its outcome.

All five of the concepts I've sketched out have applicability to 21st century Buddhism, and are worth inquiring about in religious orders that have not reached the (headline-grabbing) extremes of Aum Shinrikyo.  Although each of the five may seem rather mild if examined in isolation, they are rolled together in the cult mentality.  In combination, they're an intoxicating full-time program of self-delusion.

As with the person who thinks of themselves as an expert in economics who can't interpret a simple graph, there are remarkably obvious limitations to the ability of these laypeople who now both lead and follow religious movements.  I meet devotees (at all levels of education, including PhDs) who refuse to admit that anyone knows more than they do (even if they cannot read or understand the language of the sacred texts their practice is based upon, etc. etc.) while at the same time refusing to admit what their sources of sacred wisdom really are (what is text vs. revelation, and even what texts are Chinese vs. Indian in origin, etc. etc.) and also refusing to admit that their practices may be evaluated relative to their real outcomes, and so on.

Although I have seen writing about the (so-called) "secularization" of instruction in meditation, these articles have generally been interested in the alienation of the usual role of the monks, and the diminishing status of ritual (relative to meditation, lecturing, etc.).  The mentality of the people who actually believe they are equal (or superior) to senior monks is worth examining in itself, along with their attitude toward scholarship as such (regardless of the monastic or secular status of the scholar).  There is, I think, an important need to apply Lifton's approach to the mentality of these meditation leaders, even though the groups they are members of may never do anything violent or infamous enough to make newspaper headlines.

In my experience of speaking to such people face-to-face, their attitude is not merely one of disrespect to senior monks or scholars who may have more objective knowledge and experience than themselves --instead, it reflects a very real delusion (so to speak) that the experts do not know anything that they do not know themselves.  Even in the total absence of coercion, this all adds up to a sort of sort of self-directed cult mentality.  I cannot honestly say to what extent this marks a change over the attitudes of Buddhists just 200 years ago (i.e., 1812) but it seems difficult to believe that this level of chutzpah was so widespread in societies that still valued the contribution of the scribe in reproducing texts by hand, and of the monk in memorizing and reciting texts aloud, even if intellectuals interested in debating the content of the texts were as tiny a minority then as now.

Socratically enough, I have asked lay meditation leaders questions such as, "Is there really no monk alive that you respect enough to invite to speak at your meetings?  Have you never met a monk who you thought was more advanced in meditation than yourself?  Is there really no specialist whom you would want to consult before offering these philosophical lectures of your own invention?"  The answer is that there can be no answer: any answer would admit that there's a hierarchy of knowledge, and that we only know things in reliance upon particular sources, etc. --all of which is very much antithetical to the disaggregated and self-directed ego-trip of 21st century Buddhism.  I'm not insinuating that previous centuries did not have ego-trips of their own, but only that there are some features that seem to me distinctive to our own era.

I have heard (and read) devotees openly disrespecting (and insulting) the very same western scholars whose translations they rely upon as the source of their knowledge of doctrine.  Although there is a bit more self-censorship when the translator is a monk, the dismissive comments are not all that much different.  There is a tremendous sense of entitlement among the current generation of Buddhist meditation instructors (and even meditation followers) to dismiss anyone and everyone as not knowing what they're talking about --comparable at least in style (and certainty) to the ease with which so many people in my generation dismiss the entire corpus of knowledge published about the history of economics (in claiming that fiat currency and fractional reserve banking are some kind of conspiracy that nobody is brilliant enough to understand aside from those who denounce it a conspiracy).

The delusion of one's own infallibility is made much more powerful by my first point in the numbered list: there is less and less of an incentive to provide a coherent (or convincing) account to outsiders, because religious groups (at any scale) can passively attract like-minded people who already agree with them.  I do not think I have ever met anyone alive (monk or layperson) who had ever attempted to convert a total outsider to Buddhism; at most, they had tried to convince people who were partly in agreement with their particular form of Buddhism to become fully in agreement.  Whereas the Buddhism of just 100 years ago (in both East and West) was reasonably obsessed with providing an eminently rational, defensible account of the religion to outsiders (including the administrators of the British Empire in Asia) the 21st century tendency to operate the religion as a crossroads for the meeting of like-minded individuals is at the opposite extreme.

So the practitioner becomes an unquestioned authority in his or her own eyes.  The reader may ask, is this really so bad?  Well, one of the features of cult mentality as defined by Lifton is that it can be cured: in fact, compared to an addiction, recovery is relatively rapid, easy, and irreversible, even in cases of state-sponsored brainwashing.  What I find very sad about the type of self-directed cult that I have seen myself (and that I am here, with a few sketches, describing) is that it is very difficult for anyone to become disillusioned with it: once people are convinced that they have nothing to learn from anyone else, it is very difficult for them to ever recover.  The loss of curiosity is just as pernicious as the loss of liberty; no matter how gratifying the confidence of faith may seem, losing the capacity to thus ask questions, and to regard the world as full of things as-yet-unknown, is a first step on the road to losing the power to make one's own decisions --and it should be watched as carefully as the last step.

Totalitarian by the Numbers

Totalitarian by the Numbers: The Quantification of Democracy and Despotism in Southeast Asia

      An essay from the early 1990s crossed my desk a few days ago, opening with a world-weary remark that now seems to have a very different tone in retrospect: "Democracy", it read, "is the legitimating myth of the 20th century".*¹  In surveying the prospects for democracy in Asia, the essay made repeated reference to the Freedom House rankings, a name that was familiar to me, but that I couldn't recall hearing much about since the early 1990s myself.  I rarely (if ever) see this statistic mentioned; it reminds me of the passing optimism of that era when even the most cynical of commentators looked forward from the baseline of 1989 with the expectation that we would be able to chart rapid political improvement in the years to follow.  I hesitate to write "improvement", as the term used at the time was "liberalization", and the meaning of the latter word has been very much in flux ever since.  1989 was a year marking both the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen square protests.
      Further removed from the headlines, but closer to the interest of this essay, 1989 also marked the year of the declared quittance of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia (though not quite their withdrawal, nor, indeed, anything like peace in the country).  It was the year that Myanmar (Burma) adopted its new name, in the prelude to the (quashed) elections of 1990.  The Communist government of Laos had resolved to adopt free market economics a few years earlier, in 1986, though the first effects of that change might have been felt around 1989, as Laos had just emerged from a brief but important war with with Thailand (1987–1988).  Thailand itself had elected a new Prime Minister in 1988, but this was to come to a violent end with a coup d'état and a counter-coup soon thereafter (1991–1992).  In mainland Southeast Asia, the year 1989 is a baseline pretty close to the base.
      In retrospect, both the cynicism and the optimism of the 1990s seem misplaced. 
      It is a measurement that is meaningless at its extremes: Cambodia's "Pol Pot" regime gets the worst possible rating (double sevens), but the government of occupation that replaced it continued to receive the same rating throughout the early 1980s.  The military government of Myanmar (Burma) earned the same rating again, and, at first glance, many would tend to dismiss the measure for creating this seeming-equivalence between such starkly different regimes. 
      The Freedom House ranking system has its merits, and these are, perhaps, easily forgotten because of its limitations; the statistic may be so rarely quoted because of its inapplicability to the stuff that newspaper headlines are made of. 
      At the opposite extreme, many Europeans would be baffled to find the highest possible rating (double ones) shared by countries as dissimilar as Estonia and the United States of America. 
      Does this invalidate the statistic?  Not at all.  Simply put, the Freedom House system does not measure the degrees of difference that separate one of these governments from another, but it does provide a useful set of indications for a middle range.  An ordinal measure calibrated for one spectrum of values will (inevitably) exclude all others.

      The chart shows that the island of Taiwan (a.k.a. the Republic of China) made a transition to a culture of political rights and civil liberties at a slower pace than South Korea (but with a somewhat smoother transition); meanwhile, in the People's Republic of China, political rights have merited the worst possible rating consistently since 1989.  Was there absolutely no improvement?  The faded green line diverging from 1994–1999 denotes the "loosening up" of civil liberties in mainland China during the same period, albeit without any relaxation of the state's political control.  On China's other frontier, I note, Mongolia (not shown on this chart) had the dreaded double-seven rating from 1979 to 1989, but then rapidly progressed to its current rating of double-twos, only a half-step behind Taiwan and South Korea (shown on figure 5, right-hand side).
      Figure 2, above, shows how this can be immediately useful in contrasting political changes over time.  At a glance, we can "see" a set of changing conditions in Asia that most researchers would be subjectively aware of over the last twenty years in the field, though, I think, most of us would lack the means to quantify such impressions.  The lines illustrate, for example, that there was a time (still very much in living memory) when Taiwan, South Korea and Communist China were all clustered together in the rankings (ca. 1984), but the decades thereafter show some clearly diverging trends.  Even if the numbers are somewhat abstract, this lets us illustrate and compare the changes of this chapter of recent history with reference to something more tangible than personal impressions, or citations of isolated political events.
      In Asia, the score that Freedom House assigns for civil liberties tends to correspond closely to the score for political rights (e.g., in fig. 2, above, the two scores are identical for the P.R.C. from 1979–1994, and thus the two separate lines are only visible for the years thereafter; similarly, Taiwan's score for civil liberties only diverges from its political rights by a single point for a few of the years shown, and is thus difficult to see on the chart).  Hong Kong is an interesting exception to this pattern: the numbers suggest that political rights moved a step closer to mainland China in the 1990s, whereas civil liberties hovered around relatively positive scores of 2 and 3 during the same period (1989–2009).  Currently, this gives Hong Kong an unusual gap between a score of 2 for civil liberties, but a dangerous 5 in political rights (the latter being a step up from mainland China, but a stark contrast to the Taiwanese and South Koreans, who have recently achieved the highest possible rankings in this category, cf. figure 5).

      In terms of year-by-year political changes, both Thailand and Cambodia's charts (below, figure 3) demonstrate a clear correlation to changes in government that the reader will hardly need to be reminded of.  Thailand's chart shows two self-evident "spikes" in the numbers, with the country's best scores (for both political rights and civil liberties) constrained to a clearly-defined period: 1998–2004.  Cambodia's year-by-year chart (shown in the same figure, below) similarly correlates to changes in government (both violent and peaceable) with the country's best score (relative to a very different benchmark) constrained to a period of just two years (1993–4, with no improvement in the elections thereafter).

     Some frustration may be inevitable with the reduction of political change to a single-digit number.  While Laos has undergone a complete transformation in the period described, the chart for the Lao P.D.R. (shown below, fig. 4) is nearly a flat line.  Similarly, there seemed to be no point in displaying a year-by-year chart for Myanmar (Burma) as their numbers remained resolutely unchanged for the entire period under consideration: the Burmese received the lowest possible ranking (double sevens) from 1989 through 2009, consistently.  For some readers, it might be interesting to place a wager on when this "losing streak" will end; for others, it would be frustrating that various upheavals during that time simply do not show up in the numbers at all (unlike the charts for countries that fall into the mid-range of values, as with Thailand, shown above).

      Anyone who reads the Freedom House methodology in detail could come up with a series of criticisms and suggestions for new approaches to the problem of the quantification of despotism.  The Freedom House seven-point scale is meaningless in isolation, but becomes more and more meaningful when it is applied consistently over many years, allowing comparison between examples in various contexts and between historical periods.  We can only work with the measurements we've got until someone is willing to sponsor the creation of something better (does anyone want to write up a proposal for the Toyota Foundation?).
      However abstract such numbers may be in isolation, the Freedom House ranking allows us to assign a number to what would otherwise be an unsubstantiated opinion, to then counterpose the figure to others generated with consistent assumptions.  For example, it is often enough said (as if it were a platitude) that Sri Lanka's long civil war resulted in an erosion of civil rights; although the chart above (figure 4) is certainly an abstract set of values, we can at least show an arc of declining civil liberties (in this period) with the Freedom House data.  In some ways, this is more useful than citing specific instances of abuses of power, or specific controversies in the court (although it is just an abstraction).  Likewise, if someone were to venture the opinion that Thailand had a stronger claim to democracy than Taiwan in 1989, but that Taiwan is significantly more democratic than Thailand today, the numbers would allow us to rapidly compare such a claim against a consistent standard (which is not the same thing as an objective standard, as it is, after all, just a normative checklist).  Of course, political conditions in all of the countries reduced to dots in these charts have been transformed in the last 20 years (in ways both big and small) and to encapsulate that political change requires a great deal of abstraction; but, for many practical purposes, a number will serve better than a platitude, and the number can be compared to politicians' platitudes.
      Change is empirical if we measure it empirically; progress is merely an ideology, no matter how we may measure it, propound it or critique it. 
      While daily life in Laos has been transformed in innumerable ways in recent years, the flat line of the Freedom House ranking (shown above) corresponds to the underlying fact that the structure of social control has hardly changed at all (in the same period of time).  A formerly isolated country with strict border controls has now become dependent on international tourism and foreign investment; however, the proliferation of hotels and casinos (even schools and doctors' offices) does not equate to any change in the scope of political rights, nor civil liberties (not as defined by Freedom House, that is).
      There remains a meaningful challenge for anyone who would create a ranking system that could accurately measure political change within countries such as Laos in the 20th and 21st centuries; indeed, it would be meaningful to see a competing system calibrated to reflect the vicissitudes of political change within contemporary Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia and mainland China as well. 
      Freedom House did not set out to create a research tool that would effectively measure contrasts between Burma, Laos and other political systems that are currently lumped together at "the bottom of the barrel" as they've defined it.  Instead, the design reflects an interest in particularizing the desiderata of what can be frankly called a bureaucratic capitalist democracy, i.e., setting out a checklist to articulate what is adequate and what is inadequate by that standard (all the while, "…not maintain[ing] a culture-bound view of freedom", in their own terms).³  The seven point scale is necessarily a blunt instrument, inasmuch as it was intended to be applicable to myriad cultures (without much adaptation to each instance) and to encompass at least some variety in forms of state power without too much prejudice (although they admit that the basic premise favors, "liberal democratic societies").³

      I was part of a generation that went through university when the professors didn't know what to do with Communism anymore, but, more pressing still, they didn't know what to teach without it.  The deletion of Cold War politics from the curriculum created an opportunity, but at the moment of my own studies it was encountered as a void: the custodians of education had responded to the challenge with an appalling lack of imagination --and had simply left it blank.

      There seemed to be very little interest in the politics of Cambodia as something that existed for Cambodians (and so on for Thai politics for the Thais, or any of the other countries mentioned).  Previously, countries on the periphery of Soviet and American influence had been treated as case-studies to illustrate critiques of Communism, American interventionism, and other themes very far removed from the rights and liberties of individuals, in practice, that Freedom House tries to measure.  Places like Laos and Nicaragua were presented as symbols that existed for no purpose other than to reveal forces at work within American politics, Soviet politics, and so on.

      Once the framework of Cold War diplomacy was removed from the equation, the study of such remote and exotic governments didn't seem like political science at all anymore (or, it wasn't what political science had come to expect itself to be).  If a government is studied as a phenomenon of its people (a thing perceived by, sustained by, and primarily existing for its own people, even if it be to their detriment) the entire undertaking starts to resemble cultural anthropology: the "case study" ceases to illustrate anything other than itself, and is instead revealed as a knot of unique cultural and historical conditions that neither support platitudes nor grand generalizations.  Alas, the facts that precede and follow politics are poorly suited to the format of the one hour lecture. 

      It is from anthropology that I would like to see some quantitative methods emerge to broach the problem under discussion: it would be interesting to design a system of evaluation that proceeds from the smallest localizable unit of the ethnos (such as a tribe or group of villages) to then establish the limits of how far certain generalizations about political conditions are applicable (through ethnography and other empirical methods).  Some political rights and civil liberties are uniform over huge territories, but others are (de facto) reserved to elites in the capital city only, or can be exercised by one ethnic group but not another, in one language but not another, and so on.  These informal "borders", demarcating degrees of liberty and of state power, could themselves be the subject of study (rather than proceeding from the abstraction of the national unit downward) to be established in the process of the quantification of social control, working from the ground up.
      There is an unexamined reverberation of American attitudes in accounting for ethnicity "last and least" in the Freedom House method: ethnic minority problems are set down as a matter to be subtracted from a national sum.

      In the case of any of the former British colonies (Canada included), we do not, in fact, come to an equation that depicts the conditions of the indigenous people by looking at an equation that first measures the privileges of the white colonists and then subtracts a penality for the mistreatment of minorities.  There seems to be a propaganda function implicit in such a sum, however it may be reduced for genocide, slavery, or apartheid, inasmuch as it still precludes the evaluation of the conditions of a plurality of indigenous peoples as units unto themselves (i.e., as something existing prior to the state). 
      Freedom House has a separate score for North Cyprus, but not for the Cree, Ojibwe or Navaho; for white Americans, this is not so much anathema as it is unimaginable (despite whatever the legal reality of sovereignty may be). 
      It is a misleading feature of newspaper writing that ethnicity is depicted primarily as a problem that exists for the state, as if the business of the state were to manage ethnic minorities, and as if state power itself had no ethnicity. 
      In general, each ethnic group would generate very different figures for how they are governed (even if the same Freedom House score were applied), and how the state exists for them, if we proceeded from the smallest unit up, instead of from the largest unit down (Burma-watchers will have myriad examples at their disposal). 
      Certainly, there are contrasts (in political rights and civil liberties) within the territory of China that are more striking than those found in comparing any two nations of Europe; these often correspond to declared but unofficial boundaries, that can be discovered through fieldwork (for example, that Burmese migrants are tolerated to come into Yunnan as far as Baoshan without paperwork, but can proceed no further).  Indeed, some significant contrasts can be found in pairs of villages along the same highway in Northern Laos, where the respective inhabitants do not share any common language, and deal with their government through very different intermediaries, with different results.  It would be a delightful task (even if nearly impossible) to try to put a number on such degrees of liberty, working from the ground up.

===== Endnotes =====
1. The event actually transpired in Phnom Penh in 2011.  The book that I discovered a copy of (in a restaurant) was: Chan Heng Chee (contributing author), 1993, Democracy and Capitalism, ISEAS: Singapore.  The remark I'm alluding to is found on page 1.
2. The most recent census data at my disposal for Laos is from 2005 (published in March, 2006, by the "Steering Committee for [the] Census of Population and Housing", Vientiane).  Average male life expectancy at birth was only 50 years as recently as 1995; it had increased to 59 in 2005.  Women's average life expectancy at birth had a corresponding increase from 52 to 63 years in the same period.  For the two genders together, we may say that life expectancy extended by roughly a decade.
3. I am quoting from the introduction to the methodology chapter of the 2010 report available from the Freedom House website (without pagination, i.e., I cannot provide a page number).  The paragraph in full reads: "Freedom House does not maintain a culture-bound view of freedom. The methodology of the survey is grounded in basic standards of political rights and civil liberties, derived in large measure from relevant portions of the [U.N.] Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These standards apply to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development. The survey operates from the assumption that freedom for all peoples is best achieved in liberal democratic societies."

Pali Revival and Survival in Cambodia

(1) This is a short notice on some of the things that make the comparative study of Pali and Cambodian so rewarding, and also a few reflections as to why it is now so rare.

(2) Take a look at the illustration.  This is a nanoscale study of just two lines of Pali that equate to three lines of Cambodian text in translation.  Several different language asymmetries arise from this comparison.

Some obvious asymmetries are set out in the table forming the bottom half of the illustration --and these can be seen by someone understanding no language except English.

In some cases, the Khmer-script spelling is identical in the Pali and the (verncaular) Cambodian, but with a wildly different pronunciation:
 • [Pali] paṇḍita ☛ បណ្ឌិត ☛ [Khmer] bąndüt
In other cases, you have the conflation of multiple Pali words in one verncaular Khmer spelling, as is noted with:
 • [Pali] bāla & vāla ☛ ពាល ☛ [Khmer] piel

Some of the other asymmetries require some knowledge of the languages involved to detect.

You might notice that Khmer ស្លាប់ does indeed have the vowel marker for long ā after the first two consonants, but, nevertheless, it is quite necessary for this to be Romanized with a short aˑ (explicitly marked as sláˑp; the symbol after the á [ˑ] is the I.P.A. standard for indicating a short vowel, bearing the awkward technical name of "the triangular half-colon").

Thus, orthographically, we have ស+ល+ ា= ស្លា, but phonetically, we have s+l+áˑ=sláˑ (because sláˑp≠sláːp, they're two different words in contemporary Khmer).  A few specialists may complain that I'm not digressing into the mark that appears above the "p" in Khmer script (ប់ at the end of ស្លាប់) but my reason (for failing to do so) is simply that this would be a digression.

(3) On the top half of the illustration, there are some asymmetries of other kinds.

There are two footnotes to the Khmer-script Pali (top-left, and reproduced in the Romanized Pali, top-right) indicating two (minor) differences between the Cambodian edition of the Pali text and the Sinhalese edition.

However, this isn't the only difference that emerges from comparative reading.  This entire poem in the D.N. (i.e., that these two lines were quoted from) is omitted from the early translation of T.W. Rhys-Davids (1881), based on Sinhalese manuscripts edited by Childers (JRAS 1875-6).  These verses are very similar to a few lines found in the K.N., Sutta-Nipāta, Sallasutta; the two passages may (or may not) share a single origin.

This, too, is an asymmetry that only becomes evident through comparison, and would lead to more comparative reading to see how consistently (or inconsistently) the poem appears with the remainder of the text in different versions preserved by different manuscript traditions.

(4) The asymmetries that arise purely from modern translation are less instructive, but do provide practice of a certain kind for the reader (if you are really reading all three languages concerned).

Does [Khmer] kháŋ-muk really render [Pali] parāyaṇa adequately in this context?  This type of question would arise with any translation of an ancient (dead) language into a modern vernacular, but it is a bit more intellectually stimulating in the Cambodian context (than in English, Chinese, etc.) because of the long historical interaction between the languages involved, and also because of the frequent reliance upon Pali loan-words in the Khmer rendering.  Frequently, these loan-words have shifted in meaning since they were first adopted from Pali (as happens so frequently with English borrowing from Latin and Greek).

For a student of the languages concerned, this type of problem is worth puzzling at primarily as a method of study: you end up memorizing fine distinctions in the (overlapping) range of meanings of all of the words concerned.  It isn't something that anyone should pursue as if it were paleontology: in undertaking this type of work, you wouldn't be in the position of digging up dinosaur bones.  Admittedly, it's closer to digging ditches simply to build up your strength (or as a competitive sport).

With philology and philosophy both, the process is the product: the reason to take on this type of work is to make yourself into a scholar.  There is rarely any other outcome or reward.

(5) I have never met anyone evaluating the Cambodian translations of Pali sources, nor (despite much asking) have I ever heard of anyone doing such work in the past.

The comparative study of controversial passages would allow us to evaluate the extent to which the Khmer translators exercised their independence, in contrast to (pre-existing) English, French and Thai translations.  To some extent, the distinctively Cambodian form of Buddhism would be declared in these differences, or least, Cambodian assumptions about the texts that were incompatible with the other translations might come to the fore.  Conversely, we definitely would also find evidence of the degree of diffidence of a bygone era of Cambodian scholar-monks, who were racing to catch up with European scholarship, and who certainly copied a great deal from the earlier precedents in Europe.  Some of them aspired to imitate the European sources, others to contradict them or outdo them; in looking back (and looking forward) it is not always easy to see who was pursuing which course.

The "new" translations (of Pali into Khmer) that I found in Phnom Penh were all minor rewordings of the old translation published (as the Cambodian canon) in the Buddhist Institute edition associated with the generation of Chuon Nath.

I formed this opinion through comparative reading of the most cursory kind (in this case, comparing Khmer to Khmer --not my forte).  In the new editions that I saw (generally closer to pamphlets than books) all of the changes seemed to be intended to avoid repetition, to achieve a more natural-sounding sentence, etc.; I didn't discover any examples (in my completely unscientific survey) that were substantively "new".  It remains interesting that such books are being published at all, and that they include the original Pali parallel to the Khmer translation.

(6) Another approach to interrogating these texts would be to start from a list of errors (i.e., that we already know to be wrong) originating in old European translations (by Rhys-Davids, etc.) to verify the extent to which the Khmer translation reproduces these errors (that could only have originated in English or French, as the case may be, and could not have arisen in Cambodian spontaneously).  A similar "test" could be run, in some cases, to check for Thai influence (and there was a great deal of Thai influence at that time, because the director of the Buddhist Institute was herself a scholar of Thai, and neither of Cambodian nor Pali, at the time of her appointment by the French to the position).

(7) The lack of any long-term interest in developing scholarship (or even reading comprehension) amongst the donors and the beneficiaries alike has been a recurrent feature of the failed revival of the last ten years.

Manuscript projects, publishing projects, libraries and even universities are predominantly thought of in terms of construction.  The shortage is presumed to be a number of concrete rooms and parking spaces; whereas, in fact, the shortage is of scholars, and of advanced literacy in any of the languages concerned (Khmer, English and Pali).

Libraries have been built, along with monasteries and universities too.  Books have been reprinted, distributed, and now accumulate layers of dust in the same concrete rooms that the donors rushed to provide for a revival that was presumed --but that did not ensue.

I recall a dialogue with the publisher for a (donor-driven) project that was typesetting the entire Pali canon anew (in Khmer script, and with Khmer translation alongside the Pali).  This was under the direction of someone who apparently was fluent in none of the languages concerned (neither Khmer nor Pali) and the actual typing was being done by people who (at most) had some understanding of the Khmer (but some, I suspect, were more familiar with Chinese than Khmer).  Many of these positions (of decisive influence over the project) are determined by fundraising, or else direct donations (in plain English: money).  Of course, the standard for Khmer spelling has actually changed since the original text that they will be copying from, so the matter is not so mechanical as it might seem, even in working from Khmer to Khmer.  New decisions would have to be made (even in such spelling conventions) even if there were no impulse to innovation whatsoever.

Unlike the illustration you've just seen (examining only two lines of Pali) the source text in that project would neither be examined in contrast to the Sinhalese edition, nor to any other; the translation will neither be contrasted to the English, nor any other.  The questions of asymmetry internal to the Khmer edition also will not be puzzled at.  At best, the typists won't introduce too many new errors into the text (as typing a language that you have no comprehension of is much more difficult than typing one that you do: I have no idea how they will "proof-read" the Pali, but my assumption is that it will be approximate at best).

There were zero scholars of any kind involved in scrutinizing the text; worse, there were neither scholars nor students simply learning from it, as the undertaking unfolded.

The process of reading and revising such a text is a tremendous opportunity to learn, even if no improvements are made.  The participation of a number of aspiring scholars in such a project could have created an entire generation of people with reading comprehension of Pali.  The same is true of scribal projects: copying manuscripts need not be a mechanical or meaningless process, but can involve quite a lot of thinking, of exactly the type shown in my two-line example illustrated.

The positive effects of philology can be much more durable than a concrete shack in the tropics.  The "real estate" is thought of as a more tangible and durable outcome of donor intervention; however, in the tropics, the buildings and bookshelves do not last nearly so long as Europeans might imagine.  The donors feel assured that their money isn't being wasted if they can see the outcomes; however, there is nothing easier to fake than the quality of construction itself, unless the donors are truly scrutinizing the concrete as it gets poured.

The result of the example I've just mentioned will probably be an edition full of errors, but, more importantly, it will be a lost opportunity to really produce the next generation of scholars (as the race to compile the canon, and its coeval dictionay, in Chuon Nath's time did before).

Copying out the Pali canon is not a process comparable to setting up a concrete monument (although it is most definitely thought of as equivalent).  The most valuable product is not the printed page, but the scholars capable of scrutinizing the page --and that is exactly what Cambodia is lacking (and what Canada is lacking also, for that matter).

(8) The conditions are not unique to Cambodia: I received a detailed verbal detailed account (from one of the monks present) of the process of typing out one of Thailand's official canons.

The incompetence of the typists was ensured because the job was granted to donors, on the basis of donations.  When a typewritten page was complete, it would be handed to the one monk considered competent to proof-read it.  This monk (who was extremely elderly, with failing vision) would then circle the errors.  The page would then be handed back to the same (Pali-illiterate) typists, who would produce another page, with a different set of errors, at the same rate.

All of the crucial stages were handled by people who both (i) had zero competence in Pali, but, worse, (ii) who had zero long-term interest in developing competence in Pali.  Making mistakes is inevitable; the problem is that the people who have been given the opportunity to make those mistakes are not interested in learning from them.  In this way, a donor-driven project can institutionalize incompetence.

In both instances, Cambodia and Thailand, the donors' money will be spent much like a construction project: the output will be measured in so many hours spent at so many typewriters, producing so many volumes in so many years, just like bricks going into a wall.  Measuring the number of people with reading comprehension of Pali at the start and at the end of the project might be a more important statistic.

(9) The post-war context of Cambodia allows rumors of revival to arise without any basis in fact.  The implicit contrast to the Khmer Rouge makes even a rotting facade seem like a revival --and, indeed, many of the facades created 20 years ago are now rotting rather badly.

There are others who can (and should) write articles about it, but, during the years that I visited Cambodia, it seemed that I witnessed the last spark of life depart from Phnom Penh's Buddhist Institute.  The director there admitted to me openly (during our first meeting) that they had already been blacklisted by many of the donor agencies, and that I should not even mention the name of the institute in my own applications for funding, i.e., even if my plan was to actually base the project in their offices, and co-operate with them.  No such co-operation eventuated, and, on the contrary, in the succeeding years, I was an occasional witness to the skilled staff disappearing (amidst rumors I won't repeat here), the foreign-funded projects disappeared, and, finally, the books disappeared out of the offices.  I am not even insinuating that the books were stolen, however, the office pertaining to Pali had a shelf full of reference materials at one stage, and, the last time I was there, all of the books had disappeared from the same room (perhaps simply because they weren't being used).

Even the very modest manuscript project funded by the EFEO (at Wat Unnalom) has finally folded up its table and closed its doors (firing its last few staff, as of the news that reached me most recently).  The reason I was given for this was simply a lack of money; however, it is more often the case that the money is weighed against throughput and output (in other words, it is rare to encounter a question of money that is not related to a question of value).

When I met with the Japanese charity responsible for reprinting the Khmer-Pali canon (with the Buddhist Institute's name on it), I was astounded to hear them declaim that they had absolutely no interest in Pali, nor in Cambodian Buddhism generally.  They considered themselves "development professionals", who were burdened with these Buddhist publishing projects because their donors (in Japan) forced them to take on the burden, against the interests of the organization, in their opinion.  I wouldn't have guessed this if I hadn't heard it from the executives of the charity directly; however, this example reflects how arbitrarily responsibility is both arrogated by and discarded by those who have their logos stamped on the title pages of Pali texts.

Is this simply donor disinterest, or is it a longer-term pattern of (i) donor-driven development, followed by (ii) donor disappointment and (iii) donor flight?

I both read about and verbally heard about a foreign-funded project for female monks that received no support from the local community (and, indeed, I don't think the monks were even cultivating the support or respect of their parishioners).  When the foreign funding stopped, the project collapsed with some acrimony.  Some people reported this to me as a great injustice; however, from the donor's perspective, the point of the project was not to create a situation of perpetual dependency, but instead to establish some basis for a (viable) community-based project in future.  The final phase of every project must be self-reliance, and that self-reliance must entail the end of foreign funding.

From the donor's perspective, poverty and war are not exceptional, they're the norm: if you have the liberty of donating money to any cause, anywhere in the world, you would need very palpable proof that your money was not being wasted to sink money into anything more scholarly than a sack of rice in Cambodia.  There are plenty of people who could use that sack of rice.

It isn't an easy thing for monks (of any gender) to earn the respect of laypeople, and, in this case (that I am leaving unnamed) the foreign money (and "haughty" sense of entitlement among the monastics) could have prevented the very development of grassroots support that it was supposed to encourage.  The perception of arrogance is a very weighty matter in Cambodian culture, and very difficult to translate in full for outsiders.  Memorably, while I was in Phnom Penh, there was a case reported in the newspaper of an old woman in robes arrived at one of the major temples from the countryside seeking sanctuary; she responded to the arrogance of the refusal she received (from a younger, male monk) by attempting suicide on the spot, at the gates of the same temple.  The degrees of respect and disrespect expressed between one monastic and another, as well as between monastics and laypeople, are deadly serious matters in Cambodia; at the time, it was easy for me to imagine the sense of disgrace (and also of "revenge" against the institution) that motivated the attempted suicide, although it is not difficult to imagine that the younger monk may have been offended at the old woman's sense of entitlement to arrive unannounced and demand a bed.

(10) In beholding the brightly-painted concrete walls that now surround so many temples in Cambodia, it is easy for the casual observer to imagine that there has been a tremendous religious revival in the last 10 years.  I did not meet a single person in Cambodia (neither monk nor layperson, neither student nor professor) who was learning Pali, nor any who aspired to learn reading comprehension of Pali.  Outsiders tend to grossly underestimate the extent of this problem, because they (falsely) assume that the ability to chant a number of short texts (in the context of a funeral ritual, etc.) indicates reading comprehension of the language.

Over a period of several years visiting the country from adjacent Laos and Thailand, plus more than one year living within Cambodia continuously, I did meet several monks who had gone to Sri Lanka to study and who had then returned to Cambodia.  They had learned English, not Pali; they had merely learned to say things about the history of Pali, not to read the language.

Everywhere I went in Cambodia, I encountered people who lectured me about Pali (presuming that they knew much more than I did) who had very basic misconceptions about what the language is (and what it is not).  This included monks, university professors, and so on, as well as people who had no formal education, but who sometimes claimed a connection to Pali literacy via a deceased grandfather.  In its way, this experience was a sort of survey of social attitudes toward the language (and related areas of religion, literature and learning) in 21st century Cambodia.  I can't say that I enjoyed it.

There was a time when Cambodians were proud to present their own versions of the ancient texts, in contrast to both the Europeans and the Burmese.  They were able to muster this palpable link to their ancient past (in both manuscripts and printed editions) when their representatives attended the 20th century council to revise the canon that was convened in Burma, starting in 1954 (an historical event about which there are still more rumors than facts circulating).  When (former) King Sihanouk visited Sri Lanka, he was proud to donate Cambodian palm-leaf manuscripts (in Pali) to the Sinhalese temples he visited.  Thanks to the translation provided to me by Rev. Nyanatusita, I saw some of those manuscripts when I was in Sri Lanka; I think they had been unwrapped very few times since their initial donation, perhaps not even once.  It remains a palpable link to the past, but it is a link that fewer and fewer people care about.

You can teach a language; you can provide the opportunity to learn a language.  You cannot teach people to want to learn a language; you cannot force people not to squander the opportunities they're given.  In Cambodia, the opportunities have been squandered both by the donors and the recipients.

Reprinting (and literally photocopying) old books does not entail a revival: at a minimum, a revival would require reading comprehension of whatever those books contain.  In Cambodia, the facade of Buddhist education is maintained by large numbers of students in robes who learn everything from accounting to carpentry --and who proceed to quit the monastery for the secular life as soon as their university degrees are complete.

In many ways, large and small, Cambodia is coming to the end of an era of excuses: donor fatigue is inevitable, and there will always be another disaster somewhere to command public sympathy.  The cause of literacy and philology is never an emergency: it can't really be justified in the same humanitarian terms as the proverbial sack of rice.

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[Addendum: wondering what Cambodians have to say about it?  Take a look at the comments section that follows below KI-Media's reprinting of the article.]