Abstract
Some 34 Khmer Buddhist monks were resident in India prior to 1975, most as students. Ven.Ek Pañño and Ven. Mok Sophal were among only a handful of these monks to stay in India the rest of their lives. In this talk I explore the ambivalences of their “Cambodian” identity over the years. Ek Pañño, born in Battambang in the 1930s, went to Bangkok as a young monk and originally went to India with the sponsorship of a major Thai wat. A temple he founded at Sravasti in the mid-1980s was originally known as Thai, although one he founded in New Delhi in the 1990s came to be “Cambodian”—as were both temples by the time of his death in 2001. Mok Sophal, an ethnic Khmer (Khmer Krom) monk from Vietnam was in Phnom Penh before going to India in the 1960s. He left the monkhood in the mid 1970s, eventually acquiring Indian citizenship. As a layman he sometimes managed or was otherwise resident at Buddhist temples affiliated with different Buddhist countries, and finally re-ordained as a Cambodian monk at the end of his life in the early 2000s. I examine how, for these two transnational monks, ethnicity was something to be negotiated.
Bio
Speaker: John A. Marston is a professor-researcher at the Center for Asian and African Studies of El Colegio de México in Mexico City. He completed a doctorate in anthropology at University of Washington in 1997 and CKS Scholar-in-Residence Fellow in 2023. He has published three edited volumes on Cambodia and the anthropology of Southeast Asia: History, Buddhism and New Religious Movements in Cambodia (University of Hawaii Press) (with Elizabeth Guthrie), Anthropology and Community in Cambodia (Monash University Press), and Ethnicity, Borders, and the Grassroots Interface with the State (Silkworm Books), as well as numerous articles in books and scholarly journals. A collection of his articles, Budismo y sociedad en Sureste de Asia, was published by El Colegio de México in 2020.
Moderator: Napakadol Kittisenee is a doctoral candidate at the department of history, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received BA in Thai literature, Pali, and Sanskrit from Silpakorn University and earned his MA in Anthropology from Thammasat University and MA in Southeast Asian History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently working on his doctoral research on Cross-border Lives of Magical Monks in 1941 – 1957 Mainland Southeast Asia. His forthcoming publications in 2024 include a book chapter entitled “Preserving the Forests and Walks for Peace in Cambodia” in Oxford Handbook of Lived Buddhism and a chapter on Khmer Divination in an exhibition booklet by Bodleian Library, Oxford University.
