ABSTRACT

The Southeast Asian region is not a unit in the religious, historical, geographical, or ethnic sense. Geographically, Southeast Asia is included in the Monsoon Belt and, except for a small portion of Myanmar, located between the tropics. However, nature has divided the land here as nowhere else in any of the Asian segments, effectively fractionalizing it into diverse social and political units. A people closely related in language and race to the Mons were the Khmers, whose original home has been a subject of controversy among scholars. In the field of religion, for instance, there was no rivalry between the two great Asian peoples to save souls in Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asia, diverse maritime peoples of the region—the Mons, the Funanese, the Chams, the Javanese, the Sumatrans, the Bugis, and others—participated in the lucrative trade among China, India, and the Western world.