ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how one particular late vernacular text from colonial Cambodia, which grows out of the tradition of Buddhist literature concerned with ethics of social relationships. It provides a conceptual geography for viewing the interactions of canonical and local vernacular texts as textual cores and peripheries, while contributing the dimension of religious knowledge and expression to considerations of regionalism and subaltern constructions of modernity. In a compilation meant to represent the values necessary for Buddhists to live in the modern world, the moral person, like the orphan in the text, must learn to recognize that the inextricable interconnections between self and others are what shape the world. The chapter examines one such local narrative site for the production of local values, its engagement with ethical tensions in the Theravāda, and its rearticulating of what Buddhist values are and how a Buddhist should be in the world. It presents a key narrative of the text, "The Story of Bhikkhu Sukh".
