ABSTRACT
This book is not, strictly speaking, about Buddhism. Nor is it, strictly speaking, about Cambodia or Southeast Asia. But neither is it not about Buddhism or Southeast Asia. On one level, to be sure, it is concerned with the discursive definition of Cambodia which it addresses through a series of texts that are well known, even “classic,” in the world of Khmer Studies, from Angkorian epigraphic inscriptions to modern critical works, along with a number of ritual or art objects and practices. 1 Some of these texts, objects and practices are explicitly Buddhist, or embedded in Buddhist cultural forms. Perhaps more importantly, the book attempts to demonstrate ways in which an understanding of the history and characteristics of this definition is a prerequisite for understanding the advent and singularity of what we now call “Theravada Buddhism” as both a state and popular religion itself serving as a key element in definitions of Cambodia for the past 700 years or so. In this sense, the book is a prolegomena to a series of prolegomenae, although the temporality of its objects – and, not insignificantly, of its composition – does not obey any simple linearity.
