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ROGERR. JACKSONKEGON SCHOOL. SeeHuayan School
KHMER, BUDDHIST LITERATURE IN
Until the twentieth century, most vernacular literature
composed or known in Cambodia, including literature
intended primarily for entertainment, articulated Bud-
dhist themes concerning COSMOLOGY and HISTORY,
moral and ethical values, RITUAL, and the biography of
the Buddha. Thus, to a large extent, it is possible to
argue that the history and development of Khmer lit-
erature in Cambodia is at once the history and devel-
opment of its vernacular religious literature. Khmer
literature is generally divided into the following peri-
ods: pre-Angkorian (seventh to ninth centuries);
Angkorian (ninth to fifteenth centuries); middle or
post-Angkorian (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries);
French protectorate or early modern (mid-nineteenth
to early twentieth centuries); and contemporary or
modern (mid-twentieth century to the present).
The Khmer language belongs to the subgroup of the
Austro-Asiatic language family that includes Mon and
Khmer. Khmer writing, derived from Sanskrit, devel-
oped after the second century C.E. when Indian traders
and migrants to the region began to introduce Sanskrit
writing and literature, and Indian art forms, religious
ideas, and ideologies of KINGSHIPand government. The
first dated inscription in Khmer appeared in 612 C.E.,
roughly concurrent with several dated Cambodian in-
scriptions in Sanskrit. The dual use of both vernacu-
lar and Sanskrit inscriptions continued throughout the
following centuries with the emergence of the Khmer
kingdom of Angkor, which dominated the region be-
tween the ninth through thirteenth centuries. Pali be-
came important as a scriptural and literary language
after THERAVADABuddhism rose to prominence in the
thirteenth century.
The processes of both Indianizationand vernacu-
larizationin Southeast Asia, including the Khmer re-
gions, have received a great deal of scholarly attention.
Colonial era scholarship tended to view Southeast Asia
as an empty but fertile ground in which a “superior”
Indian culture was implanted and took root, giving rise
to a whole new Indianized civilization. More recently,
scholars have suggested that the absorption of Indian
cultural motifs and ideas was possible because they
were similar or complementary to existing indigenous
cultural forms. Thus the process was perhaps not a
wholesale Indianization, but rather a selective process
of cultural borrowing and adaptation, with influences
moving in both directions. Among the most important
borrowings from India for the Khmer was the intro-
duction of Sanskrit writing and literature. Archaeolog-
ical evidence from pre-Angkorian and Angkorian
periods shows that the Khmer utilized both Sanskrit
and Khmer for inscribing their religious, literary, and
political lives. The clear division of labor between the
two languages has been much commented on by schol-
ars: Sanskrit was nearly always the medium for ex-
pressive literary purposes such as extolling the virtues
of the gods, while Khmer was employed for more doc-
umentary purposes such as listing donations of slaves
to temples. Sheldon Pollock has theorized that the at-
traction of Sanskrit as a cosmopolitan language was
aesthetic; it provided a powerful medium for imagin-
ing the world in a larger, more complex way. Vernac-
ularization,the turn away from Sanskrit to the use of
localized languages such as Khmer for literary pro-
duction, began to occur in Cambodia after the fif-
teenth century. By this time, Sanskrit and Pali loan
words had been absorbed into Khmer and the Khmer
had developed a literary idiom of their own for ex-
pressing cosmopolitan ideas, evident in the Khmer
classical literature composed during the middle or
post-Angkorian period.
The most profound example of the ways in which
aspects of the Indian literary imagination were absorbed
and adapted by the Khmer is that of the Ramayana,
known in Khmer as the Ramakerti (pronouncedKHMER, BUDDHISTLITERATURE IN