“Ream-ker”), the Glory of Ram.The outlines of the
story, widely known among the Khmer population
since at least the time of Angkor, maintain some of the
main elements of the Indian Ramayanawhile at the
same time adapting them in critical ways. Known in
Khmer as Ram, the hero of the epic is rendered as a
BODHISATTVA, thus transforming the story into the fa-
vorite theme of Khmer literature: the biography of the
Buddha. The Ramakertiappears as one of the most
ubiquitous subjects of Khmer art; it is painted as tem-
ple murals, carved into bas-reliefs on the galleries of
Angkorian buildings, reenacted in elaborate traditional
dance forms, composed in literary versions, and retold
in many oral versions, including shadow puppet plays
known as spaek dham.At least one version of the text
has also been used as a manual for the practice of
tantric forms of Buddhist meditation in which the
Buddhist adept follows the journey of Ramin his quest
to retrieve his wife Staas a form of esoteric spiritual
instruction.
While the Khmer Ramakertiis generally considered
to be the greatest work of Khmer literature, it is not
the only one that is celebrated and influential. Equally
beloved by Khmer have been versions of the Buddhist
JATAKAdepicting the moral development of the Bo-
dhisattva in his many lives as he moves toward bud-
dhahood. The best known and revered of the Buddha’s
life stories, at least since the eighteenth century, are
his last ten lives, appearing in Cambodia in a single
compilation known as the Dasajataka.The narrative
of the Bodhisattva’s penultimate life, the Mahaves-
santara-jataka(also called the Mahajat), is the most
popular of these jataka,redacted in many different
manuscript and later print versions. Jatakastories
were also rendered into satra lpaen ̇,a genre of narra-
tive poetry intended for entertainment which often
contained long descriptions of magical battles and
other feats performed by the Bodhisattva. This genre
appears to have developed beginning in the sixteenth
century as part of the process of vernacularization.
Cpap or “codes of conduct” constituted another
prominent genre of vernacular literature in Cambo-
dia known since at least the seventeenth century. Di-
dactic poetry intended to transmit religious values and
practical advice for living, the cpapwere composed in
stylized meters (to aid memorization) and sung by
parents or teachers to children.
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, promi-
nent vernacular texts used in Buddhist education (but
also known more widely through artistic representa-
tions, sermons, and stories) included not only the
texts already mentioned, but also several works of
Siamese composition that had been translated into
Khmer versions: the Trai Bhum(a cosmological text),
the Man ̇galatthadlpanl(a narrative commentary on
the Man ̇gala-sutta), and the Pathamsombodhi(a bi-
ography of the Buddha). Also in evidence in monas-
tic collections during the period were manuals (kpuon
or tamra) on ritual, medicine, and astrology. Buddh
Damnaytexts, prophesies of the Buddha concerning
the arrival of the Buddhist dhammik, or righteous
king, circulated in written and oral forms. Folk sto-
ries loosely based on Buddhist themes were transmit-
ted orally until the early part of the twentieth century
when Buddhist writers such as Ukña Suttantaprja
Ind, author of the ethics manual Gatilok(1921), be-
gan to collect and record Khmer oral stories. While
French colonial scholars during the protectorate pe-
riod were often critical of the “fanciful” nature of
Khmer vernacular works, their objections have been
countered by Khmer scholars. Keng Vansak, a Khmer
literary scholar, has argued that Khmer writers have
been concerned not with literal representations of re-
ality, but rather with representing the moral experi-
ence of social life, which often presents human beings
with “insolvable contradictions” between their aspi-
rations for moral perfection and their situatedness in
a world of social and political bonds.Along with the works already described, Khmer
Buddhists used vernacular versions of canonical texts.
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and likely
earlier), many texts based on Pali canonical sources
such as the jatakaand the DHAMMAPADAwere trans-
lated into a genre of texts known as samray,consisting
of interwoven Pali verses and their Khmer translations,
followed by commentary in Khmer. Most of the sam-
raythat survive in existing collections of Khmer man-
uscripts date from no earlier than the nineteenth
century, when monastic libraries were reconstituted
following a long period of warfare in Cambodia. Dur-
ing the twentieth century, many Khmer samrayorigi-
nally composed on palm leaf were republished as print
texts with little or no change from the originals. Al-
though traditionalist members of the Khmer san ̇gha
initially resisted the use of print for religious texts, by
the 1920s monks and scholars turned to the use of print
rather than palm leaf (slik rit) or accordion-folded
mulberry bark paper (kramn ̇) for disseminating their
works. Among the earliest vernacular texts published
in print in the 1920s were segments of the VINAYAand
the Sin ̇galovada-sutta.A full edition of the Pali Tipi-
taka,with Khmer translation, was finally issued in 1969KHMER, BUDDHISTLITERATURE IN