instituting tighter controls on monks, the Pathet Lao
could play the defender of religious freedom. By this
time, it was too late for the royalist party to regain the
authority it once had amongst the san ̇gha. When the
Pathet Lao formed its own government in 1975, it
used the san ̇gha to legitimize its increasing monopoly
on power. Monks fled to Thailand to avoid being sent
to reeducation camps that effectively turned Buddhist
preaching into education in government ideology, and
the rigorously controlled san ̇gha lost credibility
among the laity, which had traditionally supported it
and from whom its members were recruited.
The persecutions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambo-
dia were far more extreme than those of the Pathet Lao.
As part of the Khmer Rouge goal to transform Cam-
bodia into a truly socialist republic within the space of
a few years, Pol Pot oversaw the wholesale destruction
of Cambodian society and culture between 1975 and
- People were reeducated to not give alms to
monks, monks were forcibly laicized, Buddhist rituals
were forbidden, and monasteries and libraries were de-
stroyed. Any monk suspected of resistance was exe-
cuted. Few Cambodian monks survived these years of
hard labor, mass starvation, and extermination, which
saw the death of an estimated one quarter of the Cam-
bodian population. Although some monks found
refuge abroad, more than 90 percent of Cambodia’s
Buddhist literary heritage was extirpated.
Religion continued to be heavily controlled under
the Vietnamese-backed government after 1979, and it
is only since the reinstatement of the monarchy in
1991 that Buddhism entered a phase of revival in
Cambodia.
The modern world’s improved communications,
the attendant potential for state intervention, and the
mass availability of educational systems that embody
an intellectual disdain toward religion, have meant
that, to some extent, Buddhism had already begun to
lose esteem even before communists came to power.
Even where Buddhism is not under attack, modernity
has undermined the dominant traditional Buddhism
of ritual and worship in favor of philosophy and those
aspects of Buddhism that can be mapped onto mod-
ern scientific thought and global ethics. To some ex-
tent Buddhism has been defended because of the role
it has played as a motivating force and as a form of
cultural identity. During the twentieth century, these
aspects of Buddhism were harnessed both by inde-
pendence movements that brought to an end the Eu-
ropean colonial era and by nationalist governments
that drew their mandate from an ethnically Buddhist
majority.See also:Christianity and Buddhism; Colonialism and
Buddhism; Communism and Buddhism; Decline of
the Dharma; Islam and Buddhism; Meiji Buddhist
Reform; Millenarianism and Millenarian Move-
ments; Modernity and Buddhism; Politics and Bud-
dhism; Shinto (Honji Suijaku) and Buddhism;
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