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ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 15, 2008
Review of Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice
Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice. By Ian Harris. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005, xvi + 352 pages, ISBN: 0-8248-2765-1, US $62.00.
This extremely impressive work has been reviewed several times. Ashley
Thompson’s discussion in Buddhist Studies Review (24, 2 [2007]: 250-56)
includes a metaphor for Harris’s work that is worth restating here. In
synthesizing a truly massive array of materials, Harris provides “a sort of
google-earth view of Buddhism in Cambodia, from the smallest details to
the biggest picture.” Indeed, after a preface that surveys available
secondary source material, Harris navigates for his readers the histories
and practices of Cambodian Buddhism from the earliest Indic arrivals up
through the present day. Harris has been praised (and rightly so) for his
success in distilling work in French (especially that of François Bizot on
esoteric Buddhist trends) and making it accessible to an English speaking
audience, as well as for his success in shedding light on the relations
between Buddhism and the traumas of the colonial and post-colonial
periods. Thompson herself implies that not since Adhémard Leclère’s
pioneering work Le Buddhisme au Cambodge in 1899 has a scholar
attempted such a daunting work concerning Cambodian Buddhism.
