Monday Blogcrawl

Cambodia has been much on my mind these past days. My dear friend, the artist Chhai Kakkada, opened his brand new exhibition last night at Siem Reap's hippest venue, The 1961. Here is some other interesting news from Cambodia over the past week:

Tuol Sleng Torture Museum, Phnom Penh

• Discovery of a new mass grave site at Do Dontrei brings back memories of the horrors of the Pol Pot years. And a reflection on visiting the torture museum Tuol Sleng - and another one. Brand new photographs of victims of the Khmer Rouge have surfaced and been donated, anonymously. Who on earth had them?
• Where to get Vietnamese Pho in Phnom Penh. 
• USA Today offers some tips on travelling solo in Siem Reap. And while you're there, why not do a cooking class at Le Tigre de Papier? And Words Fusion talks about how tourism is changing Siem Reap - why, you can even get yourself a High Tea there now. There is so much more to do besides visit Angkor Wat.
• Cambodia's Muslims are moving South.
• Lack of proper sanitation facilities is a major cause of child deaths in Cambodia. Asiancorrespondent.com comments on the financial and social costs of this.
• Let's hope the thoroughly adorable Mekong Dolphins are safe at last.
• The UN says we should be investing in Cambodian women.
• Nice to see good news stories coming out of modern Cambodia. Here is a successful young property developer, profiled in the Phnom Penh Post.
• A great video of Phnom Penh traffic. And apparently grilled seafood is getting popular in the capital - maybe you can get some of it at hip restaurant Malis, reviewed here in the Wall Street Journal.
• The owner of an independent radio station in Cambodia is in legal trouble, and LinkAsia reports on the complexities surrounding the case (video). And a reporter records the death earlier this year of environmental activist Chut Wutty, in Newsweek.
• Vietnamese & Cambodian women boost co-operation.
• Some time ago I reviewed Lost Loves, and now Hit Fix tells us it's Cambodia's entry in the foreign Oscars.
• A travel blog of a couple 'gone walkabout' in Cambodia.
• Social media, NGOs and social change in Cambodia.
• Getting things from one town to another has long been a headache in Cambodia, but the Phnom Penh Post reveals that rail freight services have begun again.
• Why not visit Sihanoukville?

Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teasers:

"Buddhism has had an active presence in Cambodia for over 1,500 years, enjoying alternate fortunes of acceptance and rejection by the ruling elite and the wider population. The history of Buddhism in Cambodia is pregnant with assumptions and theories that have gradually been taken as truths, making it very difficult to construct a reliable account of its development."

~ p. 11, "Buddhist Painting in Cambodia" by Vittorio Roveda & Sothon Yem   

Monday Blogcrawl

I am currently working on 3 or 4 very exciting projects, all of them keeping on my toes. Here is a collection of links that will interest Cambodia watchers:

Some fabulous popular Cambodian art from languagecorpsasia.blogspot.com.au

• A Western monk living in a cave in Thailand has released a book
• An amateur video of Angkor Wat 
• An explanation of the Vishnu statue in Siem Reap town
• Hillary Clinton is planning to visit Cambodia again
• It's no surprise that boutique hotels are booming in Cambodia 
• Disturbing news of a mysterious neurological condition that is killing children in Cambodia

Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teasers:

"If you smile at, listen to and are generous with family, employees and the public, you will be rewarded with many friends. If you are courteous, you will be welcomed anywhere. This is a short road to a notable accomplishment."

~ p. 66, "100 Action Principles" by Chum Sam Veasna

100 Action Principles is a self-help book popular in Cambodia that is available in both English and Khmer. I found it at the Peace Book Center in Phnom Penh, and have given many copies of it to my Cambodian friends, who all love it. 


PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT with either the link to your own Teaser Tuesdays post, or share your ‘teasers’ in a comment here (if you don’t have a blog). Thanks!

A Temple Across the River, Phnom Penh

One day my friend Kakkada came and picked me up on his motorcycle and took me on the ferry across the river at Phnom Penh. The captain turned out to be kind of a hunk.

The other side was mostly Vietnamese, and had a Vietnamese Catholic church. I convinced Kakkada to come in - it was his first time on the grounds of a Catholic church and he was fascinated. 
We also visited the local temple, where we met the most adorable monk.

I was interested to find a statue of Ganesha on the temple grounds - this is still reasonably rare in Cambodia.

Kakkada, a trained artist, was amused by the murals inside the temples. He was bothered by the fact that the hands were too big.

Teaser Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

 My Teasers:

"Phnom Penh has only attained its fixed status as a capital city recently. This is true despite the fact that it was Cambodia's capital for about thirty years in the fifteenth century, and for short periods in succeeding centuries."

~ p. xii, "Phnom Penh: A Cultural History" by Milton Osborne 

 PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT with either the link to your own Teaser Tuesdays post, or share your ‘teasers’ in a comment here (if you don’t have a blog). Thanks!

Basic Buddhist Concepts: Generosity (Dana)

While reading Stay Alive My Son, the brilliant and chilling memoir of Pol Pot times by Pin Yathay (and absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in Cambodia), I came across this casual reference to the Cambodian understanding of Dana, the Buddhist concept of generosity. In  this passage he is discussing the forced exodus from Phnom Penh in the days immediately following the Khmer Rouge takeover, as people became gradually hungrier and more desperate:

"Even though Buddhists would normally give generously, we refused them all, except an old lady with her grandchild, to whom I gave a handful of rice. It could have been my own mother out there, and my heart went out to her. But as she went on down the line of people and vehicles, my mother said from the back seat, 'Don't do that again, Thay. Think of your own family first.'" 

Apart from brilliantly evoking the mood of those horrendous days, this passage also helps us see the natural association Buddhists make between the practice of their religion and the practice of generosity, known in Pali as Dana. It means not just giving, but finding joy in giving, in seeing generosity as an expression of one's own humanity. It is indeed a beautiful idea.

This word Dana has become well-known in Western Buddhist circles because many Buddhist associations host what they call "Dana Days" in which the community collects together to assist the temple materially and financially.

The British Buddhist teacher Sangharakshita says that Dana is the fundamental Buddhist virue - without giving no other cultivation is possible. Giving, and delighting in that giving, is the first evidence of a higher thought, of a more moral intention. It is the action of a Bodhisattva. Those who are unwise and immoral are easily identified by their selfishness. Interestingly, being called "stingy" is a gross insult across Buddhist Asia - obviously connected to the Buddhist moral imperative towards Dana.

The Recollection of Generosity is one of the Paths to Purification suggested in the Visuddhimagga, one of the most influential commentary texts in Theravada Buddhism. In that text the scholar-monk Buddhagosa suggests that the Buddhist cultivate extreme generosity by vowing: "From now on, when there is anyone present to receive, I shall not eat even a single mouthful without having given a gift."