(2 of 2)
Neither Ho Chi Minh nor the CIA was able to find a way of using Buddhism as a rallying point. The only time Indochina's Buddhists were roused to unified action was in the early 1960s, when harassment by Viet Nam's Catholic minority provoked a series of public demonstrations that helped topple Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem.
Because it has neither dogma nor Pope, and lacks both the promise of immortality and the threat implied in sin, Buddhism is often dismissed as a weak religion. In reality it offers one of the few elements of cohesion in the ethnographic jigsaw that is Southeast Asia. On the plains, the Buddha's concepts of the "flood" (travail in the material world) and "further shore" (the search for nirvana) are apt metaphors for peasant lives constantly subjected to natural disasters. In mountain societies, which are often driven by a lust for Lebensraum, Buddhism's "middle way" tempers excesses.
Indochina's current Communist regimes seek their own middle way to deal with their Buddhist populations. In South Viet Nam, people are free to worship, but those who meditate with the 15 monks (out of 30) who remain at the Vinh Nghiem pagoda in Ho Chi Minh City are reminded by the bust of Uncle Ho and numerous red banners that the religion is tolerated only as an appendage of the state. In Laos, over the past five years, one-fourth of the peasant population of 3 million have swum or rafted across the Mekong River to Thailand. One of the most famous of these waterborne refugees is Laos' 88-year-old Supreme Patriarch, Pra Yodkaw Vachirorods, who sighs, "Buddhism is alienated and separate from the people. Religion is dying in Laos."
Scholars in Thailand disagree. They are sanguine about Buddhism's long-range prospects in Indochina, since they feel the Gautama's ideas are not incompatible with Communism. Observes Thai Scholar Sulak Sivaraksa: "Christianity and Communism have a lot of ideological conflicts, but this is not the case with traditional Buddhism, which is socialistic in that it champions the equality of man."
Ironically, despite the previous violence, religious tolerance is greatest today in Kampuchea. At the Royal Palace in Phnom-Penh, joss sticks are on sale again, and on Sundays, swarms of worshipers file through the ornate silver pagoda. Outside the capital, United Nations trucks that haul rice during the week are busy on Sunday transporting Buddhists and their gifts of food and flowers to rural temples.
The government of Heng Samrin has spent no money rebuilding temples. For now, Kampuchea's impoverished peasants seem prepared to accept the financial burden of maintaining Buddhism by themselves. The 100 families in the tiny hamlet of Damrak Ampil, 12½ miles west of Phnom-Penh, recently contributed enough money to cast a new bronze Buddha and begin restoring their roofless temple. "Lord Buddha sustained us during our darkest hours," explains Village Committeeman Chea Non. "Our village is poor, but our faith is strong."
—By David DeVoss/Phnom-Penh