RT Article
T1 Khmer Nuns and Filial Debts: Buddhist Intersections in Contemporary Cambodia
JF Religions
VO 13
IS 10
A1 Walker, Trent
LA English
PB MDPI
YR 2022
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1817363697
AB Cambodian Buddhist nuns, including the white-robed ṭūn jī, occupy a fraught confluence of competing cultural and religious narratives. Chief among these narratives is gratitude to mothers, among the most powerful structuring forces in Khmer Buddhist culture. By ordaining as nuns, Khmer women break no explicit moral rules, but violate implicit conventions to bear children for their husbands and care for their parents in old age. To explore how this tension plays out in the lives of individual nuns, I draw on public statements and social media posts of two of the most prominent nuns in Cambodia today, Chea Silieng and Heng Kosorl. The two nuns have taken a divergent approach to filial debts, with Silieng emphasizing freedom from her birth family, husband, and children and Kosorl frequently posting about acts of devotion to her parents and grandparents. Both approaches reveal the profoundly gendered dimensions of filial piety and the complex intersection of such narratives with the growing stature of nuns as Buddhist leaders and teachers in Cambodia.
K1 upāsikā
K1 ṭūn jī/doun chi
K1 Gratitude
K1 Filial Piety
K1 Buddhist Nuns
K1 Cambodian Buddhism
DO 10.3390/rel13100897