Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodia, Erik W. Davis radically reorients approaches toward the nature of Southeast Asian Buddhism's interactions with local religious practice and, by extension, reorients our understanding of Buddhism itself. Through a vivid study of contemporary Cambodian Buddhist funeral rites, he reveals the powerfully integrative role monks play as they care for the dead and negotiate the interplay of non-Buddhist spirits and formal Buddhist customs. Buddhist monks perform funeral rituals rooted in the embodied practices of Khmer rice farmers and the social hierarchies of Khmer culture. The monks' realization of death underwrites key components of the Cambodian social imagination: the distinction between wild death and celibate life, the forest and the field, and moral and immoral forms of power. By connecting the performative aspects of Buddhist death rituals to Cambodian history and everyday life, Davis undermines the theory that Buddhism and rural belief systems necessarily oppose each other. Instead, he shows Cambodian Buddhism to be a robust tradition with ethical and popular components extending throughout Khmer society.

Human-fashioned boundaries transform spaces by introducing dualisms, bifurcations, creative symbioses, contradictions, and notions of inclusion and exclusion. The Buddhist boundaries considered in this book, sīmās—a term found in South and Southeast Asian languages and later translated into East Asian languages—come in various shapes and sizes and can be established on land or in bodies of water. Sometimes, the word sīmā refers not only to a ceremonial boundary, but the space enclosed by the boundary, or even the markers (when they are used) that denote the boundary. Sīmās were established early on as places where core legal acts (kamma), including ordination, of the monastic community (sangha) took place according to their disciplinary codes. Sīmās continue to be deployed in the creation of monastic lineages and to function in diverse ways for monastics and non-monastics alike. As foundations of Buddhist religion, sīmās are used to sustain, revitalize, or reform Buddhist practices, notions of identity, and conceptualizations of time and history. In the last few decades, scholarly awareness of and expertise on sīmās has developed to a point where a volume like this one, which examines sīmās across numerous cultural contexts and scholarly fields of inquiry, is both possible and needed. Sīmā traditions expressed in the Theravāda cultures of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka constitute the dominant focus of the work; a chapter on East Asia raises questions of historical transmission beyond these areas. Throughout contributors engage texts; history; archaeology; politics; art; ecology; economics; epigraphy; legal categories; mythic narratives; understandings of the cosmos; and conceptualizations of compassion, authority, and violence. Examining sīmās through multiple perspectives allows us to look at them in their contextual specificity, in a way that allows for discernment of variation as well as consistency. Sīmā spaces can be both simple and extremely intricate, and this book helps show why and how that is the case.