Pchum Ben

9-30-08

I haven't been able to write very much over the last few weeks, for various reasons. Training stuff has kept me busy, of course, but there have also been family obligations that go along with this season. The last half of September is Pchum Ben, a traditional Khmer holiday season that was rolled up by the Buddhist cultural juggernaut when it rolled through this part of the world two thousand years ago.

Pchum Ben is like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Halloween rolled up into one great 15-day stretch. The reason for the celebration is that at this time of year the spirits of our ancestors are released from “Hell” (a state of suffering brought on by doing bad deeds in life and not accruing enough merit) to return to the wat in their hometown. It is the responsibility of all Khmer to go to the wat at least once at 4am to provide food to these spirits. The traditional food that is provided is tiny balls of sticky rice, prepared the day before. Why tiny balls? Because the spirits have small mouths.

That is the “Halloween” aspect of Pchum Ben, and one I unfortunately never got to participate in. I told my family I would like to go to the wat at four in the morning and help, but my host brother overslept and didn't take me. But I did get to participate in the “Christmas” and “Thanksgiving” aspect later in the day. In ancient times, Pchum Ben actually lasted three months. The practical reason for this was to keep all the monks inside the temples. Poor farmers were allowed to plant a small rice crop in the wat, and the monks all had to stay inside to prevent them from trampling the rice plants. Consequently, the townspeople had to bring them food during this time.

Today Pchum Ben only lasts fifteen days, but it is still the responsibility of the citizens of the local town to provide a large meal for the monks every day. The villagers are divided into groups; here in Tuk Phos, each group provided food to the wat at least three times. There are at least two ceremonies during the day that I know of in which food is provided. I went to two of them in one day. They are...quite something. For one thing, they are not actually in the wat itself, but out in sort of an open shed with a smaller shrine inside. There is a long, slightly raised area where the monks sit, and then a large open area facing it where everyone else sits. The food is piled up in front of the monks, who always get to eat first.

The unfortunate part about Pchum Ben is that all this activity at the wat means that the loudspeakers are going almost non-stop during the day. I don't know what Buddhism was like before the invention of microphones and loudspeakers, but these modern conveniences have certainly been embraced by the pagodas. There is almost always prayers and recorded music blaring out of the loudspeakers, starting at 4:00 in the morning and continuing all day long. Fortunately I don't live close enough to the wat for this to seriously affect me, but those that do are pretty cranky about it.

But anyway, the service itself. It starts with making an offering of money to one of the old men who are in charge of these sort of things. They then read a short blessing over you, and you go and sit down on one of the straw mats covering the concrete floor. The problem is that it is forbidden to sit with your legs open, or to point your feet towards the front, so you have to sit with your legs folded underneath you and to the side. This is incredibly uncomfortable, and you will be sitting like this for quite some time. Then the monks come in. The old men and the monks alternate between leading chants that can last almost twenty minutes each. After all this the monks dig in to their food. I read that the monks look forward to Pchum Ben every year for precisely this reason; they get some pretty good food out of the deal. After the monks have finished, they leave, and everyone else eats the leftover food. And that's a Pchum Ben service.

In the final, most important days of Pchum Ben, there is a lot of travel in Cambodia, because tradition dictates that you go back to your hometown and pay homage to your ancestors at your family's traditional wat. Your ancestors aren't going to come find you, and if you don't give them food they are going to be pretty pissed. And pissed-off ancestral spirits can wreak a lot of havoc with your life, or so I am told.

Pchum Ben ends today, and coincidentally so does our training. So the last few days have been spent mostly with our families, participating in various aspects of Pchum Ben. I think this was pretty good timing on the Peace Corps' part, but it's still going to be hard to say goodbye tomorrow.