植民地期のカンボジアにおける対仏教政策と仏教界の反応

Abstract

After the end of the Cambodian civil war prolonged for more than twenty years, there can be seen progress of the studies on Cambodian Buddhism in English. However, documents preserved at the National Archives of Cambodia are not fully utilized in these works. This paper, therefore, scrutinizes new documents and tries to delineate the policies of the French colonial administration and the royal government toward Buddhism, and to describe the responses of the Buddhist monks, particularly those who claimed to reform the religious practices according to Tripitaka. Since the middle of the 19th century, Cambodian Buddhism had been under the ced learning of the Pali language were provided. In order to interrupt such a stream, the colonial authorities tried to issue identity cards of the monks and novices, and to found Pali schools from the 1900s. These policies finally took root among the Khmer monks in the late 1910s. Instead of the Siamese temples, the Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orinent played an important role in cultivating a new "reformation" led by the two young Francophone monks named Chuon Nath and Huot Tath. They devoted themselves to the activities of the Royal Library and Buddhist Institute, both of which were reorganized or established by the Ecole, and they advocated the "reformation" of the Mohanikay sect. Their influences upon the alumni of the Ecole supérieure de Pali caused conflicts with senior monks, which spread to the monasteries in the cities from the 1920s and those in the local villages through the 1950s and 1960s. After the fall of Pol Pot regime, under which religion had been entirely prohibited, most of the temples began to follow the path of the "reformation." Thus Chuon Nath and Huot Tath became considered to be the leading figures in Cambodian Buddhist history.