If you are a young and able male in modern day Cambodia, there is the very real possibility that you will become a monk-- if not forever, till death do you part, at least for a few years.
Why?
Monks are respected here. People listen to them, seek advice from them, and, on a daily basis, provide money for them. As HIV/AIDS remains a huge problem here, the monks have been enlisted by various groups to provide accurate information in the small towns and villages that line the countryside.
In Phnom Penh, too, monks are a daily sight, walking the streets with their orange robes, clutching umbrellas to shield themselves from the unforgiving heat. Often, books are tucked under their arms: schoolbooks, textbooks, copies of MAD magazine. (Okay, maybe they don't read MAD.)
Some of the best students I ever taught were monks. They are interested in learning. They are interested in acquiring truth. They are interested in concepts like democracy and justice and suffering. They shave their heads and live together in pagodas and instantly, almost miraculously, you could say, become respected citizens of their country, the pride of their families. They become elevated. This makes for a good scholar.
But what is it that the t-shirts they sell at Canada's Wonderland say: Monks are people too? (Okay, maybe there are no t-shirts that actually say that, let alone ones sold at Toronto's coolest theme park, but there should be, damnit...)
One day last year I sat in the computer lab of my old university. Next to me was a young monk, perhaps nineteen years old. I glanced over at his computer seen. He was busily filling out the registration form of match.com, a dating site.
I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that on-line matchmaking services are not part of most Cambodian monks enlightenment process. Call me crazy.
In fact, monks aren't even supposed to be near females. A female student in one of my classes came late into class one afternoon and slipped into a seat beside a monk. He promptly closed his books, stood up, and found a seat at the back of the room. (Did she not know this rule?)
Still, monks are people, too. Another of my students, probably twenty-one, twenty-two years old, seemed to embody the word 'monk' to me. He was polite and solemn and eager to address issues of religion and morality, about the meaning of Christianity, and how its principles shared and overlapped with those of Khmer buddhism. And then one day he came to class in a white dress shirt and black slacks, a shy grin on his face. His time as a monk was done. He came up to me in the cafeteria later that day and let me know that he was interested in his fellow female classmate, romantically interested, and he did he have any tips I could offer? Out the came the pen and the paper.
Each culture's young people head off into the world looking for the same fundamental things: a place to belong, a job that fulfills, a (somewhat) eternal truth that can found, nurtured, sustained. In Cambodia, an ancient land of simple needs, these truths are attained through moderation: You eat two meals a day, and you study Khmer texts, and you shave your head and slap on some orange and purple robes, and you wander the city, and you think about suffering, and you maintain respect for the poor.
Not every young person here becomes a monk, no, but it still seems to me that they're somehow on a kind of track that is nowhere near parallel to ones that run back home. Do the Internet chatrooms and racing video games and action flick DVDs lead teenagers to think about issues of enlightenment? Is shaving your head and studying ancient texts a better way to prepare you for the real world?
I dunno. It's culturally relative, I suppose.
But I've gotten used to the sights of the young monks as they stroll around Phnom Penh, with their gentle smiles and slow, shambling gait. They somehow seem, I don't know, like they consider things more than young people in other, more modern lands. It always feels like they're on to something, that they've figured out primal, fundamental things that I hadn't even contemplated, let alone assessed.
If so, they keep this knowledge to themselves.
Better that way, I think. It's somehow reassuring to view them as mystic, knowing sages, not confused kids groping for answers, as they probably are. Just trying to make their way in the world, tryig to put one foot in front of the other without falling down.
Under the blinding Cambodian sun, they wander the streets. I watch, and wonder.
