The First Month

The first month has passed before my eyes very quickly, and while I now have a pretty clear picture of what I will be doing this year, I think it's important for me to reflect on the broad and amazing experience I've had so far. This month was my chance to get oriented--oriented to the culture, the music, the religion, and the language. In each of these areas I have learned a great deal and, perhaps more importantly, I have had many experiences, both positive and negative, that have supported what I have read or been taught.

Starting with the language, perhaps the most tangible of the four areas, I now feel well-aquainted with basic conversation skills, have devoleped more of an ear for understanding Khmer, and have learned enough to read and write as much or more than I can speak. Moreover, I now realize how much work it is going to take to make further strides in my language abilities. I am currently studying with my teacher for four hours a day and I also study about that much more on my own, and what I enjoy most about studying Khmer is that it never feels like a burden or a task--language learning, especially when it can be applied in almost any situation I encounter outside my flat, is deeply satisfying to me.

My plans for the coming months are as follows. I will stay in Phnom Penh for about another month, focusing on studying the language, so that by the end of October, I will be ready, or as ready as possible, to live in the countryside without a translator. I plan to take up residence in Kompong Speu province--pending the availability of a place to live--in order to study smoat chanting there. The chanting master also spends two weeks per month as an achar (lay ritual specialist) at a wat on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, so my living arrangement may also take this into account. After about 3 1/2 or 4 months of smoat study, towards the end of February I plan on preparing for ordination into the novitiate, most likely under Ven. Pin Sem at Wat Rajabo, Siem Reap, where I plan on spending the rest of my time in Cambodia, most likely six months, until September 2006.

This brings me to the second of the four areas, religion. From the beginning of my interest in coming to Cambodia, I have been most focused on studying the interrelationship between Khmer music and the religious practices of the Khmer people, for the most part dominated by Theravada Buddhism. While in Phnom Penh, I am doing what I can to observe and participate in the life of the wats. Concurrently, I am reading as much as I can on Khmer religion to be able to put into a larger context what I observe from day to day. Again, my study constantly reminds of how much I have yet to learn.

I have had a great many enriching experiences with the third area, music. Whether it has been visiting the masters and their students in the Tonle Bassac community, taking trips out to the provinces to see how music is taught and performed there, or taking up study on the tro sau with master and professor Yun Theara in Phnom Penh, I have learned about and experienced a broad slice of traditional music in Cambodia. There has been little that makes me happier than seeing the young people in the classes show such talent and dedication in their study of traditional music--it is a joy to behold and makes me feel a great deal of respect for the masters and the way music is taught and passed on in Khmer culture. Each class I visited affected me in a different way, and I still am sometimes without words to describe how moved I am to see a culture and an ancient tradition blossoming again.

The fourth and final area, culture, is the least tangible to me and the area where I sometimes feel the most lost. Culture is deeply embedded in history, and I am doing what I can study and observe how Cambodia's past guides the lives of people today, but in general I realize that learning about a culture is not something that really can be quantified. Cultures enter our bodies more than our minds; we adapt to living in another culture below the level of intellectualization, but rather at the level of intuition. And in my experience, learning about another culture turns out to be much more about learning about myself and my own attitudes and prejudices than those of others. I am not trying to rush this area of learning, but rather let it seep through me and change me from the inside--this is the only I way I know to learn. And while I laugh as I realize that it will be hard for me for to go back my country and not address everyone by their kinship relation or not be able to expect a backdrop of Theravada Buddhism as the norm, I know that learning about Khmer culture has been a wonderful journey so far and I will continue to meet more joys and difficulties in the future. To be sure, the same could be said of the three other areas of language, religion and music in my first month: what I have learned has energizied and inspired me to just let myself go deeper and open my eyes wider, so that journey of these coming months may continue to be fruitful.