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Cambodian Buddhist nuns, including the white-robed ṭūn jī, occupy a fraught confluence of competing cultural and religious narratives. Chief among these narratives is gratitude to mothers, among the most powerful structuring forces in Khmer Buddhist culture. By ordaining as nuns, Khmer women break no explicit moral rules, but violate implicit conventions to bear children for their husbands and care for their parents in old age. To explore how this tension plays out in the lives of individual nuns, I draw on public statements and social media posts of two of the most prominent nuns in Cambodia today, Chea Silieng and Heng Kosorl. The two nuns have taken a divergent approach to filial debts, with Silieng emphasizing freedom from her birth family, husband, and children and Kosorl frequently posting about acts of devotion to her parents and grandparents. Both approaches reveal the profoundly gendered dimensions of filial piety and the complex intersection of such narratives with the growing stature of nuns as Buddhist leaders and teachers in Cambodia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Heonik Kwon, this article explores the social and cultural underpinnings of the Cold War (and Cambodia's stance of neutrality in relation to it) as illustrated through the life of a colorful Cambodian monk, Dharmawara Mahathera. Long resident in India, Dharmawara became a confidant of Norodom Sihanouk as the latter negotiated independence and Cambodia's new geopolitical realities. Dharmawara was one point of connection between Sihanouk and India at the time Sihanouk was drawn to a position of neutrality and to the Non-Aligned Movement associated with Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou Enlai, and his story illuminates some of the cultural interface underlying the politics. He would assume a profile in emerging institutions of international Buddhism, such as the World Fellowship of Buddhists, which in their own way related to developing geopolitics. He subsequently attracted the attention of American diplomats in Cambodia in ways that illustrate something of how the Cold War came to be negotiated on the ground. His tensions with the Cambodian monastic hierarchy help us better understand the latter's role at a historical conjuncture. I argue that Dharmawara helps us understand Sihanouk's emerging philosophy of "Buddhist socialism.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]