François Ponchaud

A European passing through Cambodia may have found surprising or even scandalous that there should be sixty thousand bonzes in a total population or 7 millions, but to Khmer peasants it was natural, for under the monks’ religious robes were their own sons or brothers, who were receiving a sort of education obtainable in no other way. The clergy also fulfilled a social function by piling up merits for the villagers who fed them. They gave sense to life, death, and work. In their attitude toward Buddhism, the Khmer Rouge have reacted like Westerners, seeing only the surface, the seemingly parasitic existence of this clergy.