688 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



A CAMBODIAN PRIMARY SCHOOL. 



By M. ADHEMARD LECLERE. 



THE V^at, or Buddhist monastery, is in Cambodia very much 

 what the Christian monastery was in Europe in the middle 

 ages a community of persons devoted to religion, having a chapel, 

 a place of entertainment for strangers, and a school for boys. 

 The schools directed by the mendicants are most generally pri- 

 mary schools, where are taught gratuitously and in a spirit of 

 charity to voluntary pupils reading and writing in the Cambo- 

 dian language and characters; prayer in the dead language of 

 Maghada (or Pali), which has become the sacred language of the 

 Buddhists of the Southern Church ; reading of the Balery Molcoth, 

 or Maghada texts, which are written in Cambodian characters on 

 palm leaves ; arithmetic ; and a little religious morals on " earth 

 to earth." 



The superior of the monastery is the chief professor and exer- 

 cises a general direction over the other professors and the pupils, 

 without personally giving much attention to the instruction. 

 Under him is a monk known as the reading professor, who reads 

 on festival days, in the temple or in the hall of the monastery, 

 from the sacred book, the life of Buddha and a few fragments of 

 his teaching, and in the absence of the superior supervises the 

 observance of religious discipline. The other monks, generally 

 spoken of as gentlemen of the clergy, or of the assembly, or of the 

 church, are addressed by the pupils as the professor or my pro- 

 fessor. 



All the bonzes can read and teach reading, but there are many 

 who hardly know how to write and are absolutely incapable of 

 reading aloud in the assembly of the faithful. Only a few of 

 them are so advanced as to comprehend what they read without 

 pronouncing the words. In short, although the instruction given 

 in these institutions is very elementary, and there is absolutely 

 no discipline, the Buddhist monks are nevertheless the veritable 

 and only teachers of children, their beloved and respected school- 

 masters, and their spiritual fathers, to whom it is " good form n to 

 be submissive, the respected educators of the people. 



The pupils are of two kinds those who are dressed like the 

 laity and those who are dressed like the bonzes. The former are 

 designated by terms meaning children who study, who learn, or 

 pupils ; the others are novices. But those of both classes who are 

 of the same age pursue the same courses. Those of the second 

 class, the novices, are incipient bonzes. They accompany the 

 monks who go out in the morning to beg, and, like them, hold out 

 the wooden contribution boxes for the alms of boiled rice. Fur- 



