Word: viets
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During the lazy decades before the war in Viet Nam spread to Cambodia, now called Kampuchea, mornings in Phnom-Penh began when Buddhist bonzes filed slowly out from their wats (monasteries) in search of food. They proceeded along tree-lined boulevards, past colonial mansions and temples glistening with gold leaf, begging until their silver bowls were filled with rice and fresh mangoes. That usually did not take very long...
Buddhism was one of the first institutions affected when pro-Western governments in Cambodia, Laos and South Viet Nam were replaced five years ago by Communist regimes. In Viet Nam, bonzes managed to keep the pagodas open by strategically placing busts of Ho Chi Minh opposite altars crowded with Buddha images. In the mountainous kingdom of Laos, the new Communist rulers were less tolerant. Monks in Luang Prabang were lucky to escape with re-education in "seminar camps." Many others who had become wealthy by selling protective amulets to hill-tribe animists had their magic severely tested by Pathet...
...from desire; 3) this desire can be extinguished by 4) following the Buddha's path of truthful and chaste behavior. The introspective Theravada school of Buddhism is predominant on the plains of Thailand and western Kampuchea, where the faith was once centered in the fabulous Angkor Wat. In Viet Nam, whose Mayahana school permits social concern alongside withdrawal of the self, Buddhists have sometimes supported nationalist movements, but rarely actively...
Neither Ho Chi Minh nor the CIA was able to find a way of using Buddhism as a rallying point. The only time Indochina's Buddhists were roused to unified action was in the early 1960s, when harassment by Viet Nam's Catholic minority provoked a series of public demonstrations that helped topple Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem...
Indochina's current Communist regimes seek their own middle way to deal with their Buddhist populations. In South Viet Nam, people are free to worship, but those who meditate with the 15 monks (out of 30) who remain at the Vinh Nghiem pagoda in Ho Chi Minh City are reminded by the bust of Uncle Ho and numerous red banners that the religion is tolerated only as an appendage of the state. In Laos, over the past five years, one-fourth of the peasant population of 3 million have swum or rafted across the Mekong River to Thailand...