Monk-centric culture may be reason for Buddhist decline in South Korea: Expert

By Chang Dong-woo, Yonhap News, Jan 25, 2017

SEOUL, South Korea -- Korean Buddhism's monk-centric culture may be a major reason behind a steep drop in the country's Buddhist population in the last decade or so, a religious expert argued Wednesday.

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As Cambodia modernises and sex and drug scandals rock the monkhood, the famed saffron robes no longer command the respect they once did

Phnom Penh, Cambosia -- In 1959, May Mayko Ebihara became the first American to write an anthropological dissertation on Cambodian village life. Published in two volumes nearly a decade later, Svay: A Khmer Village in Cambodia depicted a pre-modern agricultural idyll governed by family and religion, in which monks were seen as the “living embodiments and spiritual generators of Buddhism”.  More