Pchum Ben stands as a vivid illustration of how Cambodian Buddhism has absorbed and reshaped older folk and ancestor-veneration practices rather than displacing them. At its heart lies the ancient Khmer concern for the dead—especially ancestors and forgotten spirits—now expressed through a Buddhist vocabulary of hungry ghosts (preta/petas), karmic consequence, and rebirth. The belief that spirits of the dead return and may roam in a state of deprivation is an older folk intuition, yet it is now interpreted through a Buddhist cosmology in which these beings inhabit unhappy realms and can benefit from the merit generated by the living. In this way, a pre-Buddhist obligation to care for the dead is preserved, but it is framed as an expression of Buddhist compassion and responsibility toward all sentient beings.

The ritual life of the festival further reveals this blending. Families visit pagodas over a defined period, bringing offerings of food—especially rice balls (bay ben)—along with other gifts for the monks. Some offerings are placed or thrown in symbolic ways that echo earlier practices of feeding invisible spirits, while monks recite Pali suttas and Buddhist prayers that formally dedicate the resulting merit to departed relatives and neglected souls. The temple thus becomes a meeting point of worlds: the laity, the monastic community, and the unseen beings who are believed to depend on these acts of generosity. What might once have been a purely folk ritual of appeasement is now structured as canonical merit-making (puñña), centered on dana and the role of the sangha.

This synthesis has profound social and ethical implications. By encouraging offerings not only for known ancestors but also for “forgotten” or “abandoned” souls, the festival extends older kin-based obligations into a broader, more universal ethic of care that resonates with Buddhist teachings on compassion and interdependence. At the same time, it reinforces long-standing Khmer values of filial piety, gratitude, and communal solidarity, now articulated in explicitly Buddhist terms of karma, moral responsibility, and spiritual progress. Pchum Ben thus functions as a bridge between worlds—between the living and the dead, between folk cosmology and Buddhist doctrine, and between inherited customs and the formal religious life of the monastery—embodying a distinctly Cambodian mode of Buddhist practice.