Within Cambodian Buddhist communities, mediumship and spirit possession form a parallel yet intertwined religious sphere that coexists with orthodox Theravāda practice. Mediums, often lay practitioners such as rup, kru, or kru Khmer, enter altered states of consciousness in which they are believed to be “mounted” or entered by various beings. These include local tutelary spirits of land and villages (neak ta), ancestral and recently deceased spirits, territorial or nature spirits, and at times Hindu-Buddhist deities. The same shared cosmology that speaks of karmic rebirth, heavens, hells, and hungry ghosts also accommodates these local and ancestral beings, so that spirit work is not experienced as separate from Buddhism, but as addressing a different layer of reality.

The practical functions of mediumship in this setting are wide-ranging and deeply embedded in everyday life. Spirit possession is sought for healing physical and mental ailments, especially those not easily explained in biomedical terms, and for protection against malevolent influences. Mediums diagnose misfortune, prescribe offerings or behavioral changes, and provide divination and guidance on matters such as marriage, migration, business, legal disputes, and agricultural fertility. Spirits speaking through mediums may also scold wrongdoers, demand reconciliation, and reinforce social norms such as respect for parents and generosity, thereby contributing to social regulation and conflict resolution. In this way, spirit cults manage misfortune and uncertainty, offering explanations for accidents, bad luck, infertility, or distress in terms of displeased spirits or unresolved karmic entanglements.

Although monks rarely act as mediums, the relationship between monastic Buddhism and spirit practices is characterized more by practical interdependence than by strict separation. Monks may bless spirit shrines, images, or the opening of a medium’s practice, and Buddhist protective chants and symbols are often incorporated into spirit ceremonies. Mediums in turn attend temples, sponsor offerings, and request chanting for the spirits with whom they work, and laypeople move fluidly between temple-based merit-making and spirit-based rituals depending on the nature of their concerns. From a doctrinal standpoint, reliance on spirits can be seen as at odds with the ideal of taking refuge solely in Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha, yet in lived religion these practices are widely tolerated and integrated. Cambodian Buddhism thus appears as a religiously plural field in which spirit possession and mediumship serve as a complementary system of healing, protection, guidance, and social order, operating alongside the quest for ultimate liberation articulated in Theravāda teachings.