His chest smeared red and his mouth dripping blood, Neang Mork announced that—as usual—he felt no pain.
He had just sliced open his tongue with two 15-centimeter-long steak knives. It was the Interior Ministry performer’s most gruesome trick, but there are others: Running a needle through his cheeks; walking barefoot on broken glass; massaging his bare skin with a flaming stick.
The power to withstand pain, Neang Mork says, is in four ancient Pali words.
“After I chant those magic words, they make me brave, and I can dare to cut my tongue,” Neang Mork said after a recent impromptu performance for reporters and about 30 neighbors. “If I don’t chant those words, I will feel pain.”
The 51-year-old, employed by the ministry as drama director and chief of the Apsara Amatak Art Group, is a practitioner of what he says is a dying Khmer art. The ability to block out pain was once common among ancient Khmer warriors, who summoned their strength to fend off invaders, Neang Mork said.
In these more peaceful times, he is a solitary performer and vessel of a bygone culture. As he learned from his father, Neang Mork is teaching his magic to his own son and two students. But Neang Mork reveals said he reveals only 70 percent of his tricks to his students. Some magic is self-taught, he said.
The practice requires that the students spend one night a week abstaining from sex and in meditation. Eating certain foods, such as dog meat and star fruit, is forbidden.
Adultery is also forbidden, because with such formidable power comes temptation. Included in Neang Mork’s brand of magic is the ability to
