Fire in the Lake (73 page)

In the Mekong Delta, where the bonds of the village have never been strong, and where families worship their ancestors only to the third generation, the
dinhs
are, as always, neglected, and it's difficult to find a clan house like those in central Vietnam. But the local religious practices are back, and so, in big way, is Buddhism. All the hamlets I visited in the central delta had small pagodas, and a number had private prayer houses built by well-to-do families. In My Tho, the beautiful Vinh Trang pagoda, built in 1849, has become a major pilgrimage center for the delta. On the fifteenth day of every lunar month, thousands of visitors come to admire the temple's exuberantly colorful facade and to worship in its sanctuaries. The pagoda has a school of Buddhist studies, and it helps to support many of the smaller Mahayana pagodas in the province.

Possibly the most remarkable development in Vietnamese cultural life since 1986 is the revival of Buddhism throughout the country. In southern and central Vietnam the revival came after a hiatus of only ten years, but they were years in which the government regarded the monasteries as potentially subversive, and people were afraid to visit the pagodas. In the north it followed upon almost half a century of quiescence: decades of war, revolution, and “building socialism” in which the priests left the villages and many of the pagodas and shrines fell into disrepair. Yet after the economic reforms, people all over the country flocked to their local pagodas and petitioned the government to help preserve those of historic importance. The government acquiesced, and beginning in 1989 it gave many pagodas, north and south, the equivalent of landmark status. At the same time, it lifted many of the restrictions it had put on the monasteries and on Buddhist folk practices. During the nineties the monasteries came to life again, and priests returned to celebrate the rites at village temples and shrines, and at least a dozen pagodas became major pilgrimage sites and tourist attractions for the Vietnamese.

One of the most popular pagodas in the north is Ba Chua Kho in Ha Bac province, dedicated to the eleventh-century empress who provisioned her husband's troops for war against the Chinese. Neglected during the fifties, it became part of an army base and was virtually destroyed in the war. In the nineties the Ministry of Culture rebuilt it almost from the ground up, justifying the expenditure on the grounds that it was a national historical monument. But, for its visitors, the main attraction is the provident empress's reputation for conferring prosperity and good fortune upon her devotees.

Arriving at Ba Chua Kho at 10
A.M.
on a Friday morning, I found the parking lot already filling up with buses and cars. In the booths in front of the pagoda steps, scribes were writing out prayers in Chinese characters for their customers, and vendors of fruit, sticky rice, joss sticks, and paper offerings were doing good business. At one of the booths a woman from the Ministry of health in Binh Dinh province, who had been called to Hanoi for a meeting on malaria control, was ordering a tray piled high with an arrangement of fruit, flowers, and gilded paper offerings to take to the goddess on behalf of herself and some of her coworkers. She was, she said, building a house and needed help with the financing.

The main sanctuary of the pagoda was crowded with people and with the trays of offerings they had left before the altar. Going in through a side door, I found myself pressed against a wall next to a young woman in jeans and a fashionable black leather jacket. On the wall a government poster enjoined people to practice religion and eschew superstition, a distinction the author did not even try to define. In front of us a group of men were handing around a cup with three antique coins and taking turns throwing the coins: heads you got your wish, tails you didn't. After some conversation, the young woman told me she had come to the pagoda because she wanted a boyfriend. Sure, she said, she was making an effort, but a little good fortune always helped.

Ba Chua Kho is one of those eclectic pagodas in which Buddhism has melded with folk traditions, Taoism, and the worship of a national hero. What's happening there is fairly easy to understand. With the economic reforms of the late 1980s, the government essentially told its citizens: the system isn't working, so we're breaking it up and you're pretty much on your own. That meant that the people had to take economic risks — a novelty for most in the north. In temples such as Ba Chua Khoa, the Vietnamese are taking out the spiritual equivalent of insurance policies on their houses and business — or their potential for finding husbands or having children.

At the orthodox Mahayana temples, some of great age and beauty, the atmosphere is more subdued and the quest of the visitors not so obvious. In the north, the ancient Thay pagoda in Ha Tay province, built into the lee of a limestone mountain, and the nearby Tay Phuong pagoda are both very popular. On weekdays, most of the visitors are women from Buddhist associations traveling together on buses from one temple to the next. Quiet and serious, they listen as the local guide explains the history and the religious significance of the sculptures, carvings, and musical instruments. Some ask questions about the iconography, and at the main altar they stop to light joss sticks and pray. On weekends, the crowds swell with family groups, busloads of civil servants and factory workers, and groups of young people from the cities in a holiday spirit. Clearly these people are exploring their country — a luxury the Vietnamese have never had before — and watching them examine the shrines and grottos, I could imagine them simply as museum-goers, except that some of them stop to pray.

With the reforms of the eighties the government did something more than open up the economy, for in the Vietnamese context Marxism-Leninism was more than an economic system and an ideology. Like Confucianism, it was a social system grounded in a claim to an immutable, scientific understanding of human nature and the laws of history; it was also a set of ethics, and the ethics, or “revolutionary virtues,” taught by Ho Chi Minh closely resembled those of Confucianism. In abandoning the command economy, the government was withdrawing from its claim to know how the larger laws of history worked and its claim to represent a complete moral and social system — or a complete replacement for the Confucian regime.

In fact, the system had already broken down by 1986, and everyone knew it. In the villages of the north, people — including Communist Party members — worked to rebuilt their communities along traditional lines. In central Vietnam, people reconstructed their family ties to include those who had fought on both sides in the war. But Vietnamese farmers, along with city people, live in a larger society as well. In many countries in certain periods of history, multitudes of people made pilgrimages to shrines long distances away. Whatever the pilgrims hoped to accomplish, they saw something of the larger world and developed a sense of spiritual community with their fellows: a community that transcended local boundaries and regional differences. Then, too, in Vietnam the traditional pattern was that Buddhism flourished in times of trouble, when the Confucian state weakened. In this case, of course, the “trouble” is the market economy and the old order reasserting itself to deal with what Westerners blithely call modernization.

Back Notes

1: States of Mind

  
1
. Viet Hoai, “The Old Man in the Free Fire Zone,” in
Between Two Fires: The Unheard Voices of Vietnam,
ed. Ly Qui Chung, pp. 102–105.

  
2
. Léopold Cadière,
Croyances et pratiques religieuses des viêtnamiens,
vol. 2, p. 308.

  
3
. Nghiem Dang,
Viet-Nam: Politics and Public Administration,
p. 53.

  
4
. Confucius,
The Analects of Confucius,
p. 127.

  
5
. Conversation with Paul Mus.

  
6
. Confucius,
Analects,
p. 104. According to Waley, “The saying can be paraphrased as follows: If I and my followers are right in saying that countries can be governed solely by correct carrying out of ritual and its basic principle of ‘giving way to others,’ there is obviously no case to be made out for any other form of government. If on the other hand we are wrong, then ritual is useless. To say, as people often do, that ritual is all very well so long as it is not used as an instrument of government, is wholly to misunderstand the purpose of ritual.”

  
7
. Charles Gosselin,
L'Empire d'Annam,
p. 149.

  
8
. Truong Buu Lam,
Patterns of Vietnamese Response to Foreign Intervention: 1858–1900,
p.
77.
From an anonymous appeal to resist the French (1864).

  
9
. Paul Mus, “Les Religions de l'Indochine,' in
Indochine,
ed. Sylvain Lévi, p. 132.

10
. There were also handicraft guilds and Buddhist and Taoist priesthoods, but these are details. The generalization in true enough for the purposes of contrast.

11
. For the French, the emperor's persecution of French Catholic missionaries (though there were relatively few cases) served as a pretext for intervention in Vietnam. But to the French emperors conversion to Catholicism signified not just a religious apostasy, but alienation from the state itself.

12
. The Gia Long code, promulgated by the early-nineteenth-century founder of the Nguyen dynasty, was a much more exact copy of the Chinese codes than the Le code that governed Vietnam from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

13
. Le Thanh Khoi,
Le Viêt-Nam.
According to the French historian, Henri Maspero, the land did not belong to the emperor, but to the people, whose will was expressed by the mouth of the sovereign. This reflexive relation between the people and the sovereign is typical of the Vietnamese political philosophy derived from Mencius.

14
. Truong Chinh,
President Ho Chi Minh,
p. 68.

15
. In the seventeenth century a French missionary, Alexandre de Rhodes, transcribed the Vietnamese language into the Roman alphabet, using diacritical marks to indicate the different tones. His aim was to render the Bible and other Christian texts into Vietnamese. The first people to use
quoc ngu,
as his system was called, were therefore the Vietnamese Catholics. The Latin alphabet came into general use only after the French conquest.

16
. A hypothesis: the spoken language with its five tones may also be more concrete (more allusive, less abstract) than Western languages because of the element of music in it. In the way that people recall particular situations and particular people from the sound of a familiar tune, so the Vietnamese may associate words more directly with particular events than do Westerners. Cf. A. R. Luria,
The Mind of a Mnemonist
(New York: Basic Books, 1968).

17
. Gosselin,
Empire,
p. 27.

18
. Douglas Pike,
Viet Cong,
pp. 379, 383.

19
.
New York Times,
8 October 1970.

20
. Nguyen Truong To, “Memorials on Reform,” in
Patterns of Response,
ed. Truong Buu Lam, p. 98.

21
. If the Buddhists were, for instance, to be proved wrong in the end, then their statement would be both untrue and useless.

22
. Phan Thi Dae,
Situation de la personne au Viet-Nam,
pp. 137–156.

23
. Phan Thanh Gian, “Letter on His Surrender,” in
Patterns of Response,
ed. Truong Buu Lam, pp. 87–88.

24
. Ibid., p. 88. Phan Thanh Gian may have been wrong in his assessment of the military situation. Other mandarins had behaved differently, many of them resisting the French to the last. Given his assessment, however, there was little else for him to do.

25
. Confucius,
Analects,
p. 168.

26
. Paul Mus, “Cultural Backgrounds of Present Problems,” p. 13. In the
Analects
the Master recounts this story about one of the divine sages of the past.

27
. Ho Chi Minh,
Ho Chi Minh on Revolution,
p. 145.

28
.
I Ching,
p. 190.

29
. John T. McAlister, Jr.,
Vietnam: The Origins of Revolution,
pp. 186–188.

30
. Jean Lacouture,
Ho Chi Minh,
p. 179.

31
. In the Sino-Vietnamese world, dates were not reckoned from a single point (such as the birth of Jesus Christ) but from the beginning of each new dynasty or each new emperor's reign. Thus even the numbers of the years repeat themselves.

32
.
I Ching,
p. 190.

33
. Ibid., p. 189.

2: Nations and Empires

  
1
. This secret society was the northern branch of the Dai Viet Party (see below for further details). Far from being an arm of the Lao Dong Party, it was the group that General Edward Lansdale used in some of his intelligence and sabotage missions in North Vietnam just after the French war. Cf. “Lansdale Team's Report on Covert Saigon Mission in '54 and '55,” in Neil Sheehan et al.,
The Pentagon Papers,
pp. 53–66.

  
2
. Ly Thuong Kiet, “The Principle of Identity,” in
Patterns of Vietnamese Response to Foreign Intervention:
2858–1900, ed. Truong Buu Lam, p. 47.

  
3
. Nguyen Trai, “A Great Proclamation upon the Pacification of Wu” (1428), in
Patterns of Response,
ed. Truong Buu Lam, p. 56.

  
4
. Ho Chi Minh, “Speech Opening the First Theoretical Course of the Nguyen Ai Quoc School” (7 September 1957), in
Ho Chi Minh on Revolution,
ed. Bernard B. Fall, p. 321.

  
5
. In 1945–1946 Ho Chi Minh had even courted American support. He quoted from the American Declaration of Independence in his own independence declaration and he wrote a series of letters to the American government asking for diplomatic aid.American scholars and scientists who visited the DRVN during the American war were always surprised by the interest and knowledge the North Vietnamese showed in the United States and their particular scholarly disciplines.The Vietnamese desire for outside contacts was not by any means confined to the non-Communist world.