Alec Soucy's Articles on Lions Roar

A century ago, Buddhists in Vietnam—and in much of Asia—started rewriting their traditions, and in some cases even their history. Alec Soucy explains how what we think we know of Vietnamese Buddhism points to a much more complex reality. On the first and fifteenth day of each lunar month in Hanoi, Vietnam, temples teem with devout Buddhists. Devotees arrive at the temple with bags full of fruit flowers, incense, and spirit money. Off to the side of the shrine, people arrange their offerings, piling the fruit and spirit money (as well as real money) on the provided plastic trays. Reverently, they enter the temple, place their offerings on the altar, the flowers in the vases, and then step back; clasping hands together, they identify themselves, reporting their names and addresses to the buddhas, and then make wishes for themselves and their families to be healthy, successful, and prosperous. They then visit the other various altars for bodhisattvas and spirits, making similar but smaller offerings. When the incense from the main altar has burned down and the offerings have been infused with the blessings of the buddhas, the fruit and money are retrieved from the altars, and the buddhas are thanked for their blessings. The supplicant burns the spirit money in the furnace outside, conveying the essence of the money up to the buddhas, and then brings the offerings and real money home to be shared with the family so that they can also benefit from the buddhas’ blessings through the consumptive talismans. Later in the day, a group of more devout Buddhists gathers in the main shrine to chant from the Buddhist liturgy called the Sam Nguyen, to atone for their transgressions and lighten their karmic burden. The liturgy consists of chanting pieces from various sutras as well as the names of important buddhas and bodhisattvas, then doing the nembutsu, called Niem Phat in Vietnamese. While some see this as a chance to reflect and recite the dharma, for many of the practitioners it is seen as an enhanced way to bring the buddhas’ benevolence to their families so they can thrive in this challenging world. In overseas Vietnamese temples, from Hamburg to Hamilton, California to Canberra, the Buddhist practices are not dissimilar. Largely devotional, they generally involve meeting on Sundays to chant a variation of the penitence liturgy and recite the names of various buddhas, especially Amitabha, to atone for transgressions. These practices tend to be less syncretic than in northern Vietnam, with the temples generally being dedicated only to the Buddhist pantheon and not including altars to spirits. Individual practices like offerings of money (real or spirit) are not done. Nonetheless, devotees often make the same kinds of requests for help with worldly issues, particularly seeking the help of Quan The Am (Avalokiteshvara). Divination blocks are often placed in front of her altar so people can get advice about important decisions they need to make. Unsurprisingly, there is a strong communal element at these overseas temples, so while individual food offerings are not made, the offerings placed on the altars are consumed in a communal meal after the service is over. When I first started doing research on Vietnamese Buddhism at a local temple in Montreal in 1990, written descriptions of Vietnamese Buddhism were rare. The two available English accounts that I could find in my university library were Thich Nhat Hanh’s Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire and Thich Thien An’s Buddhism and Zen in Vietnam, both of which described Zen as being at the core of Vietnamese Buddhism—a very different presentation from what I was seeing at the temple. There was one additional French account by a priest–anthropologist named Léopold Cadière, who lived and conducted research in central Vietnam over many years in the middle of the twentieth century. Cadière’s short account in his extensive three-tome work on religious practice in Vietnam concluded that there was no clear Vietnamese Buddhism: “there are no real Buddhists except the monks—and not even all of them, because for most it is a job.” This was similarly unhelpful, since surely what these devout Buddhists were practicing had to be understood as Buddhism. Buddhism as a Religion. It has taken me many years to make sense of the wide gap between the accounts by Thich Thien An and Thich Nhat Hanh, and the way that Buddhism is actually practiced by most Vietnamese. The first step was to recognize the way that globalization has led to the reconstruction of Buddhism. The Age of Enlightenment laid the groundwork for the development of the idea of “religion” as a social category. European exploration and imperial conquest brought Europeans in close contact with other societies, and the scientific method that had taken root led them to study and create typologies of all aspects of the natural and social world. The label “religion,” which had been used internally within Christianity to denote monastics, was adopted to label the category of beliefs and practices that could be found in different forms throughout the world, across spiritual traditions (though academics still debate exactly what the category of “religion” should include). A defining aspect of this new category was the centrality of salvation or enlightenment. Peter Beyer describes in his book Religions in Global Society how different realms of human endeavour came to be systematized and seen as distinct enterprises: politics, economics, entertainment, academia, medicine, and so on, so that each had their own internal rules and processes and were incommensurate with one another. Religion, also, was developed as a distinct category separate from secular activities, leading to the idea of separation of church and state. The category of religion was recognized as comprising a number of distinct religions, and the academic field of religious studies was carved from theology to set about exploring and defining what these were. While from today’s perspective it seems self-evident that religion is an identifiable category made up of discrete and definable religions, at the time, this represented an entirely new way of looking at the world. This view has since reverberated across the globe, altering all traditions in different ways and to varying degrees. Through interactions between Western Orientalist scholars, Asian Buddhist reformers, and Western converts and sympathizers, Buddhism was restructured to conform to this modern view of religion. It was distinguished from other religions, but also from beliefs and practices that were seen as extraneous, termed as “culture,” “custom,” or “tradition,” or pejoratively as “superstition.” It is out of these views that Cadière pronounced that there are no Buddhists in Vietnam. The colonial discourses of European superiority and Asian inferiority appeared self-evident to many Asian intellectuals, who saw their traditions as retrograde and premodern, and the cause for their subjugation and humiliation. There was a religious response as well, with religious leaders calling for the modernization of their traditions. Mostly these came in the form of calling to a return to a golden age from which their tradition had been corrupted over time. These views were at the forefront of reconfiguring their traditions to construct core rituals, texts, philosophies, and practices into what we recognize as Buddhism today. These Buddhist reform movements took place throughout Buddhist Asia, with figures such as Shaku Soen and Dharmapala being important figures in Japan and Sri Lanka, respectively. The reform movements were also international in scope, drawing ties between the various traditions, sects, and countries to draw the contours of the newly constituted religion. The central projects in this regard were to establish unifying symbols and foundational aspects of the religion. The historical Buddha was refashioned as Buddhism’s founder—an historical account, ironically, first assembled by a British missionary named Spence Hardy, whose aim was to prove the inferiority of Buddhism compared to Christianity. It was then taken up by the more sympathetic founder of the Pali Text Society, T. W. Rhys Davids. Bodhgaya was wrestled from Hindu control by Dharmapala to be remade into the geographical center of Buddhism. A Buddhist flag was adopted. The Buddha’s birthday was made into the main global Buddhist celebration. (In Vietnam it was not celebrated until the 1930s, and it still wasn’t an important day in the north when I started doing research there in the 1990s.) Even as these reform movements engaged in transnational dialogue, they were also heavily implicated in nationalist discourses. Most tended to be country-based and were reactions to Western imperialism and Christian missionary pressures. They were usually elite movements that were part of larger projects of asserting national and cultural identity to push against European colonial powers. For Buddhists, these projects combined efforts to organize by forming associations and to assert nation-based Buddhisms that had been cleansed of superstitious elements and cultural accretions. Zen and Buddhist Reform in Vietnam. Vietnam started this process quite late (in the late 1920s) and took its cues mostly from Chinese reformers, especially Taixu, who called for a humanistic Buddhism. Associations and study groups were founded in all of the major urban centers of southern, central, and northern Vietnam, but the French rulers prevented them from uniting into a single organization. The regional associations established schools for monastics to put forward a new, international Buddhist orthodoxy. They began publishing Buddhist journals that condemned superstitious practices like burning spirit money and supplicating the Buddha for worldly benefits. They also advocated for Buddhist monks to be socially active. It was at one of these new schools that Thich Thien An and Thich...

Zen in Vietnam: The Making of a Tradition

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