At a simple luncheon Quang Ba held for visitors from neighboring villages and a few other guests, Mr. My told me that for many years the dinh festival had not been celebrated in this way. But now, he said, the government favors the ceremonial and traditional games because they remind people of their history and help to create strong communities. Listening to him, I began to think that the festivals were some kind of government effort to resurrect “tradition” for state purposes. Later I discovered that it was the villages who had insisted on reviving their festivals — along with their other religious practices.
Northern Vietnam never had a cultural revolution, but in the period of “building socialism” from 1954 to 1986, the government curbed the old rites and banned the expensive feasts that often accompanied them. The elaborate family ceremonies, the cult of the village genie, and other spirit cults were variously denounced as wasteful, superstitious, and “feudalistic.” By the mid-seventies even ancestor worship seemed to be on the wane. But then came the failure of collectivization and the economic reforms. Villagers immediately began to put more time and resources into their family rituals, and when they had some money, they refurbished their dinhs and began to celebrate the festivals. According to anthropologists, the villagers were readjusting to the return of family farming and the need for voluntary cooperation among households. The family and village ceremonies helped this process along.
In the early 1990s, the government gave the historic dinhs landmark status and helped to restore them. It also gave its blessing to the festivals. “When we collectivized, we said the festival was feudalistic. Now we bring the festival back and call it traditional,” one villager told an American development expert with some irony. Apparently, in the wake of the economic disaster caused by its own “scientific” methods, the government had decided to relegitimate itself on traditional grounds.
Central Vietnam was the region hardest hit by the American war. Driving from Danang to Hue on my first trip back, I somehow expected to see the rusting bodies of tanks, the tin shacks of the refugee encampments, and scars from the bombing and shelling on the hillsides. But the wounds of war had disappeared from the countryside, and in Hue the citadel and the palaces and tombs of the Nguyen emperors had been so completely rebuilt and restored that it was hard to imagine that the sanguinary battle for the city in 1968 had ever occurred. Along Route 1, the landscape looked much the same as when I first saw it in early 1966 — except for one thing. Here and there by the roadside were cemeteries with enormous new family tombs freshly plastered and painted in pastel colors.
When I returned seven years later, Route 1 outside of Hue had become a bustling commercial highway lined with stores, repair shops, and houses. New houses had sprung up in the villages as well, some with highly decorated spirit screens in front of them. But the dinhs, even those the Ministry of Culture had designated as historical monuments, lay in various states of disrepair. “It's hard to raise money for the dinhs,” an elderly guardian of one of them told me. “People take care of their clan houses, but the dinhs are lost in these large communities.”
In central Vietnam — at least south of the seventeenth parallel — the villages do not have the cohesiveness they do in the north. Whether this is a recent or a historical development, they are today little more than administrative units. But all the people we talked with knew exactly how many clans and subclans there were in their villages, and, as the dinh guardian suggested, the most impressive buildings were the houses that people had built or repaired in honor of their ancestors. Walking around one village — as it happened the home village of Le Due Anh, the president of Vietnam in the early nineties — we found a splendid new house, completely unoccupied, that the members of a clan had built for the ancestral altar and for family gatherings on the death anniversaries of their forebears.
On a road just north of Hue, we came across a lineage hall: a shrine built in the 1990s by a branch of the imperial Nguyen family containing the family's ancestral tablets and a genealogical chart tracing the family back fifteen generations. Lineage halls were, I knew, a feature of traditional society, but I had never seen one in the sixties and seventies. Just opposite the Nguyen hall was another one, also of recent construction, this one honoring a branch of the Do family. The caretaker of this shrine, Mr. Do Van Le, showed us a book, privately printed in 1998, that traced the family back twelve generations to the ancestor who had come here from Thanh Hoa province in the north five hundred years ago. In 1977, by his account, a member of the family had found a record of the first seven generations compiled by a Confucian scholar in 1875. He had the text translated from Chinese characters and added information about the succeeding generations. Subsequently the family had appointed a board of editors to do the remaining work.
According to Mr. Le, most of the Do family had lived in this district until the American war, when there had been a partial diaspora. Some members now lived in Hue, some in Ho Chi Minh City, some in the United States. Mr. Le told us that his elder brother had joined the NLF and had been killed in the U Minh forest, but he spoke of the war as if it were ancient history. What pleased him, he said, was that as many as two hundred fifty members of the family came back for reunions, including a number from California.
Listening to Mr. Le, I remembered a family feast a colleague and I had stumbled upon in 1973 in a hamlet not far from Danang. The village had been razed in the sixties, but the rice was growing again, and people had put up thatched huts on the old brick foundations and terraces. On one of the terraces some forty people — old men, women, and children — were gathered around a long wooden table laden with dishes of fish, chicken, vegetables, and fruit. The elders at the gathering gave us to know that the village supported the revolution through the French and the American wars. They were telling us obliquely of their own exploits in the resistance when an ARVN major in dress uniform pulled up on a motorbike. The patriarch acknowledged his arrival and motioned him to a place at the table. The old men went right on talking about what they had done to help the NLF. The major was, after all, a member of the family.
That family feast had seemed to me a natural resumption of tradition — a simple exhalation of breath after all those years of war. But the appearance of clan houses and lineage halls in the 1990s seemed to require some explanation. Families such as the Do and the Nguyen had not simply renewed their local ties after a decade of collectivization. Rather, they had gone to considerable scholarly effort — one they had not made since the French arrived in the nineteenth century — to discover their roots in the distant past. In doing so, they had created clans that encompassed large numbers of people, some of them living as far away as California. But perhaps that was just it. Central Vietnamese families had been torn apart by two wars and geographically dispersed. The effort to put them back together was so great as to seem artificial, but it was proportionate to the trauma of the deaths and the separations.
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, a
nd 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 t
he 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.
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