The history of Buddhism in Vietnam

++ Buddhism

The Buddha was born Siddhartha Gautama to a wealthy family sometime during the sixth century BC in present-day Nepal. At an early age he renounced his life of luxury to seek the ultimate deliverance from worldly suffering and strive to reach nirvana, an indefinable, blissful state. After several years Siddhartha attained enlightenment while sitting under a bodhi tree, and then devoted the rest of his life to teaching the Middle Way that leads to nirvana. The Buddha preached that existence is a cycle of perpetual reincarnation in which actions in one life determine one’s position in the next, but that it is possible to break free by following certain precepts, central to which are non-violence and compassion. The Buddha’s doctrine was based on the Four Noble Truths: existence is suffering; suffering is caused by desire; suffering ends with the extinction of desire; the way to end suffering is to follow the eightfold path of right understanding, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration.

++ The history of Buddhism in Vietnam

It’s estimated that up to two-thirds of the Vietnamese population consider themselves Buddhist. The vast majority are followers of the Mahayana school which was introduced to northern Vietnam via China in the second century AD. Within this, most Vietnamese Buddhists claim allegiance to the Pure Land sect (Tinh Do), which venerates A Di Da or Amitabha Buddha above all others, while the meditational Zen sect (Thien) has a moderate following, predominantly in northern Vietnam.

In fact Buddhism first arrived in southern Vietnam nearly one hundred years earlier as Theravada, or the "Lesser Vehicle", following Indian trade routes through Burma and Thailand. Theravada is an ascetical form of the faith based on the individual pursuit of perfection and enlightenment, which failed to find favour beyond the Khmer communities of the Mekong, where it still claims about one million followers. One of the salient features of Mahayana Buddhism, in contrast, is the belief that intermediaries, bodhisattvas, have chosen to forgo nirvana to work for the salvation of all humanity, and it was this that enabled Mahayana to adapt to a Vietnamese context by incorporating local gods and spirits into its array of bodhisattvas. The best-known bodhisattva is Avalokitesvara, usually worshipped in Vietnam as Quan Am, the Goddess of Mercy. Mahayana Buddhism spread through northern Vietnam until it became the official state religion after the country regained its independence from China in the tenth century. The Ly kings (1009–1225), in particular, were devout Buddhists who sponsored hundreds of pagodas, prompting a flowering of the arts, and established a hierarchy of scholar-monks as advisers to the court. Great landowning monasteries came into being and Buddhist doctrine was incorporated into the civil service examinations along with Confucian and Taoist texts as part of the "triple world-view", Tam Giao. At the same time it became apparent that Buddhism was unable to provide the unifying ideology required by a highly centralized state constantly fighting for its survival. Consequently, by the mid-fourteenth century Buddhism had lost its political and economic influence, and, when the Later Le Dynasty came to power in 1428, Confucianism finally eclipsed it as the dominant national philosophy.

But by then Buddhism was too deeply rooted, particularly in the folk religion of the countryside, to lose its influence completely. It enjoyed further brief periods of royal patronage, notably during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when new pagodas were built and old ones repaired. To many people it still offered a spiritual element lacking in Confucian doctrine, and during the colonial era Vietnamese intellectuals turned to Buddhism in search of a national identity. Since then the Buddhist community has been a focus of dissent, not least in the 1960s when images of self-immolating Buddhist monks focused world attention on the excesses of South Vietnam’s Catholic President Diem. At the time, protesting Buddhists were accused of being pro-Communist, although their standpoint was essentially neutral. In the event they experienced even greater repression after reunification when pagodas were closed, and monks and nuns were sent to re-education camps.

The situation has eased considerably in recent years, and pagodas affiliated to the officially recognized Vietnam Buddhist Sangha (VBS) have been able to resume their social and educational programmes to a certain extent. Many pagodas, now bustling with life again, have been renovated after years of neglect. Nevertheless, the government continues to exert control over the VBS, and Buddhist leaders have persisted in their denunciations of the regime, campaigning for human rights and causing the government acute embarrassment as it seeks international approval. In particular, the authorities refuse to recognize the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV), the main pre-1975 Buddhist organization. According to international human rights organizations, its leaders are regularly placed under "house arrest" with no official charges against them.