Cao Dai, Vietnam Cao Dailism

Social upheaval coupled with an injection of Western thinking in the early twentieth century gave birth to Vietnam’s two indigenous religious sects, Cao Dai and Hoa Hao. Of the two, Cao Dai claims more adherents, with an estimated following of around two million in south Vietnam, plus a few thousand among overseas Vietnamese in America, Canada and Britain. The sect’s headquarters, the Holy See, resides in a flamboyant cathedral at Tay Ninh, where they also maintain a school, agricultural co-operative and hospital. Vietnam’s most northerly Cao Dai congregation worships in Hué.

The religion of Cao Dai (meaning "high place") was revealed by the "Supreme Being" to a middle-aged civil servant working in Phu Quoc, called Ngo Van Chieu, during several trances over a period of years from 1919 to 1925. What Chieu preached to his followers was essentially a distillation of Vietnam’s religious heritage: elements of Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist thought, intermixed with ancestor worship, Christianity and Islam. According to Cao Dai beliefs, all religions are different manifestations of one meta-religion, Cao Dai; in the past, this took on whatever form most suited the prevailing human need, but during the twentieth century could finally be presented in its unity. Thus the Supreme Being, who revealed himself in 1925, has had two earlier manifestations, always in human guise: the first in the sixth century BC, appearing as various figures from Buddhism, Taoism and Christianity among many other saints and sages; the second as Sakyamuni, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Mohammed and Lao-tzu. In the third manifestation the Supreme Being has revealed himself through his divine light, symbolized as an all-seeing Eye on a sky-blue, star-spangled globe.

Cao Dai doctrine preaches respect for all its constituent religions and holds that individual desires should be subordinate to the common interest. Adherents seek to escape from the cycle of reincarnation by following the five prohibitions: no violence, theft or lying – nor indulgence in alcohol or sexual activity; priests are expected to be completely vegetarian though others need only eschew meat on certain days of the lunar month. The Cao Dai hierarchy is modelled on that of the Catholic Church, and divides into nine ranks, of which the pope is the highest. Officials are grouped into three branches, identifiable by the colour of their ceremonial robes: the Confucian branch dresses in red, Buddhist in saffron and Taoist in blue. Otherwise practitioners wear white as a symbol of purity, and because it contains every colour.

The rituals of Cao Dai are a complex mixture of Buddhist and Taoist rites, including meditation and seances. Prayers take place four times a day in the temples (6am, noon, 6pm and midnight) though ordinary members are only required to attend on four days per month and otherwise can pray at home. Note that shoes should always be removed when entering a Cao Dai temple or mansion. At the start of the thirty-minute-long ceremony, worshippers file into the temple in three columns, women on the left, men in the middle and on the right; they then kneel and bow three times – to the Supreme Being, to the earth and to mankind. Cao Dai’s most important ceremony, a sort of feast day for the Supreme Being, takes place on the ninth day of the first lunar month; other special observances are the day of Taoism (fifteenth day of the second month), Buddha’s birthday (fifteenth of the fourth lunar month), the day of Confucius (twenty-eighth of the eighth lunar month) and Christmas Day.

The religion of Cao Dai is further enlivened with a panoply of saints, encompassing the great and the good of many countries and cultures: Victor Hugo, Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lenin, Winston Churchill, Louis Pasteur and Sun Yat Sen, alongside home-grown heroes such as Tran Hung Dao and Le Loi. These characters fulfil a variety of roles from prophet to bodhisattva and even spirit medium, through which followers communicate with the Supreme Being. Contact can occur by means of a ouija board, messages left in sealed envelopes or through human mediums – who enter a trance and write using a planchette (a pencil secured to a wooden board on castors, on which the medium rests his hand, sometimes known as a corbeille à bec). Apparently, adherents of Cao Dai once appointed an official to take down the further works of Victor Hugo by dictation from his spirit.

The ideology, which had widespread appeal, attracted converts in their hundreds of thousands in the Mekong Delta, but only gained official recognition from the French colonial authorities in 1926. Over the next decade the Holy See developed into a semi-autonomous state wielding considerable political power and backed by a paramilitary wing which mustered around fifty thousand men in the mid-1950s. Although originally nationalist, Cao Dai followers clashed with Communist troops in a local power struggle, and the sect ended up opposing both the North Vietnamese and President Diem’s pro-Catholic regime. Diem moved quickly to dismantle the army when he came to power and exiled its leaders; then after 1975 the Communists purged the religious body, closing down Cao Dai temples and schools, and sending priests for re-education. However, Cao Dai survived as a religion and has gained some new adherents since 1990 when its temples and mansions, approximately four hundred in all, were allowed to re-open, albeit under strict control.