Apocalypse Now? Hoa Hao Buddhism Emerging from the Shadows of War
Philip Taylor - Anthropology, The University of Western Australia
Hoa Hao Buddhism, founded in the late French colonial era
is, like the other religions of ethnic Vietnamese in the Mekong delta, an
eclectic and creative approach to imagining existence in this newly settled
region. This paper investigates the context in which this faith evolved and
explores its main characteristics. These include its settler colonialist
worldview, synthesis of diverse cultural currents, universalist outlook and
construction of a moral community. It concludes by exploring the religion’s
contemporary relevance, uneasy relationship with the state and the perceived
challenges faced as the integration of the delta into broader economic and
cultural structures continues.
An enduring image of religious syncretism in Southeast Asia
was provided by early twentieth century ethnographer and Catholic missionary
Father Leopold Cadiere, who characterised religious observances among the
ethnic Vietnamese as like a jungle: prolific, dense and entangled. He also drew
on imagery from geology to describe the influences in terms of manifold layers
and deposits (Cadiere 1989[1944]:1). His naturalistic metaphors characterise
Vietnamese religion as marked by rich diversity and plurality rather than
orthodoxy, purity and order. A problem with his analysis is that his analogies
are ahistorical, as if these traits are ‘endemic’. And despite his appreciation
of the wealth of Vietnamese religious life, by construing his subject matter as
natural, Cadiere belittled the impact of the institutionalised and textual
‘great traditions’, such as Buddhism. With respect to this latter, Cadiere
applied his naturalistic schema more rigidly, considering Buddhism to be a
spring from which Vietnamese draw only for the most part in passing (Cadiere
1989[1944]:6).
Cadiere’s assertion that there are no ‘real’ Buddhists among
the ethnic Vietnamese illustrates the need to explore his ethnography itself as
‘situated knowledge’ (Haraway 1988). His sixty-two years of residence in the
country gave him unparalleled insights into popular practices, yet his twin
vocations as a colonial era orientalist scholar and missionary profoundly
shaped his idiosyncratic and exclusionary delineation of the religious field
(Mabbett 1989). Other commentators writing at other times have drawn different
lines around religious practice, delineating the ‘soul’ (hon) or ‘essence’ (ban
sac) of Vietnamese culture as fragile and contrasting it with ‘external’
(ngoai) influences construed as ‘incompatible’ ([khong thich hop) or even
hostile. Although studies of Vietnamese religion make almost obligatory
reference to syncretism and borrowing in one form or another, the tendency to
essentialise and to draw boundaries has indeed been powerful. Images of
division, conflict and mutual incomprehension certainly became more marked as
religion along with all other aspects of life got sucked into the vortex of
military and political strife that spiralled through Indochina in the late
twentieth century. In consequence, for a long time the potential for
appreciation of the more inclusive aspects of Vietnamese religion has seemed
bleak. Rather, religion became associated with the manoeuvres of militarised
‘sects’, manipulation by the state or other political parties, assassinations,
mass protest movements, fiery immolations, religious persecution, imprisonment,
petitions and international human rights appeals.
Apparently exemplifying these exclusivist and conflict-prone
tendencies is the Hoa Hao Buddhist religion (Phat Giao Hoa Hao), most of whose
adherents live in the Mekong delta in the South of Vietnam. One of the less
well-known movements of the colonial and postcolonial era, the Hoa Hao
Buddhists have received only cursory anthropological attention. Their movement
features most prominently in the writings of police agents, journalists,
historians and political scientists interested in the social divisions and
political dimensions of a society embroiled in revolution and war. In these
accounts the Hoa Hao ideology appears as an agonistic creed, forged out of a
clash of worlds. Social scientists have declared its ‘traditionalist’
orientation alien to Europeans and Vietnam’s communists alike. Considered a
traditional reflex, a substitute, a void-filling response to cultural
destruction or as a refiige from political activism, the Hoa Hao is a religion
that diagnoses not fluid borrowing but traumatised rigidity, conflict between
worlds, the embrace of the apocalypse, the impossibility of peaceable solutions
and the futility of worldly action.
Despite the consistency of these accounts and given the
movement towards normalisation and regional integration in Vietnam one is led
to ask whether the notion of irreducible difference does not indeed diagnose an
unduly rigid and pessimistic orientation towards intercultural relationships on
the part of some analysts. To better comprehend the Hoa Hao, one must go beyond
the conflictual history to which these sources attest, and the epistemological
priorities it has thrown up. This has become possible due to improved
opportunities for ‘outsiders’, be they foreign tourists, urban pilgrims, or
domestic tourists and traders, to travel in the region and meet and talk with
people who adhere to the Hoa Hao faith. Believers too have travelled far and
wide and have new opportunities to relay their ideas, including Internet sites
that describe the history and philosophy of the faith and advocate greater
religious freedoms for Vietnam. My own relatively easy communication with
followers of the faith in markets, ports, at festivals and in homes when
travelling in Vietnam, as well as contacts made via the Internet and through
e-mail communications have led me to a perspective on the religion that
contrasts with that found in the written record. Some of the most noteworthy
aspects include the religion’s practices of assimilating, communicating with
and borrowing from other creeds as well as its social activism and engagement
in political and economic activity.
While these dimensions represent to some extent responses to
new circumstances, it is clear that they have strong antecedents, which have
been neglected in studies of the religion. This essay attempts to redress this,
re-interpreting the historical record and incorporating my own ethnographic
description. Placing the religion in the context of the deeper history of the
colonisation of an ecologically and culturally distinctive region helps to
explain the religion’s syncretistic elements, the significance of universalism
and the apocalyptic dimension, the religion’s integration with parallel
normative projects and its leaders’ bids for power. Refining and broadening the
definition of this religion in this way also helps better answer the question:
how will this religion find a place for itself in the contemporary political
system and respond to the challenge posed by the Mekong delta’s further
economic and cultural integration?
Recasting the Hoa Hao in history
The Hoa Hao religion was founded in 1939 late in the French
colonial period. In the first decade of the religion’s existence, the Japanese
occupied Indochina, national independence was declared, the French re-invaded,
anti-colonial war broke out and the US entered the melee. In 1947 Huynh Phu So,
the religion’s founder was reportedly assassinated and his followers became
embroiled in Vietnam’s bitter wars of decolonisation. The early scholarship on
the Hoa Hao, articulated in these fraught militarised conditions, not
surprisingly situated it in the context of Vietnam’s clash with ‘the West’.
Initially the tendency was to locate the movement at the historic fault line of
traditional peasant and colonial-capitalist formations. Theorists in the
Durkheimian tradition such as Wolf (1969) and McAlister and Mus (1970:84)
characterised the religion as a traditionalist response to the disintegration
of Mekong delta society under French colonialism and its regime of export
agriculture. The later saw the religion as a ‘substitutive’ movement,
attempting to achieve the reintegration of Vietnam’s collectivist rural order,
which was fractured by colonialism, providing new cultural moorings to replace
those destroyed during the colonial period.
On the other hand, Vietnam’s Communist leaders and
theorists, who considered themselves as modernists, nationalists and liberators
of the nation from French rule, have regarded the Hoa Hao as a ‘feudalistic’
(phong kieri) and ‘superstitious’ (me tin) hangover, even if ultimately
amenable to being integrated into the socialist state under the leadership of
the Communist Party. As the region of Indochina most extensively made over and
exploited by capitalism’s impact, the delta theoretically should have been
fertile ground for the rise of the self-identified ‘proletarian’ communist
movement. Nevertheless, it was the ‘feudalistic’ Hoa Hao religion that thrived
in the capitalist social relations, political rivalry and cultural exchanges in
this region in the late French and early post-colonial period. Social movements
such as the Hoa Hao that were shaped by this intense encounter might well have
been expected to become something of a driving political force of the postcolonial
era. Yet it was Vietnam’s Communist Party that eventually came to power and in
doing so dealt to the Hoa Hao religion a severe blow.
These perspectives, which place great weight on the
historical disjunctive of French colonialism, do not do justice to the
historical reality in the southern regions of the country. Indeed agrarian
capitalism was particularly intense in that region. Prior to the French,
however, the newly settled frontier region of the Mekong delta did not match
the image of ‘traditional’ Vietnam that theorists evoke to draw such contrasts.
The narrative of catastrophic confrontation, of a ‘traditional’ society
challenged by ‘modernity’, is markedly Eurocentric. Nevertheless it has also
been a feature of nationalist historiography, which has drawn heterodox places,
experiences and meanings together to constitute the nation as a homogeneous
subject of history (Taylor 2001). Countering this tendency, Hy Van Luong (1992)
has shown that the nation’s communist movement owes much to the socio-cultural
system pertaining in the centre and north of the country. Those who have delved
into the genealogy of the Hoa Hao religion see it in a similar way as a local
subculture reflecting a particular regional history (Hue Tam Ho Tai 1983;
Brocheux 1995).
Hue Tam Ho Tai’s detailed portrait of this religion makes
sense of it in terms of the Mekong delta’s distinctive past as a frontier
region. She situates the Hoa Hao within the Buu Son Ky Huong tradition, a loose
collection of apocalyptic folk sects which she interprets as a peasant response
to the vicissitudes of life in a remote and newly settled region (Hue Tam Ho
Tai 1983). According to Hue Tam Ho Tai, this religious tradition’s millenarian
doctrine reflected the difficult ecological conditions of the great natural
frontier of the delta. Emerging during the catastrophic cholera epidemic of the
1840s, its apocalyptic message was a response to instability and privation.
Nguyen Van Hau (1970) too describes the Buu Son Ky Huong faith as a pioneering
tradition. Originating at the periphery of Vietnamese court influence and
supposedly shunned by the imperial elite, the apostles of the faith are
portrayed as an authentic grassroots tradition. On the margins of the
Sino-Vietnamese world and absorbing influences from non-Vietnamese faiths and
ethnic groups, the Buu Son ICy Huong religion was seen as a distinctive local
‘subculture’ (Brocheux 1995:189). These theorists situate Hoa Hao Buddhism in an
older local tradition, exploring continuities in the pre and post-colonial era.
In Hue Tam Ho Tai’s view, the Buu Son Ky Huong worldview emerged out of a
catastrophic confrontation with nature, pronounced social unrest and cultural
‘anomie’. Almost 100 years later, when Master Huynh Phu So founded Hoa Hao
Buddhism, it was again during calamitous change, the traumatic dislocations of
the colonial era, which saw this religious tradition remerge. In other words,
the revival of religious millenarianism was a pre-pattemed localised response
to the social rifts and cultural crisis induced by French colonialism.
It is vital, however, to see the religion not only as a
response to crisis but also as a vehicle for profound social and cultural
change. One cannot neglect that these early religious communities were
themselves agents of such social and political changes as the radical
displacement of the Khmer occupants of the delta by the Vietnamese state. The
political context for the emergence of this faith was the Vietnamese court’s
annexation of Khmer lands, demarcation of the new border and the Vietnamese
occupation of Cambodia (Chandler 1996). The Buu Son Ky Huong religion emerged
during a movement of ethnic Vietnamese settlers into the area, who displaced
the Khmer and provoked conflicts to the extent that the king had to issue often
tokenistic edicts that they not infringe on Khmer land (Hue Tam Ho Tai 1983).
Although the Vietnamese may have been a minority, during this time the Court
actively assimilated groups such as the Chinese and Khmer and established
Vietnamese as the dominant ethnicity in southern Vietnam (Choi Byung Wook
1999). The critical social ‘amorphousness’ and cultural ‘anomie’ attributed to
the western stretches of the delta of the mid-nineteenth century, are in effect
retrospective projections onto the region of the values of mainstream
Vietnamese culture, whose supposed ‘deficit’ allow theorists to anticipate the
emergence of a ‘restorative’ creed.
Although portrayed as a peripheral, grassroots cultural
alternative to imperial orthodoxy, the Buu Son Ky Huong faith was closely
implicated in the Vietnamese court’s colonialist venture of the mid-nineteenth
century. Several details in Hue Tam Ho Tai’s account call into question this
religious tradition’s peripheral standing vis-a-vis the culture of the
Vietnamese court. The founder, the Buddha Master of the Western Peace (Phat Tay
An), was the son of a Vietnamese canton chief. He became a labour recruiter for
the state in its campaign to settle the Mekong. He used amulets magically to
counter suspected Chinese saboteurs, who were believed to have planted evil
spells in the region to the detriment of the Vietnamese. His successor
commanded an army unit that put down a Khmer uprising against Vietnamese rule
(Hue Tam Ho Tai 1983:15). The Buu Son Ky Huong’s emphasis on indebtedness to
country and to compatriots resonated with the Vietnamese court’s
contemporaneous efforts to ‘Vietnamise’ this ethnically heterogeneous region
(Choi Byung Wook 1999). This possibly explains why one of the first people
claiming to be an avatar of the Buddha Master was a local man who also claimed
that in spite of being Cambodian he was really Vietnamese in spirit (Hue Tam Ho
Tai 1983: 41).
The Buu Son Ky Huong’s apocalyptic vision, such as the
prophesised appearance of the Future Buddha, and the election of people who
gathered at the Dragon Flower (Long Hoa) festival to a state of blessedness,
may indeed be linked to the influence of culturally marginal doctrines like
Amidism in this far-flung region of the country (Hue Tam Ho Tai 1983; Do My
Thien 1995). Yet it can also be seen in terms of the court’s vigorous efforts
to colonise Khmer lands. The pioneering settlements, which the founders of the
Buu Son Ky Huong religion construed as a future Buddhist paradise, were opened
with court assistance. The spiritual allure of imminent salvation was
materially backed by the provision of capital outlays such as seeds, tools and
cash advances, which was possible because the court gave tax reductions, and
access to land titles for recruiters who were able to bring in new settlers and
open new land (Hue Tam Ho Tai 1983).
In many ways French colonialism can be seen as continuous
with, if not intensifying an older process of Vietnamese settler colonialism.
In the French era, the ethnic Vietnamese settlement of the delta accelerated
dramatically. Many people left other regions of the country to settle the areas
of cultivable land opened by mechanised dredging. French colonisation enabled
the ethnic Vietnamese to consolidate their hold on both lands and positions at
the expense of the ethnic Khmer. Vietnamese cultural institutions such as
communal houses, language schools, newspapers, associations and religious
organisations, expanded in influence during the French colonial period
(Brocheux 1995:136).
The Hoa Hao religion was a significant force for
consolidating the hold of Vietnamese culture in the delta. Chinese villagers
who met the founder of the faith when he travelled though their village on his
way to school told me the Master’s following was chiefly among the ethnic
Vietnamese. His teachings, which were written in a poetic style of Vietnamese,
made reference to the mythic origin figures of the Vietnamese people. The
ethnic Khmer and Cham who have a presence in the Mekong delta also see the Hoa
Hao as an ethnic
Vietnamese tradition. Khmer residents in the western delta
told me that they were displaced from their lands by the Hoa Hao in 1945 during
that group’s struggle to attain dominance over the communists in the struggle
for national independence. Certainly, when the Hoa Hao took part in the
anti-colonial struggle, they did so in the name of a tradition of Vietnamese
national sovereignty. The Hoa Hao venerate patriotic Vietnamese historical figures
such as the anti-colonial hero Nguyen Trung True and indeed two of the debts of
gratitude enjoined upon Hoa Hao Buddhist believers are to one’s country and to
compatriots. Hoa Hao followers have told me that the black silk pyjamas worn by
the faithful are a symbol of the Vietnamese farmer and many wear their hair
long in what they say is the traditional Vietnamese style.
The Hoa Hao Buddhist religion emerged in the French period,
part of a longer-term process of colonisation of the Mekong delta. It is of
limited value to view it as an attempted restoration of the ‘status quo’ or
alternatively, as an ‘outmoded’ feudal legacy. The Hoa Hao religion, like
Communism and the Cao Dai faith, is a project of settler colonialists for whom
the French colonial interregnum in Indochina only added another layer to an
ongoing process of colonial political domination and of cultural assimilation
whose principal local beneficiaries have been the ethnic Vietnamese. Hue Tam Ho
Tai is undoubtedly right in tracing the origins of the Hoa Hao religion to
older structures, yet I would argue that one can find in this ‘tradition’ a
more dynamic and politically engaged history. Hoa Hao Buddhism is the religious
expression of an ethnic Vietnamese experience of pioneering, land reclamation,
physical and cultural transformation of the landscape, consolidation of state
rule and assimilation of other groups into the Vietnamese cultural world.
Redrawing the geographical context
Most accounts of Hoa Hao Buddhism locate the religion in a
‘remote’ geographical setting, employing images that subtly reinforce arguments
made about the peripheral, ‘traditional’ or ‘otherworldly’ character of the
religion. One of the pervasive tropes of the Mekong delta is of a closed
society, its villages ‘small worlds’ (Hendry 1964), people’s minds bounded not
by the bamboo hedges of the Red River delta settlements but by relatively
restricted opportunities for movement and communication due to low
technological capacity. Although ethnographers such as Hickey (1964), Rambo
(1973) and Cummings (1977) have indicated the society of the Mekong to be open
and loosely structured, even a sympathetic commentator such as Hue Tam Ho Tai
refers to the Buu Son Ky Huong religion as the product of a closed, isolated
peasant world. The founder of the religion, Master Huynh Phu So is depicted as
a villager at heart and his followers simple farmers (Hue Tam Ho Tai 1983).
These days, it is common for the residents of Vietnam’s urban areas to
romanticise about the Mekong delta as a place of nature where traditions have
remained largely unchanged (Taylor 2001). Many urban Vietnamese also think of
the Mekong delta as remote, as Vietnam’s ‘Wild West’. The religious tradition
out of which the Hoa Hao religion grew is sometimes considered an adaptation to
a demanding environment, of hills with names like ‘Forbidden Mountain’ (Nui
Cam), jungles, and nature considered largely as an obstacle. In this vein, Hue
Tam Ho Tai refers to the Seven Mountains (That Son) region as ‘inhospitable’
and ‘notoriously wild’ (Hue Tam Ho Tai 1983: 12). The Buu Son Ky Huong faith is
described as having been a cultural expression of communities that were
relatively cut off from wider social and cultural movements. The conception of
this landscape as ‘remote’ supports the common depiction of the Hoa Hao
religion as one of inwardness or otherworldliness.
If one switches the features used to sketch a backdrop for
the emergence of the religion, from the handful of limestone outcrops to the
more ubiquitous waterways of the region, one instantly gets a vastly different
image. Phu Tan (formerly Hoa Hao) village, birthplace of the religion’s
founder, lies on the banks of the Mekong River, one of mainland Southeast
Asia’s major communications routes. Most Hoa Hao followers live along this and
other waterways, some of which run right by the Seven Mountains. To the south,
connected by a canal built early in the nineteenth century is the seaport of Ha
Tien, since the 1700s a regional centre for commerce, learning and cultural exchanges.
The inhabitants of the area have long sailed, poled and oared their way along
the delta’s vast network of channels, which, in the pre-French era linked them
to Southeast Asia’s expanding markets. For centuries their home has been an
important crossroads on a major trade and passenger route between Saigon, Phnom
Penh and other Mekong River ports. In 1939, when the Master promulgated the
faith, his home and adjacent riverside settlements were bustling service
centres. Hoa Hao village was located on a motorised passenger launch route to
Saigon, and beside an important cross-river ferry. Markets and industrial
centres were found both upstream and downstream and ships on the way to
Cambodia frequently stopped over in adjacent river ports like Tan Chau. To this
day, the Hoa Hao are great travellers and traders and virtually all make a life
from a river which is at the same time a home, a resource and a transport
artery connecting their homes with distant locales.
The geographical quality of marginality that is
conventionally attributed to this religion together with narratives of its
history as catastrophic, creates an inescapable sense of foreboding for those
who would contemplate its future, especially given the vogue to characterise
contemporary reality as globalised and ever-changing. Yet one must be wary of
the stereotypes through which it has been portrayed. Indeed most Hoa Hao adepts
reside in a rural region, but one that has long been differentiated, changing,
connected and integrated with broader structures. It is also a region of
relative plenty, whereas depictions of the landscape as harsh have led to a
tendency to regard episodes of conflict and struggle in the Hoa Hao’s history
as typical of its relationship to the environment and other groups. Such views,
albeit only partially true, may lead some to conclude that the time for such a
religious ‘subculture’ may be past, that it is dysfunctional in a time of peace
and possibly unlikely to survive in a truly national community (Hue Tam Ho Tai
1983:172) or a globalised world. In contrast to such a bleak scenario, it is
impossible to overlook the syncretic aspects of the religion as well as its
engaged dimension and the worldly orientation of its followers.
Syncretism
The Hoa Hao Buddhist faith has often suffered in comparison
with the Cao Dai religion, which, with its eclectic range of saints, teachings
and rites drawn from many religious traditions and its baroque taste in
architecture, is generally considered one of the most ambitiously syncretic religions
in Vietnam (Huynh Ngoc Trang 1992). This comparison has been pursued to the
extent of regarding the Hoa Hao as ‘Calvinist’ or ‘Protestant’
Buddhists: exemplified by modesty in living, simplicity of
ritual, a largely privatistic orientation and no priesthood (Popkin 1979:202;
Wolf 1969:194). Socially, the religion is portrayed as an austere sect
positioning itself nationalistically, in contrast with foreign interference,
providing a critique of social corruption and countering religious decadence. Add
its much-noted militaristic history, an unswerving dedication to its founder
and singleminded antipathy to communism and the fundamentalist tag is virtually
unshakeable.
Portrayed in such terms, the Hoa Hao religion seems an
unlikely candidate for investigating the question of religious syncretism. Take
for instance the household focus of the religion and the simplicity of the
altar. These are often adduced as evidence that Hoa Hao Buddhism is a form of
‘fundamental Buddhism’ (Keyes 1977:218). However, the impulse may have been not
to strip down Buddhism but indeed to augment it. One Hoa Hao adept told me that
the household focus of the religion had been borrowed from Cambodian Theravada
Buddhism. Whereas typically among the Vietnamese, the Mahayana monastic
tradition involves life-long vows—one leaves one’s family (xuat gia) for the
Sangha permanently—the Theravada tradition of the Khmer requires that men
ideally spend a period of time as a monk before proceeding to life as a
householder. For its part, Hoa Hao religion combines the two kinds of Buddhism
into one orientation: prescribing that all should strive to become monks for
life but doing so at home and supporting themselves rather than turning into a
caste of specialists permanently dependent on the community.
From this perspective, the household orientation is less the
radical simplification of a religious tradition than a borrowing from another
tradition, that of the neighbouring ethnic Khmer. The emphasis on simplicity
can also be attributed to influences from Chinese popular religion, Zen and
Pure Land Buddhism, described by Hue Tam Ho Tai (1983) and Woodside (1976)
among others. In addition, the Hoa Hao religion represents an interesting case
study in the Islamicisation of Buddhism. Huynh Phu So’s imprecations against
idolatry are commonly linked to his puritanism and doctrinal purging of
superstitious or erroneous elements from the Buddhist faith (Hue Tam Ho Tai
1983:148). For their part, Hoa Hao adherents have told me that the proscription
on displaying Buddha statues on the household altar is borrowed from Islam’s
proscription on the worship of images. For these reasons too they say, the Hoa
Hao Buddhist flag bears no pictures.
This influence owes much to the presence of a significant
Islamic community in the local area. Islam was brought to the Mekong three
hundred years or so ago by Malay and Javanese traders. A large community of
ethnic Cham converts to Islam live in close proximity to Hoa Hao village. The
surrounding area is full of mosques and its residents number many devout
Muslims. Huynh Phu So, the founder of the Hoa Hao went to school in Tan Chau,
in a heavily Muslim area. This was a thriving trading and manufacturing centre
where local Muslims engaged in the manufacture and trade of textiles. They were
and still are a relatively well-travelled, multi-lingual community, connected
to Malaysia, Java and other parts of Islamic Southeast Asia, including Muslim
settlements in Cambodia, through trade, familial and religious links.
The influences from Islam are numerous, as evident in the
Hoa Hao’s religious practices, doctrine and architecture. One of the most
evident forms of this is the approach to prayer. Hoa Hao followers say that
like Muslims but unlike other Buddhists, they orient themselves in prayer in
relation to a fixed point. Believers recall the Master’s enjoiner, ‘When the
time of worship comes, if we are away from home, let us turn westwards to pray
to Buddha (because the original land of Buddhism is India, West of South
Vietnam).’ Preaching houses (nha giang dad), another innovation explicitly
linked to Islam, were formerly used to call people to prayers three times a
day. Although their use was banned by the new regime in 1975 they were also
used to chant the Sam Giang, the poetic holy scriptures composed by the master,
as well as to explicate the meaning of his religious and social philosophy.
These towers, still standing, are two or three storied structures with a small
room for preaching at the base and speakers mounted on the top. Hoa Hao
followers sometimes refer to the structures as ‘minarets’. They have no
residential quarters, unlike the pagodas of the Mahayana and Theravada
Buddhists of the region. A number of the towers, such as the one located by the
Mekong River in Tan Chau town, have ornate sculpted decorations in an Islamic
style and domed roofs. Smaller and simpler versions of these are located in
every hamlet where the Hoa Hao live, just as in the adjacent Cham settlements
one finds small mosques in every residential cluster.
In the mix of influences that have shaped the Hoa Hao
worldview one needs to consider not only ‘Oriental’ elements such as Theravada
and Pure Land Buddhism or Islam, but also elements often contrasted to the
‘traditional’ elements of the religion, which are merely more recent additions
such as modernism, nationalism and humanism. While Huynh Phu So is regarded by
most commentators as a traditionalist, and indeed many of his teachings support
such an interpretation, the Master also had a well-defined modernising vision,
evident, for example in his imprecation against superstition, ‘Superstition is
a sin conjured by our lack of logical reasoning. Without logical reason, we
cannot distinguish between right and wrong. Partaking and surrounding ourselves
with superstitious beliefs, we blind ourselves from the natural reality of
life.’ Other modernist innovations that his followers have pointed out include
the Master’s suggestions to direct funds away from pagoda building into
community works, his simplification of rites, his call to limit the amount
spent on commemorative festivities and his exhortation to engage in
self-improvement. In a like way, although the religion is sometimes
characterised as ‘anti-Western’, it has indeed been open to a range of different
influences, from Marxism (Brocheux 1995:189) to US-style modernisation
ideology. Similarly, the Master’s exhortation to fight enemy invaders is
regarded by some followers as a reaction against French uses of religion as
‘exoticism’, his engaged metaphysics an innovative rejection of colonial
neo-traditionalist ideology. These different ideological strands were not
adhered to in exclusion of others but synthesised in an original way. For
example, the combination of nationalist sentiments with the cult of heroes, the
concept of a supreme being and US civic religion is found in this statement
made by a contributor to a Hoa Hao Buddhist journal in the USA on the prospects
for the democratisation of Vietnam:
I am praying to a higher power and to the sacred soul of the
land, to the souls of heroes who have fallen on behalf of their beliefs and for
the defence of the nation, so that they can prod and move and defeat this wave
of atheism which is currently washing over Vietnam so that our people can welcome
the light of Freedom and Democracy. (Nguyen Huynh Mai 2000: 170)
Universal aspirations
As localities are ‘produced’ increasingly by reference to
global flows, processes and images, and because these latter are articulated
variably through localities (Appadurai 1995), one might understand the process
of‘localisation’ as a particularly important variety of syncretism. On the
other hand, Tsing has questioned whether ‘globalisation’ should indeed be
apprehended in the singular or if globalism is not an ideology privileging the
perspective of just a few localities (Tsing 2000). In the interests of
exploring globalism in the plural, it is worth touching briefly on one of the
distinctive features of the Mekong delta’s settler colonialist religions and
ideologies: their appeals to universalism and global validity. The Hoa Hao and
Cao Dai faiths as well as the different varieties of Marxism that have had a
presence in the delta, have all embraced the breaking down of particularities:
be they ethnic groups, religions, nations or languages. All have consciously
sought to integrate parallel trends, resolve conflicting interpretations and
achieve general validity. Characteristic of ‘ideologies that promise no less
than cosmic renewal and the total and lasting transformation of man, society
and nature’, the Buu Son Ky Huong tradition’s message of universal salvation is
regarded by Hue Tam Ho Tai as having been a response to socio-cultural crisis
in an amorphous undifferentiated rural society (Hue Tam Ho Tai 1983:10). This interpretation
underscores her view of the religion as the local product of a peasant society.
To take a very different tack, the striking vein of universalism in the Hoa Hao
mindset can be seen as the result of several factors quite at odds with a construction
of the Hoa Hao as a merely local phenomenon. Briefly these include:
1.The political philosophy of the Vietnamese state, which
saw itself as a centre of the world.
2.Settler colonialists’ strategic appeals to protection by
this centre.
3.The impact of Islam and varieties of Buddhism,
Confucianism and Taoism, along with Catholicism, Humanism and other
transcendental philosophies.
4.The influence of French colonial, Soviet, Maoist and US
imperialist visions.
5.The requirement of cross-cultural intelligibility thrown
up by the communicatively open society of the Mekong delta.
These influences have come together to fashion among Hoa Hao
Buddhists a powerful sense of their broader significance. Analytically this
means that it is of little value to maintain a distinction between ‘local’ and
‘global’ culture. The problem with seeing Hoa Hao as the localisation of a
‘world’ religion such as Buddhism is that central to the Hoa Hao faith is an
unswerving conception of their faith’s universality. Hoa Hao followers with
whom I have spoken position their home at the epicentre of world Buddhism, the
Buddha having re-incarnated as Huynh Phu So. Many believe that Hoa Hao Buddhism
spread from Vietnam to the rest of the world, following the Master’s extensive
overseas travels bringing peace and benefit to all. In each land he visited the
creed has been adapted to the local customs and is called by a different name.
Nevertheless all these local versions flow from the one source (nguon) the
Master’s birthplace in the Mekong delta. Like many of the creeds and religions
in the region, the Hoa Hao also work images of globes into their iconography:
an aesthetic expression of universalism reflecting an imagining of the spatial
condition as global. This symbol has a mnemonic function as one of the four
injunctions of the Hoa Hao faith is to recognise one’s debt to humanity. Yet it
is also a reminder to followers that the propagation of the Hoa Hao faith is
considered a sacred mission in order to reform mankind. This value is also
reinforced in the prescribed colour for the altar cloth and flag, which is
brown. As brown is considered the combination of all colours, it is used to
symbolise human harmony and the connectedness and interdependence of all
people.
The apocalypse and prospects for integration
Hoa Hao Buddhism is generally considered an apocalyptic
religion: believers are held to anticipate the impending destruction of the
world and seek refuge provided by faith. Hue
Tam Ho Tai describes this as an older complex, whose
quietism alternating with outbursts of millenarian violence was symptomatic of
an ‘ideological ecology of unrest’ (1983:viii). This illuminates the history of
violence in which the Hoa Hao have been involved. Yet one might sketch an
alternative image of the faith as neither a quiescent refuge nor a radical
rejection of the here and now, but as politically and normatively engaged with
transformational projects as significant and diverse as settler colonialism,
modernist reformism, nationalism, socialism and export capitalism.
The violent history of the Hoa Hao is sometimes depicted as
the way a subsistence- oriented society responded to the social dislocations
provoked by the commercialisation of agriculture. Yet to depict this religious
tradition as otherworldly or marginal ignores its inextricable association with
the Mekong delta’s rise as an economic powerhouse. The Hoa Hao are today some
of the most successful producers in the delta’s export economy. Members of the
religion have responded successfully to post-war shifts in the economy. To
imagine followers of the religion as being outside capitalist structures or as
culturally prone to resort to violence as a way of resolving their problems
neglects these profoundly worldly dimensions of the faith. Like the French
colonial state whose focus on export agriculture led to studies on the
attributes of the Vietnamese farmer (Gourou 1955), one of Master Huynh Phu So’s
concerns was how to incite farmers to self-improvement. His advice to farmers
(khuyen nong) was a standard topic of his proselytising tours. Now that the
Communist regime, like the French, is trying to extract bumper rice harvests
out of the Mekong delta, some authors in Vietnam have emphasised that religions
like the Hoa Hao can be a valuable adjunct to economic activity (Pham Bich Hop
1999).
Such authors portray the Hoa Hao at core as a religious
tradition of simple, industrious, agricultural workers. Yet the earliest
followers of the Hoa Hao were not just landless peasants impoverished by
capitalism but small holders and those working in transport, light industry and
trade. The leaders of the Hoa Hao faith were recruited from schoolteachers,
itinerant drivers and motor coach and river launch conductors, people on the
nodes of the most important communicative pathways of colonial society
(Brocheux 1995:129). Today, some of the most cosmopolitan people in the delta,
boat captains, traders, cafe owners and physicians, belong to this religion. I
have found members of the faith, like many residents of the Mekong delta, to
have wide horizons. They are informed about and engaged with current
developments, interested in news of the outside world, focused on social work,
improving the physical infrastructure of their locale and the building of a moral
community. Not uncritical of a world of commercial relations, many are also
critical of a climate of naked economism that reigns in their homeland,
stressing the role of religion as a counterweight. Several members of the
religion have expressed concerns that government control is weakening their
religion’s ability to sum up life and counter ‘superstitious’ (me tin) or
heretical interpretations, not to mention act as a moral counterweight to
cultural dissipation, yawning disparities of wealth and the rise of crime and
of ‘social evils’ such as prostitution. Some commented to me that local people
had lost their self pride and identity as a result of the political restriction
of the religion and now thought only of personal enrichment and the purchase of
consumer goods for flashy self-advertisement.'5
Certainly, the Hoa Hao faced severe restrictions on their
religious and political activities after 1975, in part because of their
previous armed opposition to Communist forces. In 1975 all administrative
offices, places of worship, and social and cultural institutions connected to
the faith were closed, thereby halting public religious functions. Preaching
towers were boarded up or rededicated as taxation or security offices. The lack
of access to public gathering places contributed to the Hoa Hao Buddhist
community’s isolation and fragmentation. Those who sought to gather
independently of the officially-sanctioned association were arrested and
imprisoned. A tentative easing of control on the religion began in 1999. There
were, however, crackdowns in the face of demands that the government speed up
this process. In 2001 there were again serious protests and arrests; a female
member of the religion reportedly committed self-immolation to protest against
restrictions on religious freedom.
One of the ways of denigrating the undeniable success of
groups such as the Hoa Hao in staying relevant in contemporary Vietnam is to
label them as ‘political’ rather than religious in nature. The authorities
dismiss the sect’s protest activity as not in keeping with a religion. Yet an
undeniable feature of the Hoa Hao faith has been its challenging relationship
with the secular authorities, including the French, the South Vietnamese regime
and the Communists, whose bids for legitimacy have extended over the Mekong
delta. No quiescent Buddhist faith, members of the religion have engaged in
political indoctrination and borne arms. Members of the Hoa Hao community
abroad situate the emergence of the Hoa Hao in the colonial era within a narrative
of loss of Vietnamese imperial power. These images hearken back to an idealised
political order, the loss of which calls forth an alternative to fill the gap.
This is how the founder of the faith, Huynh Phu So, presented matters in the
late 1930s, and it is how Hoa Hao Buddhists still argue for a platform today.
Some overseas Hoa Hao groups describe the religion as a movement of revolt,
depicting the Hoa Hao as a tradition of grass-roots struggle, and nationalism a
potential weapon against communism (Ly Dai Nguyen, 1999; Nguyen Long Thanh Nam,
2000).
Today many members of the Hoa Hao still consider themselves
engaged in a desperate struggle for survival. On the other hand, there is a
discernible stirring of optimism within Vietnam about the religion’s future
prospects. Some of the followers with whom I spoke in Vietnam believed that the
religion has recently secured limited recognition because of the large number
of Hoa Hao believers who are in the local party and state administration
quietly pushing for change. According to this view, the Communist Party in the
south is actually a tool for quietly advancing the aims of the Hoa Hao
movement. An extremely effective political campaign has been waged by a number
of overseas-based Hoa Hao organisations, who post news about political events
in Vietnam to the international community on several very active Internet sites
and project information back into Vietnam by e-mail and other means. Protests
and actions by members of the Hoa Hao to achieve greater freedom and
recognition for their religion continue to take place in Vietnam and abroad. Of
a less revolutionary order of activity, members of the faith are also very
active in health care provision, community development activities and
philanthropy. Such activities in accordance with the Master’s injunction to
social engagement represent a viable and promising basis for the Hoa Hao to
secure broader political support.
Conclusion
The Hoa Hao religion has only begun to emerge from the
shadows of war and political repression, to gain the attention of journalists,
web surfers and domestic and international tourists. It is hardly surprising
therefore that the available commentary on Hoa Hao Buddhism reflects the
concerns of those who apprehended the religion through the lens of past
conflicts. In some quarters, the faith is still regarded as a survival of an
outmoded socio-economic system, a normative response to the traumatic impact of
French colonialism, a hoped for alternative to the communist movement, or a victim
of such forces. The types of questions asked of it are zero-sum and
apocalyptic. Will it survive or be destroyed? Will it successfully resist or
perish due to state repression? These sets of questions reflect markedly the
concerns of an earlier era and are inadequate for comprehending the
contemporary concerns of the religion. Today, movement and exchanges between
people and across borders are easier, ideas flow more freely, the market has
emerged as a new pre-occupation. Yet our tools for understanding the Hoa Hao
religion remain poor, based as they are on limited data and addressing only a
narrow set of concerns.
My own discussions with members of the religion both in
Vietnam and elsewhere have brought to light a different set of emphases and a
more wide-ranging set of concerns. Vietnam’s complex and bloody wars of
de-colonisation are over and the passage of time has allowed attention to be
focused on the nation’s own colonialist history. Improved physical access to
the area has enabled a better appreciation of the ecological conditions in
which the religion developed. The climate of increased movement and exchange
has brought into focus the question of borrowing and influences rather than the
issues of conflict and incomprehension. Economic exchanges within Vietnam and
abroad are in full flow, and Hoa Hao followers are deeply engaged in marketing
activities. The Internet takes the dimension of political engagement to new
levels as members of the religion joust quite effectively with the government
in securing new publics and developing transnational networks.
Considered a local grassroots religion, there is no denying
that this is a faith whose growth has been in tandem with the consolidation of
the state, sharing to some extent its assimilationist concerns. Its potential,
therefore, to work with the current regime must be recognised. A syncretic
creed, product of a communicatively open region, it is likely to absorb some of
the state’s ideological concerns but is also likely to influence critically the
way the state operates in the region. Given that the intensity of communication
throughout the Mekong delta is increasing due to its increasing global
integration, the religion is likely to continue to assimilate and be
transformed by other ideological currents. These processes might be considered
as continuous with a history that I have argued is more dynamic and
cosmopolitan than some theorists have recognised. The relative amorphousness of
the religion also gives believers a certain amount of doctrinal leeway to
define their own tradition, even though a lack of clarity as to what
constitutes the Hoa Hao religion could possibly also lead to conflicts.
However, for the same reason Hoa Hao Buddhism is not likely to succumb to
external threats or lose its ‘essence.’ Undoubtedly, its followers will be key
players in the economy, society, community development and politics of the
Mekong delta for the foreseeable future.
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15.In July 1999 an estimated 500,000 Hoa Hao believers
gathered in An Giang province to commemorate the founding of the faith, the
largest Hoa Hao gathering since 1975 and the first to get official approval.
This was repeated in subsequent years. Even though many people welcomed this
return of the right to associate, some lamented the festival’s
commercialisation and pallor in contrast to the years prior to liberation.
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