Buddhist Pilgrimage and Religious Resurgence

in Contemporary Vietnam

Due The Dao

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Washington

2008

Program Authorized to Offer Degree:

Anthropology
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 University of Washington

Abstract

Buddhist Pilgrimage and Religious Resurgence in Contemporary Vietnam

Due The Dao

Chair of the Supervisory Committee:

Professor Charles F. Keyes
Department of Anthropology

The resurgence of Buddhist pilgrimage in northern Vietnam is rooted in

renewed interest in Buddhist religious meanings as interpreted in practices by leaders

of associations of laywomen. These women have successfully asserted their religious

authority vis-a-vis a government led by Marxist ideology, Buddhist religious who

privilege Buddhist texts over devotion, and males who tend to favor secularist

orientations. This resurgence has been made possible because of changes in the

political economy of Vietnam since the government adopted the policy of 'renovation'

in the mid-1980s. Since then, the government has allowed religious activities that were

previously deemed to be 'superstitions.' The expansion of the economy since

'renovation' has not only led to many people having more disposable income, some of

which can be used for religious activities, but has also increased uncertainties which

have led some to turn more to religion. The marked increase of religious pilgrims to

shrines in remote areas has led to reshaping of relations between outsiders and local

people in these shrine areas.

 While state control protects pilgrimage sites from secular exploitation, the

projects of restoration and preservation have somehow interfered with the attempts of

pilgrims to repair pagodas and donate statues as the best ways of making merit. The

establishment of management committees also creates tensions between state officials

and Buddhist religious. On the one hand, the Buddhist Association is the agency that

supports local Buddhist monks and nuns in competition with state officials to control

the site. On the other hand, the association, through its provincial branches, actively

exercises its power to control these Buddhist religious. In addition, the abbot and the

abbess of different pagodas at a pilgrimage site are also competing with each other to

gain followers. This is not to mention other secular companies and local people who

also find interest in these sites. A pilgrimage center, therefore, is a field where different

interests and meanings are negotiated with each other to shape the "magnetism" of the

site.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

List of Figures hi

List of Tables iv

Introduction 1
Pilgrimage Studies in Vietnam 7
Anthropological Studies of Pilgrimage and Religious Resurgence 13
Conducting Fieldwork on Pilgrimage Study 17

Chapter 1: The Pilgrims 22

Formation of Pilgrimage Groups 24
Association of Laywomen: Gender, Merit-making and Pilgrimage 33
Age, Ability and Social Status in Pilgrimage Groups 38
Religious Activities of Laywomen 43
Wealth and Merit-making 50
Religious Motivation of Pilgrims 53
Chapter Summary 61

Chapter 2: Political Change and the Religious Resurgence 63

Syncretism of Buddhist Pilgrimage and the Classification of Religion 66
'Abolish Depraved Customs and Preserve Cultural Values' 75
The Establishment of Vietnamese Buddhist Association 87
Chapter Summary 94

Chapter 3: Pilgrimage Center 96

A Sacred Mountain and a Buddhist Pilgrimage Center 99
A National Cultural Heritage Site 103
Yen TUT Buddhist Religious and Orders 112
Pilgrims' Practices and Meanings 124
Chapter Summary 136

I
Chapter 4: Religious Resurgence and Economic Renovation 137
Religion as a Reflection of Economic Base 140
Economic Change and the Resurgence of Religious Activities 147
Religion is an Internal Power of Economic Development 155
Chapter Summary 164

Conclusion 165

Bibliography 172

u
 LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Number Page

Figure 1: Map of pilgrimage route to Yen Tu 5

Figure 2: Diagram of pilgrimage route in Yen Tu mountain 97

in
 LIST OF TABLES
Table Number Page

Table 1: Numbers of visitors to Yen Tu 153

IV
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In completing this dissertation, I owe my thanks for many people.

First and formost, my thanks to many Vietnamese pilgrims, local people in Yen

Tvr mountain, Buddhist monks and nuns, and state cultural officials who made this

dissertation possible. To Mrs. Diem, Mrs. Thuong, and Mr. Viet, leaders of three

pilgrimage groups in Hanoi, I offer my thanks for accepting me as member of their

groups and sharing their pilgrimage experiences with me. Venerable Thfch Giac Hai has

spent time to accompany me to Yen Tu and other pagodas and explained many Buddhist

practices and terms with his great knowledge of Buddhist teachings.

I genuinely thank my Chair Supervisor, Professor Charles F. Keyes, at the

Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, who has given me both

superior scholarly and humanistic advises through the course of my study. Other

members in my Reading Committee, Professors James W. Green and Christoph Giebel

provided critical and supportive comments for this dissertation. I deeply thank Professor

Hue-Tam Ho Tai from Harvard University for her great supports and insightful advises

during my study in the United States.

To Mr. Duong Trung Quoc, Editor-in-chief of Xua&Nay magazine, I offer my

thanks for giving me official permission and time to carry out my study. My friend and

colleague Doctor Andrew Hardy has provided me a chance to travel in different parts of

Vietnam and given skeptical criticism to my study.

I am indepted to the Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University, the

Toyota Foundation, the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS) at

v
Australian National University, and the University of Washington for providing me the

financial supports and an opportunity to pursue graduate program in anthropology at the

University of Washington and to complete my dissertation.

My special thanks to Doctor Judith M.S. Pine for her skillful English editing and

useful comments to this dissertation and Catherine Zeigler at the Department of

Anthropology, University of Washington, for her positive administrative supports.

Last but not least, my grateful thanks to my wife, Hanh, for her long-term

support and for all sufferings she experienced in the past ten years.

VI
 1

Introduction

When I was praying for a job at the pagoda in the top of Mount Yen Tu, my sister

who was in Hanoi received an official letter from a company informing me that

my application had been accepted.

Mr. Bien,1 one of my friends, repeated this anecdote every time he recounted his

first trip to Yen Tu in 1992. After he graduated with a BA in constructional engineer in

1987, he searched for a job for almost five years. The job-hunt was urgent since his

mother, the backbone of his family, had died in 1986 and his retired father was only able

to support his younger sister, who was a student at Hanoi University. In 1990, seeing no

reason to hope that he could find a job in Hanoi, he relocated to the coastal city of Vung

Tau, a petroleum and tourist centre 130 kilometers southeast of Ho Chi Minh City, where

construction was flourishing and where he had some personal contacts. Unfortunately, he

could not find a job in three months of searching, and returned to Hanoi having spent his

last coin. In 1991, through another contact, he went to Thai Nguyen, a mountainous

province 80 kilometers northwest of Hanoi, to work as a security guard at a construction

site. This position lasted less than a month. At times he worked as a manual laborer,

sometimes following his friend, a carpenter while waiting for another chance. He also

tried to find his luck by taking pilgrimages to Perfume Pagoda (chua Huong) in Ha Tay

province, a well-known Buddhist pilgrimage centre 64 kilometers southwest of Hanoi:

1
For reasons of confidentiality, except when quoting from published statements, all personal names in this
dissertation have been changed.
 2
I used to bicycle carrying my mother to many pagodas in 1985 when she was sick

but I did not pray. I first went to Perfume Pagoda to pray in 1989 and continued to

visit the pagoda in 1990 and 1991. Some people said that if you conducted

pilgrimages to Perfume Pagoda in three successive years, you would gain more

merit than you gained from three journeys to the pagoda carried out in

discontinuous years. (Field notes 2004)

His cousin, a medium in Nam Dinh province, had told him about Mount Yen Tu,

another Buddhist pilgrimage centre that is, according to her, more sacred. He hoped that

he could visit the mountain but did not know how before the mother of a mutual friend, a

trader of clothing materials in Dong Xuan market, one of the largest wholesale centers in

Hanoi, registered for him and the friend to join a pilgrimage group to go to Yen Tu after

the lunar New Year (Tet) in 1992. She also paid the registration fee, about 50.000

Vietnamese Dong (VND) each, a sum he could not afford at that time as a jobless man.

The trip, according to him, was a turning point in his life. After returning from Yen Tu,

he got a position as an accountant working for the Water Supply Company2 of Hoan

KiSm district in Hanoi. Five years later, in 1997, he became vice-director of this

company. His success, he believed, partly derived from the merit he gained on pilgrimage

journeys to Yen Tu; he had made the pilgrimage every year since 1992.

This was also the first time I heard about Yen Tu. In the following year, 1993, the

mother of our friend again registered for her son, Mr. Bien and one of his new colleagues,

and me to join this pilgrimage group. Since we had contributed registration fees, we did

Cong ty cung cap nude sack, a state-based company that is in charge of supplying water to the city and
districts around Hanoi.
 3
not have to prepare anything before the trip. Organizers would rent buses and buy

offerings and some meals for the whole group. What we had to do was to show up on

time since the long journey would start at 3:00 am. We spent the night at my friend's

house, from which we could walk to the address where we would assemble in that early

morning. That was how I met Mrs. Lan, the organizer of this pilgrimage group, who

became one of the crucial key informants in my research on Buddhist pilgrimage almost

ten years later. A thin, active woman in her late sixties, Mrs. Lan was the charismatic

leader of about three hundred pilgrims during that three-day trip. She guided us to visit

different shrines along the pilgrimage road and selected a timetable for the trip that we

should follow; she taught us how to behave properly and enforced some restrictions on

our behavior; and she performed rituals on behalf of the whole group.

In the first day, we visited Kiep Bac temple, a shrine dedicated to Saint Tran, in

Hai Duong province, 80 kilometers from Hanoi. After performing a one-hour ritual at

this temple, we had lunch and left for Yen Tu, the main destination of our journey.

Mount Yen Tu, 130 kilometers northeast of Hanoi, is in Uong Bi town of Quang Ninh

province. We arrived at the mountain in the afternoon. Mrs. Lan performed a ritual at

Giai Oan (literally clearing unjust charges) pagoda located in the foothills before leading

the group to climb the mountain. In the late afternoon, we reached Hoa Yen pagoda, chief

shrine of this Buddhist pilgrimage centre. The pagoda is dedicated to the Three Founders

3
Hung Dao Virang Tran Qu6c Tuln (1226-1300), a general of the TrSn dynasty (1226-1399). See Pham
Quynh Phuong, 'Tran Hung Dao and the Mother Goddess Religion" (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program
Publications, 2006) for more information on the cult of Saint Tr&n.
 4
of True Lam. The main ritual of the pilgrimage, lasting over two hours, was performed

at this pagoda in the evening. We then spent that night in some huts built by local people

next to the pagoda. In the morning of the second day, we climbed to the top of Mount

Yen Tu. For many people, Dong (bronze) pagoda, located at the top of the mountain, is

their most important destination. In the afternoon, we left Yen Tu for Cua 6ng temple,

dedicated to Tran Quoc Tang,5 and located in Cam Pha district of Quang Ninh province,

a costal town 180 kilometers from Hanoi. We arrived at Cua 6ng temple in the evening

and spent the night in guesthouses near the temple. On the third day, after praying at Cua

6ng temple, Mrs. Lan rented a boat to take us to Cua Suot temple, a Mother Goddess

shrine located in an island about two kilometers from the seashore dedicated to Cua Suot

princess6. She performed a ritual lasting almost three hours in this temple. In the

afternoon, we returned to Hong Gai, the provincial city of Quang Ninh (this city, in

December 27, 1993, merged with the tourist site of Bai Chay to form Ha Long city). In

Hong Gai we visited Long Tho pagoda, one of the largest Buddhist shrines in town. We

then went shopping at a nearby market before returning to Hanoi late that afternoon.

4
True Lam tarn to: Tran Nhan Tong (1258-1308), Phap Loa (1284-1330), and HuySn Quang (1254-1334),
the first three patriarchs of the True Lam Zen school founded in the 13* century.
5
Hung Nhugng Vucmg Tran Qu6c Tang (1252-1313), a son of Tran Qu6c Tuan, the general who
commanded a garrison in this frontier in the 13th century.
6
Co Be Cua Suot, literally a little princess of Su6t estuary, a form of tutelary goddess commonly worshiped
at costal regions in Northern Vietnam.
 Figure 1: Map of pilgrimage route to Yen Tu

Returning from Yen Tu, I decided to choose the Yen Tu festival as the subject of

my BA thesis in ethnology at Hanoi National University. In order to get permission to

conduct fieldwork in Yen Tu, I went to Hong Gai city to see the Director of the

provincial Department of Culture with a letter from his friend, an official working for the

Department of Preservation and Museums, Ministry of Culture. My roommate from the

period of six years during which I had worked in Siberia7 accompanied me to U6ng Bi

town to introduce me to his cousin, who was Director of the Uong Bi Department of

7
From 1982 to 1988,1 was sent to Siberia, with 700 men from Hanoi, Hai Phong city, Hai Duong and
Quang Ninh provinces, to be trained and work at an engineering works in a cooperative program signed
between Vietnam and the Soviet Union.
 6
Culture, to get another permission. A month after my first trip to Yen Tu, I went back to

the mountain with an official letter of introduction from the University. The Yen Tu

Management Committee, established in 1992, arranged for me to stay with a police

officer in a small room adjoined Hoa Yen pagoda.

My focus for my BA research was the traditional values of this festival. For a

month, I observed ritual performances in order to discover traditional symbolic activities

and their meanings, where these activities fell within categories of 'traditional values,'

such as cosmological system and fertility desires of agricultural population or patriotic

and heroic histories. One evening, a group of women came to my room to get permission

from the police officer to perform a rite of possession (len dong), which was considered

non-Buddhist and superstitious and was officially prohibited. This group, led by two

Buddhist nuns, came from Hanoi late that afternoon and had just finished their Buddhist

ritual of chanting sutras. In order to give me a chance to observe the performance, the

officer went to bed early, thus allowing them to perform the rite. They were not the only

group who wanted to perform such rituals. A week later, a group of local people from a

village located in the foothills visited Hoa Yen pagoda and performed the rite of

possession, again with the tolerance of the police officer. Such receptiveness of the

authorities toward 'superstitious' activities was, however, selective. The day after the

group from the foothills performed their rite, the head of the Management Committee
Q

asked me to take pictures of the shaking of divinatory wands, a forbidden superstitious

8
Xoc the, literally to shake the wands. These wands are contained in a bamboo cylinder. While addressing
a person's name and age to consult the future of this person in front of an altar of Mother Goddesses, one
has to shake the bamboo cylinder until one of these wands is dropped down. One will find the horoscopic
paper (que), with a number printed in the top, from the number written at the end of this wand. A
 7
practice conducted by some soldiers in their office located near the mountaintop.

Although I knew that the order put me in danger, since the young soldiers might get

angry and that would end my stay in Yen Tu, I could not find a reason to refuse since one

responsibility of a Vietnamese researcher was to struggle against superstitions. The only

way to escape from this trouble was to leave the site.

Pilgrimage Studies in Vietnam

The Vietnamese term for pilgrimage is hanh huong (literally, to walk [with]

incense). The explanations of this term I received from several Buddhist monks and nuns

were similar to the definition in Ven. Kim Cuong Tu's Dictionary of Sino-Vietnamese

Buddhist Studies:

A rite performed when donors make offerings to Buddhist monks. First, [the

donors] distribute incense to everyone. Then, [the donors] light incense and walk

around a stupa to worship... When [the donors] walk with incense, the monks

have to stand to receive. If people who walk with incense are women, [the monks]

have to sit to receive... This rite was started by Mr. Dao An of the Jin kingdom

[265-317; 317-420] in China. It became an imperial ritual in the Tang [618-906]

and Song [960-1280] dynasties. When [the donors] walk with incense, incense

horoscopic paper, 8x15 centimeters, contains some themes: destiny (ban m$nh), official position (cong
danh), litigation (kien cdo), landed property (tho track), illness (benh tat), wealth (tai loc), bereavement
(tang ma), marriage (hon nhan), and offspring (con cdi). Each theme is explained in a four-line poem. One
horoscopic paper cost 2.000 VND in 1993.
 8
receivers [Buddhist monks] have to chant a verse. (Kim Cuong Tu 1992: 530.

My translation)

The ritual described above is no longer observed. In addition, pilgrims do not

interpret the term hanh huang as 'walking with incense.' In contemporary usage, this

term indicates the practices of "going to worship the relics such as at Perfume Pagoda,

Yen Tu inside the country or the famous Buddhist relics in India and other countries"

(Thich Minh Chau, Minh Chi 1991: 275-76. My translation). "The believers go to distant

places that are considered sacred, such as temples and pagodas, to worship in order to

fulfill their hope" (Hoang Phe 1994: 406. My translation).

Although Buddhist pilgrimage is practiced by a great number of believers, it is not

a religious obligation. Buddhist religious maintain that salvation or enlightenment can be

achieved only through one's own thinking and understanding; it is not necessary to go

anywhere to find the Buddha.10 This view is popularized by the saying 'Buddha is in the

mind' {Phat tai tarn). The anecdote of a meeting between King Tran Thai Tong (1218-

1277) and an abbot of Yen Tu pagoda is usually used to illustrate this point of view.

When the King came to the mountain in 1237 and wanted to become a monk in order to

find the Buddha, the abbot said:

Ke (s. gathd), a poem contains four sentences with a specific number of words in each sentence. A verse
is chanted to praise merit of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas, to describe the gist of a sutra, or to express the
belief on the three gems: the Buddha, Buddhist teachings, and Buddhist religious.
Meanings of each Buddhist term in Vietnamese and Sanskrit in this dissertation are drawn from Kim
Cuong Tu-, Tit diin Phat hoc Han Vi$t (Sino-Vietnamese Dictionary of Buddhist Studies) (Hanoi, 1992);
Pham Huu Dung, Tit dim doi chieu Phat ngit (Correspondences of Buddhist Terms) (Montrouge, 1996);
Thien Phuc, Phat hQC Tit dim (Buddhist Dictionary) (California, 2003) and my notes of explanations given
by some Buddhist monks.
10
Phat (s. Buddha), beside indicating to the 'historical' Buddha, Siddhartha Gotama, in the 5th century BC,
means an ultimate truth (dao vo thupng), an absolute mind (tarn tuy$t ddi), a knowledge (tri), to perceive
(gidc), to awake (tinh thuc), to understand (ngo), and the being who achieved enlightenment (dang toan
gidc, dang gidc ngo or dang tinh thuc).
 9
There is no Buddha on the mountain. Buddha is only in one's own mind. If one's

own mind grows quiet and intelligence appears, that is the Buddha. If Your

Majesty can be conscious of that mind, you immediately become Buddha and do

not need to find [Buddha] outside of yourself. (Nguyen Lang 1994 [1973]: 229;

Thich Thanh Tu 2002a: 9. My translation)

Yen Tu has been known as the Buddhist centre where King Tran Nhan Tong

(1258-1308) founded True Lam (Bamboo Grove) Zen school. Tran Nhan Tong and True

Lam Zen school have become symbols of an "independent" and "unified" Vietnamese

Buddhism (Thich Thien Sieu 1995: 7) since Tran Nhan Tong is the only Buddhist

patriarch who is Vietnamese (Thich Thanh Tu 2002a: 8) and True Lam school is

considered as a united Buddhist association of previous three Zen schools in Vietnam

(Nguyen Lang 1994: 217). The hagiography of Tran Nhan Tong and his teachings have

been the focal point of a number of publications written by Buddhist monks and scholars

(Nguyen Duy Hinh 1977; Nguyen Hung Hau 1997; Thich Thanh Tu 1999 [1972]; Phan

Dang Nhat, Trinh Cao Tuong 2001; Le Manh That 2002). The establishment of True

Lam Zen school has been an important element in the historical study of Vietnamese

Buddhism (Thich Mat The 1984 [1942]; Thich Thien An 1975; Nguyen Tai Thu 1992;

Nguyln Lang 1994 [1973]; Minh Chi et al. 1999). These publications reflect two main

streams in Buddhist studies in Vietnam. Male intellectuals, by examining Buddhist texts,

attempt to ascertain moral values or traditional ideologies. Buddhist monks, in the same

manner, seek the 'true' meanings from the doctrine. An abbess of a pagoda in Son Tay

district, 42 kilometers east of Hanoi, said that she was interested in conducting research
 10
on Buddhist practice during the Tran dynasty (1226-1399) and particularly Tran Nhan

Tong. Nevertheless, her interest is TrSn Nhan Tong's writing and she could not

remember when her only visit to Yen Tu took place or any of her experiences of the trip.

A Zen Master stated that the spiritual part of Yen Tu- is the teachings of the founder; the

mountain and pagodas are simply a body. Without a spirit, the mountain is a dead body.

People go to Yen Tu in order to follow the teachings, he suggested, and they should not

come to the mountain only because it is sacred or because it is a place associated with the

founder (Thich Thanh Tu 2002b: 15). As a result, pilgrimage to Yen Tu, a devotional

form practiced mainly by laywomen, is almost absent in Buddhist studies.

The abbot of Sui pagoda in the eastern suburb of Hanoi recalled that except in

writing, he has not heard the term hanh hirong until recent time. In practice, the common

verbal expression of going on pilgrimage in Vietnamese is 'journeying to the festival' (di

hoi or tray hoi). Pilgrimage has also been subsumed and studied within the broader

category of festival (le hoi):

Le Hoi or Hoi Le is the combination of two nouns: Le (ceremonial) and Hoi

(meeting, and by extension festival where people meet). Hoi (meeting-festival) is

a cultural activity of the ordinary world. Le (ceremonial) is a religious activity

related to the sacred world... Connecting the sacred to the profane, folk festivals

are the occasions where people gather in a common faith and meet to make merry

together. (Nguyln Duy Hinh 1993: 232)

Dividing a festival into two separate elements, some scholars emphasized the

significant role of hoi, which is secular, disordered, and chaotic, and considered to be the
 11

original part of a festival, a fragment of the traditional culture. The religious, ordered, and

stable element, le, was considered a new addition through the historical evolution of

religious practice and social inequalities (Thu Linh, Dang Van Lung 1984: 61-71). Other

scholars argued that religious rites are the central part of most festivals (Ngo Quang Nam

1993: 149), or that le and hoi are two inseparable sides of a festival (Truomg Thin 1993:

17; Le Huu Tang 1994: 279). The argument arose from efforts to distinguish traditional

values that should be preserved and backward superstitions that should be abolished in

the studies of 'traditional festivals.'

Marxism, the only official perspective toward religion authorized by the

Vietnamese government, posited that as people adopted scientific understandings of the

world, religious practices would decline in significance and, ultimately, disappear. In

addition, religion was considered not only as a "superstructural" reflection of the past

feudal and colonial economic system but also as an implement of ruling classes.

Therefore, religious practices, under a label of superstitions, should be eliminated in the

process of building a 'new socialist culture' that has been carried out since Northern

Vietnam became independent from French colonial rule in 1954. As a result,

ethnographies by Vietnamese scholars on Yen Tu tend to describe historical values of

this 'traditional' festival (Thi Sanh 1980; Do Phuong Quynh 1995; Pham Ke 1996; Tran

Truomg 2002). The weakness of this approach in the study of pilgrimage is that each

festival is presented as a timeless and bounded entity without any change in practices

brought about by the effects of socio-cultural, economic and political factors.

Ethnographic accounts of a single community living in a specific area where a festival is

 12
organized also did not acknowledge the significant role of pilgrims in this religious

practice.

In 1986 Vietnamese government adopted the policy of 'renovation' (doi mai),

which sought to re-situate the country in the global economy. This policy not only led to

major economic changes in Vietnam with a concomitant rise in per capita income, but it

also sanctioned the opening of the society. Since the late 1980s religious practices have

blossomed and many shrines were built or restored (Luong 1993; Malarney 1996).

According to the Ministry of Culture, there are 1,399 religious festivals organized in

Vietnam each year (La Son 2007). Pilgrimage has re-emerged as one of the most popular

religious practices, undertaken by hundreds of thousands of people at different shrines

throughout the country (Tran Manh Dure 1996: 265-66). From some hundreds pilgrims

who sporadically and secretly visited the mountain in the 1960s - 1980s, the number of

pilgrims to Yen Tu has increased to about 10,000 in 1992 and over 200,000 in 2001

(Pham Hai Duong" 2001: 2). The mountain is no longer a local or regional destination of

pilgrims who come from surrounding cities and provinces in northern delta but becomes

a national and even international pilgrimage centre since pilgrims also come from central

and southern parts of Vietnam and some other countries. In addition to diverse pilgrimage

groups, local people, state agencies (e.g. Ministry of Culture and its branches at

provincial and district levels; provincial, district, and communal People's Committees;

police and tax offices; and the Yen Tu Management Committee), religious organizations

(e.g. abbots and abbesses at Yen Tu pagodas; Vietnamese Buddhist Association and its

provincial branch), businesses (e.g. guesthouse and restaurant owners; Quang Ninh
 13
Import and Export Company; tourist and transport companies) and the media actively

shape what James Preston (1992) calls the "spiritual magnetism" of this pilgrimage site.

This new phenomenon is not simply vestiges of a traditional past which heretofore have

been used in discussing pilgrimage in Vietnam. Then pilgrimage to Yen Tu should be

analyzed in a framework theorized by studies of pilgrimage in different religious

traditions and by studies of religious resurgence, especially in the former socialist

countries.

Anthropological Studies of Pilgrimage and Religious Resurgence

The body of theory that has most influenced pilgrimage studies thus far was

formulated by Victor Turner. Building on Arnold van Gennep's concept of the rites de

passage (rites of transition), Turner (1973) terms pilgrimage a "liminal" phenomenon.

Taking the journeys, pilgrims leave their quotidian social structures and enter the stage of

liminality where "communitas" or "antistructure" generates. Communitas, a social

structure "which combines the qualities of lowliness, sacredness, homogeneity, and

comradeship," is universal and central to religion (Turner and Turner 1978: 250; see also

Turner 1969; 1974).

Critics have pointed out the limitation of this theory since communitas is not

always found in every pilgrimage and therefore cannot "be a universal aspect of

pilgrimage" (Morinis 1992: 9). Behera (1995: 60) states that reducing all factors that are

important to pilgrims to the emotional and experiential aspects was to deny "the

importance of other facets of the human character, such as the intellectual, social and

spiritual." Pilgrims do not escape but communicate, validate and reproduce their cultural
 14
structures (Sangren 1987). John Eade and Michael Sallnow (1991: 2) suggest that

pilgrimage should be seen as "an arena for competing religious and secular discourses"

and the experience of communitas is only one particular discourse of pilgrimage. On the

other hand, studies of modern mode of journeying, tourism, find Turner's theory of

liminality useful to explain the popularity of this practice among city dwellers as a mean

of temporary escape from urban life (Eiki 1987; Reader 1993). The question of whether

pilgrimage is characterized by communitas or contestation continues to be debated by

scholars (Badone and Roseman 2004: 5). When the experience of communitas, at some

points, generates among pilgrims, we often observe contestations in the interactions

among pilgrimage groups and between them with other religious and non-religious

agencies.

The phenomenon of religious resurgence in the late 1980s in the former socialist

countries has attracted both local and foreign scholars. While the Vietnamese official

discourse still considers religious activities as a continuity of tradition and tries to

preserve it from non-religious elements (e.g. political or economical interests) (Dang

Nghiem Van 1998; Nguyen Minn Ngoc 2004), foreign researchers,11 on the other hand,

focus on the process of restructuring tradition in a changing political and economical

context. The relaxation of political controls brought by the policy of renovation have

made the resurgence of religious practices possible (Luong 1993). Shaun Malarney

(1996) found that post-Renovation religious syncretism is a result of socialist policies

carried out since 1954. He also argues that while the government attacked men's

11
Political changes in the late 1980s have also provided a chance for Western researchers to conduct
fieldwork in Vietnam after decades of closing door.
 15
practices at communal houses, women's practices at Buddhist pagodas were tolerated

because their power did not challenge male authority (Malarney 2002). The finding,

however, did not acknowledge a long tradition of syncretism in religious practices

revealed in religious activities observed at different shrines along pilgrimage routes. The

argument also overlooks long opposition of men toward women's religious activities in

Vietnam. In fact, both previous Confucian and post-1954 Marxist states have criticized

women's practice as 'superstitious' and sought actively to control them.

A profound resurgence of religious activities has been observed in former

socialist countries in their transition period to capitalist economies since the mid-1980s

(Varga 1995; Weller 1998). Scholars have found that the new interest in religious

practices has come about in part because people seek means to confront crises that have

arisen under the new mode of economy (Endres 1999; Le Hong Ly 2003; Taylor 2004).

These arguments, though, do not explain the decline of religious practices in pre-

Renovation period. That is economic change includes the rise in disposable income for

individuals who, in turn, have the means to provide material support for their religious

practices. Religious resurgence, in turn, creates economic changes, especially at remote

pilgrimage centers.

A new gender perspective has recently been added to the discourse of religious

studies in Vietnam. Religious rituals are seen as a mechanism providing power for

women, who lack access to secular authority (Pham Quynh Phuong 2006). Alexander

Soucy (2000: 194) maintains that "the motivation for religious participation by women

revolves around this dynamic of mothers building moral debts to exert control within the
 16
family." This view, again, does not realize the fact that male members in their families

often neglect if not criticize women's religious activities. In addition, it does not see

women as an active agency in asserting their own meanings of religious practices.

It is my thesis that the resurgence of Buddhist pilgrimage in northern Vietnam is

rooted in renewed interest in Buddhist religious meanings as interpreted in practice by

female leaders of lay Buddhist associations. These women have successfully asserted

their religious authority vis-a-vis a government led by Marxist ideology, Buddhist

religious who privilege Buddhist texts over devotion, and males who tend to favour

secularist orientations. In Chapter 1, I will examine pilgrimage groups in different

aspects: their formation, their hierarchical structures, their understanding of themselves in

interactions with the views of males and Buddhist religious to explore women's religious

authorities, especially the charismatic roles of their leaders. I will also examine pilgrims'

religious motivations and their activities in order to investigate the institutions of

pilgrimage.

The phenomenon of religious resurgence has been made possible because of

changes in the political economy of Vietnam since the government adopted the policy of

'renovation' in the mid-1980s. Since then, the government has allowed religious

activities that were previously deemed to be 'superstitions.' In chapter 2,1 examine how

government policies toward religion have shaped religious practices and how pilgrims

have continued their syncretic practices through different periods when different policies

have been dominant.

 17
Pilgrimage is mainly practiced by laypersons in Vietnam as well as other

Buddhist societies in East and Southeast Asia (Welch 1967; Keyes 1987). Although

viewing such practice as being politically or religiously incorrect, State agencies and

Buddhist religious still have actively sought to control pilgrimage sites and impose their

meanings on these centers. Chapter 3 will explore the negotiation between pilgrims and

other agencies, religious and secular, in the process of creating and shaping a pilgrimage

center.

Chapter 4 will provide an examination of the connection between religious

practice and economic conditions. Uncertainties of the new market economy has not only

led some people turn to religions but the expansion of the economy since the policy of

renovation was adopted has also led to many people having more disposable income,

some of which can be used for religious activities. Pilgrimage sites have been made more

accessible by investments from transporting and tourist companies. The marked increase

of pilgrims to shrines in remote areas has led to reshaping of relations between outsiders

and local people in these pilgrimage centres.

Conducting Fieldwork on Pilgrimage Study

This dissertation is based on my fieldwork had been conducted in Vietnam from

early 2002 to the summer of 2004 and in a short period in late 2005 early 2006. I have

carried out a long term participant observation research with pilgrimage groups in Hanoi.

After returning to Vietnam in late 2001,1 was introduced to Mrs. Lan, leader of a group

of retired state-employees and shop owners living in Bach Khoa area. She allowed me to

register for the trip to Yen Tut she would organize in early 2002. Three weeks after that
 18
trip, I joined the pilgrimage group she led to Perfume Pagoda. In the of summer that year,

Mrs. Lan called me to accompany her and two other women to Yen Tu* to attend a

ceremony performed before the main pagoda at the site was rebuilt. In December 2002,1

came to Yen Tu again with Mrs. Lan and her group to donate Buddhist statues to Ngoa

Van pagoda, located on another part of the mountain. In addition to these trips, I

participated in some other religious activities carried out by this group in that year,

chanting sutras monthly in pagodas and donating books and medicines to Buddhist

schools in the summer.

One day late in 2002, Mrs. Lan called me to help her write a report that she would

read at a meeting of Buddhist believers organized by the Vietnamese National Front.

During the course of one week, I came to her house every afternoon to write down her

stories. This was the first time Mrs. Lan narrated her whole participation in Buddhism.

She also recalled her involvement with the cult of Mother Goddesses, a practice she had

abandoned and hesitated to mention. She talked about Trucmg Can,13 a controversial

bioenergetic14 man of whom she was a close follower. It took almost a year for Mrs. Lan

to accept me as a member of the group. At the same time, I followed a group of traders,

led by a female medium, from two big markets in Hanoi, and a group of people working
12
Yen Tu is the name of a chain of mountains in the border between Quang Ninh and B3c Giang province
in northeast Vietnam. While pagodas in the highest mountain in Uong Bf town were annually visited by
pilgrims, pagodas built in other part of this mountain chain were abandoned in ruin. Ngoa Van pagoda,
discovered in the early 1990s and defined as the place where Trin Nhan Tong (1258-1308) actually died, is
not an exception (Nguyln Van Anh 2007). This pagoda has been managed by a student of the abbot of
Quynh Lam pagoda in Dong Trieu district since 2000 but is still not part of the pilgrimage route.
13
Nguyen D6c CSn, living in Ngoc Ha village in Hanoi, believed could heal people by his bioenergetic
power without using medicine. In 1974, Hanoi Department of Health Service prohibited his practices,
considered as superstition. Nguyln Phuc Gidc Hai, who had conducted research in this phenomenon, was
expelled from National Scientific Committee from 1976 to 1990. (Nhu Nguyen 2006)
14
Nhan dim: literally human electric, an inner power which can be obtained spiritually or through a course
of training. A person who has this power can heal illness by touching the patient without the usage of
medicine.
 19
for a state-owned company. I also conducted interviews with pilgrims who have been at

Yen Tu.

I officially conducted interviews with officials of state agencies in Hanoi and in

Quang Ninh province and with local people at the pilgrimage site. While an official

document of introduction15 is a requirement for conducting interviews with officials of

the Management Committee, provincial and district Department of Culture or People's

Committee and with local people in the commune at the foothills as well as getting access

to any official data, an informal introduction within a social network is a necessity for

making contacts with pilgrims. There were some hindrances in the interviews. When

pilgrims thought that their understanding might not be correct, they did not answer my

questions and directed me to their leaders. This was similar to the experience of Soucy

(2000) when he conducted interviews with laywomen in a pagoda in Hanoi. Since

pilgrims tended to give me correct stories, they avoided talking about what they thought

to be incorrect; for example, an individual might not mention their earlier involvement

with another form of popular religion that they considered superstitious and had given it

up. In addition, pilgrims hesitated to answer questions when I, as a Vietnamese, could be

expected to know the answer.16 Only long participation in a pilgrimage group could make

conversation with pilgrims become more open.

15
This document of introduction (gidy giai thieu) was given by Xua&Nay magazine, Association of
Vietnamese Historians, where I have worked for since 1994. Foreign researchers also need this document
of introduction from an affiliate institute when he/she carries out research in Vietnam, especially when
conducting interviews outside Hanoi.
16
One colleague of mine said that he had the same problem when he was conducting research in his
hometown. Interviewees did not want to talk about stories that he was supposed to know as a native man.
On the other hand, people would answer every question given by a foreigner whom they thought knew
nothing about them. This was my experience when my foreign colleague and I were conducting interviews
in Vietnam.
 20
An informal visit to pilgrims' houses or a meeting in a pagoda in Hanoi provided

time for longer conversations, since there was little free time during a pilgrimage trip

when pilgrims were busily climbing the mountain and making prayers at many pagodas

at the site. Similarly, interviews with local people could only be conducted when the busy

time of a pilgrimage season was over and they had returned home. In addition, when the

group led by Mrs. Lan arrived at Yen Tu, they separated into many sub-groups of fewer

than ten people before climbing the mountain; they only gathered to perform the ritual at

the main pagoda in the evening. While accompanying Mrs. Lan and some other women, I

knew little of what other members of the group was doing. In other words, I could only

learn of their experiences when they were narrated to me at another time.

On some occasions, I joined a group of my friends to take pilgrimage to Yen Tu. I

also spent weeks on the mountain talking with pilgrims from different groups at

guesthouses and teashops where they stopped for a meal or to rest. I joined their

pilgrimage trips to another Buddhist center, Perfume Pagoda, as well as some non-

Buddhist pilgrimage sites, in order to collect comparative data on this phenomenon.

The document of introduction was also not useful when making contacts with

Buddhist monks and nuns. Ven. Thich Giac Bach helped me in this matter. When I met

him in 1992, he was working for a restoration project at the Champa historical site of My

Son and teaching art to street children in Da Ning city, central Vietnam. He entered the

monkhood after his wife passed away in 1995 and was ordained at a Zen institute in Ba

Ria - Vung Tau province in the south. Born in 1955 in Quang Yen, a district next to

Uong Bf town of Quang Ninh province, he spent his youth there and knew the region
 21
well. Playing the role of his servant, I accompanied Ven. Thich Giac Bach to visit Yen

Tu as well as pagodas in Quang Ninh and some other provinces where he could lead his

conversations with other Buddhist monks and nuns to the topic which interested me. He

also explained Buddhist terms and concepts related to my research. I also visited True

Lam Zen Institute in Da Lat city in central highland and VTnh Nghiem pagoda in Ho Chi

Minh City in southern Vietnam, the headquarters of two Buddhist schools which claim

their practice from Yen Tu tradition. Secondary data, beside some obtained in National

Library and bookstores in Hanoi, were collected in bookshelves of different pagodas

where I had visited.

In the next chapter, I will start with the pilgrimage journey to Yen Tu I undertook

in 2003 accompanying Mrs. Lan and the Bao An group, the main object of my

dissertation.
 22

Chapter 1: The Pilgrims

The alarm woke me up at 4:00 am. It was the ninth day of the first month after

Vietnamese lunar New Year, February 10, 2003. The cold northern wind blew through

the quiet streets of Hanoi. That early in the morning it was hard to find a motorcycle taxi

(xe 6m) (a popular type of public transportation). On my way to the house of Mrs. Lan, I

could see groups of pilgrims with their bags waiting for buses at some street crossings.

When I arrived at her house, in a small street within the campus of Hanoi University of

Technology,17 five buses were already parked in front of her door. Inside these buses,

about two hundred people, most of them women over fifty, were greeting one another,

talking, calling, and shouting to each other while looking for their seats.

In front of the line of buses was a small truck loaded with Buddhist statues. The

day before, these statues had been brought to a school near Mrs. Lan's house from Ngu

Xa, a craft village well-known for its bronze products, located at True Bach lake in the

northwest of Hanoi. The statues, a one-meter-long bronze image of Emperor Tran Nhan

Tong (1258-1308) lying on a lotus flower and two forty-centimeter-high images of Bao

Sai, one of the close students of Tran Nhan Tong, were the donations of the wife of an

artisan in Ngu Xa village. This artisan had crafted two similar statues of Tran Nhan Tong

ordered by Mrs. Lan a year ago to donate to Yen Tu pagodas. This year, his wife asked

17
Dai hoc Bach Khoa, founded in 1956, located in Hai Ba Trung district, southeast of Hanoi, an
acquainted address of foreign scholars since the classes of Vietnamese study program are located inside the
campus. It was constructed and extended from the former Indochina Dormitory (Dong Duong hoc xd) built
in 1938. During the Vietnamese-French war from 1946-1954, the dormitory was occupied by French
troops.
 23
Mrs. Lan to donate these three statues on behalf of her family and to perform essential

rituals for the occasion. She and her family members were in another bus that would join

the group later. Mrs. Lan and some women in her group had spent the night before

decorating the truck with many Buddhist flags and five festival flags hanging around the

vehicle. They used a long, wide red cloth to cover the body of the truck. They also

covered the statues with red cloths and tied them carefully to the floor.

Mrs. Lan was at the altar on the second floor of her house saying a prayer for a

smooth trip. Her daughter-in-law asked me and the other men, there were fewer than ten

of us, to load offerings onto the buses. These offerings, including incense, candles, votive

papers, fruit, and cookies, were packed in several cardboard boxes. One box would be

offered at each shrine visited along the journey. A tray of twenty rice balls,18 each ball

made up for about three bowls worth of rice, had been assembled the night before to offer

at the main shrine in Yen Tu. These rice balls would be consumed at the end of the ritual

while other offerings, such as fruit and cookies would be distributed to everyone at the

end of the journey to bring home as gifts iloc). Pilgrims also received their meals of a rice

cake19 and two cups of instant noodles, distributed by Mrs. Lan's son at the front door of

her house, before the journey started.

As happened on previous trips, more than twenty people showed up in that

morning in order to join the journey without registration. That created chaos in this

section of the street. People ran from one bus to another in search of their groups and an

Cam nam, a round shape cake made by kneading cooked rice in a base of the areca leaf petiole or a
handkerchief to keep the rice good for several days during a journey.
19
Bdnh chung, a square shape cake made of sticky rice, green beans, and pork for new year's meals and
offerings.
 24
available seat. Bus drivers refuse to leave if there is over loading. A woman explained to

her friends that her daughter-in-law just invited a colleague to join the trip a day before,

which put her in a difficult situation. Her daughter, angry at losing face with her friend,

could not stand this inconvenient situation and started to talk back. On the street, another

woman yelled because five people she had registered were not on the list of registered

pilgrims, while others helped her to calm down. It took almost an hour for Mrs. Lan to

arrange things so the buses could depart. Pilgrims who joined the group without previous

registration had to sit on the floor of the buses for the whole trip, an inconvenience that I

also sometimes suffered as a young man in this group.

In this chapter, I will examine the formation of pilgrimage groups, their

hierarchical structures, their religious motivations and activities in order to explore the

institution of Buddhist pilgrimage. I also examine the gendered dimension of this popular

practice which has become a phenomenon since the policy of renovation was adopted in

the mid-1980s.

Formation of Pilgrimage Groups

Born in 1924 in a trading family, Mrs. Lan spoke with regret of her 'golden age'

when she owned a textile shop operated at her two townhouses on Hang Ngang, a busy

street in the old quarter of Hanoi. 'All cloth was imported from France and Hong Kong

and I had two Indian employees to help me at my shop,' she said. In 1946, like many

Hanoi residents, Mrs. Lan had to leave her houses when the Vietnamese-French war

broke out. 'In the hill area of Phu Tho province,201 operated a shop to buy and sell goods

20
A disputed territory between Vietnamese and French armies, 120 kilometers north-west of Hanoi.
 25
smuggled from the French occupied region in order to support my mother and my

younger siblings,' she remembered. Returning to Hanoi in 1954 when the war ended,

Mrs. Lan married an artillery officer of the Vietnamese People's Army, a dream of many

Hanoi girls at that time according to her. One night, after a tearful pitched argument with

her husband, she burned all the papers associated with her houses on Hang Ngang street

to sever herself from her past as a trader in order to protect her husband's political

position. She bought a townhouse in a newly constructed area of Hanoi and started to

work as a tailor for X20, a military manufacturer.

When her husband died in 1980, Mrs. Lan quit her job to work at home as a

private tailor in order to feed her children. 'I had to work 20 hours per day in those days,'

she recalled. She later established a knitted-goods cooperative21 in her house with dozens

of workers producing cotton blankets. 'My success created a thorn in the authorities'

side,' she complained. Officials from relevant state agencies (e.g. police officers, tax

collectors, and commercial managers) inventoried her cooperative for days but could not

find a single discrepancy. Riding a bicycle around Hanoi and to other provinces to meet

her partners or to win a contract, Mrs. Lan stopped at any pagoda she saw at noon to

make a prayer and rest. 'The Buddha helped me to survive through that period of physical

and mental difficulties,' she recalled.

When I met Mrs. Lan for the second time in early 2000, she was known among

both pilgrims and local people in Yen Tir as the leader of one of the largest pilgrimage

groups in Hanoi. In the 1990s, she led groups of from three to five hundred people in ten

21
Although the business was of her own, she had to register it as a cooperative since owning a private
company was not officially accepted at that time.
 26
buses on trips to the mountain. She explained the situation that led to the formation of her

group:

I first visited Yen Tu in 1963. Since then, each year when the spring was coming,

I looked for a pilgrimage group in order to join their journey to the mountain. It

was hard to find such a group in Hanoi in the 1960s and 70s; therefore there were

several years in which I could not make a pilgrimage to Yen Tu. I have visited the

mountain more often since 1980. Then I thought that I could arrange a pilgrimage

by myself. I first organized a group of thirty women with whom I was acquainted

at the pagoda to go to Yen Tu in the spring of 1987. My group was named Bao

An (repay), which means to repay the debt of gratitude of the Buddha and our

parents. (Field notes 2002)

In the following years, women living in her neighborhood have joined the group.

They include former university staff, schoolteachers, doctors, and retired officials who

reside in state-owned apartments build in 1970s on Hanoi University of Technology's

campus. Others were private traders who owned family shops on nearby Bach Mai street.

The group of pilgrims also included her former partners, with whom she traded when she

owned a cooperative in the 1980s. There were about 100 women22 who had joined as

permanent members of the group when I conducted an interview with Mrs. Lan in 2002;

of these, more than twenty have died and some have left for other provinces but have not

withdrawn from the group. Though members of the Bao An group formed the central part

of the pilgrimage group, from preparing the journey to performing rituals, their activities

Mrs. Lan said that there are some men joining the Bao An group but I observed no man in chanting sutras
sessions carried out monthly by this group at pagodas in Hanoi. Least than ten men join pilgrimage group
to take the journey to Yen Tu each year but they are not permanent member of the Bao An.
 27
were not restricted to pilgrimages in the spring but also included various religious

activities throughout the year. On some occasions, permanent members might not be able

to join a pilgrimage journey but could participate in other activities of the group. At the

same time, some pilgrims who are not permanent members and never attend any rituals

or participate in other religious activities of this group in Hanoi joined the pilgrimage

almost every year. This latter group included five women who are co-workers of Mrs.

Lan's only daughters-in-law; daughter and daughters-in-law of Mrs. Lien, the accountant

of this group; three neighbors of a clothing shop owner who is a permanent member; a

retired doctor, her son and his friend.

A month before the New Year when Mrs. Lan announced that she was about to

organize a pilgrimage to Yen Tur, members of the Bao An group would register for their

relatives, friends, and neighbors to join the journey. Each pilgrim had to contribute one

hundred thousands Vietnamese Dong (100,000 VND). The fee was collected to buy

offerings and food for the journey and to rent buses. Mrs. Lan herself made all the

arrangements for the two-day trip with the help of her daughter-in-law. Her close contacts

with bus drivers, most of them relatives of her friends, helped her find reasonably priced

buses at that time of the year. On the evening before the trip, some members of her group

would come to her house to lend a hand dividing and packing offerings, a time-

consuming job that lasted until midnight.

Pilgrimage groups formed by people living in the same neighborhood, similar to

the one organized by Mrs. Lan, are popular in Hanoi and thus have quite different

memberships. The pilgrimage group led by Mrs. Ly is one example. Pilgrims in this
 28
group are residents of Hoang Mai village in Hoang Mai district, southeast of Hanoi. They

get together around a permanent group called Dugc Svr.23 Members of this group, mainly

women trading at nearby Ma market, gather not only for trips to Yen Tu and other

pilgrimage sites but also for different religious activities at their village pagoda. In some

neighborhoods more than one pilgrimage group is formed, as when a former member of

the Bao An split off from that group in the late 1990s and organized a group of

laywomen who are retired state employees living in Hanoi University of Technology's

campus.

Another group, which I accompanied in 2002, was organized by Ms. Luang, a

seller of groceries at Ngo ST Lien market, a market located at the back of the Hanoi train

station. The group of about fifty, mostly women in their 30s and 40s from various

neighborhoods in the city, was made up of vendors in this market and their relatives, as

well as a dozen of Ms. Luang's acquaintances, who were traders of Dong Xuan market,

one of the biggest wholesale markets in Hanoi. Ms. Luang collected 150,000 VND from

each participant to rent a bus and purchase offerings. These offerings would be offered at

every pagoda the group visited at Mount Yen Tu. Ms. Luang first made the pilgrimage to

Yen Tu in 1964 with a group led by the abbot of Kim Lien pagoda in Hanoi, and this

mountain is the only Buddhist site she visits during the course of a year.

'I am a medium and I mainly worship the saints,'24 explained Ms. Luang, a

celibate woman in her late fifties. In addition to an annual pilgrimage to Yen Tu

organized for these vendors, she leads trips to temples dedicated to Mother Goddesses

23
The group was named after a sutra olDuac suPhgt (s. Bhaisaya Guru), the head of Eastern Paradise
(Thien duang Dong do).
The saints (thdnh) are commonly referred to deities in the pantheon of Mother Goddess religion.
 29
(e.g. Bac Le temple in Lang San province; Thac Ba temple in Hoa Binh province) where

she performs a rite of possession. These smaller groups of ten to twenty people were

selected from among her fellow mediums and close friends. They would share the cost of

transportation (e.g. bus and sometime boat), offerings, and food, about 200,000 VND per

person for one trip. (The cult of Mother Goddesses and the medium's rite of possession

are discussed in the next chapter).

Mr. Bien, a vice-director of a water management company in Hanoi, has visited

Yen Tu regularly since 1992, accompanying the group led by Mrs. Lan, traveling with

another pilgrimage group or gathering a group of friends to go on pilgrimages to the

mountain. Since 2000, he has organized a pilgrimage group that includes workers and

administrators at the water management company, and their relatives, to go to Yen Tu

every spring. Each participant is expected to contribute 100,000 VND to cover the cost of

buses, entry tickets, and accommodations for a night at the mountain. Pilgrims are

required to prepare for their own offerings and make prayers by themselves. This group

has made an additional trip to Perfume Pagoda in Ha Tay province, another Buddhist site,

in their spring pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage groups formed by co-workers in companies or officials in state

agencies in Hanoi have become popular in the past ten years; another friend of mine who

works for a bank in Hanoi said that he had gone to Yen Tu with his colleagues and they

were treated generously during the journey by their partners in provincial branches. Good

summation, the private vendors organized by Ms. Luang and the state employees led by
 30
Mr. Bien present a distinct type of pilgrimage group formed by people working in the

same place rather than people who live in a particular neighborhood.

Diversity of age, gender, wealth, and occupation exists both between different

pilgrimage groups and within groups, forming part of a complex picture of Buddhist

pilgrimage in contemporary Vietnam. Each pilgrimage group has in common the fact that

they are usually led by an experienced organizer, however. While going on pilgrimage to

Yen Tur today is much easier compared to the experience in the 1960s and 70s as

described by Mrs. Lan,25 pilgrims tend to join a pilgrimage group organized by an

experienced leader. This leader, who can be a layperson, a medium, or an official as

mentioned above, not only prepares necessities for the trip but also decides on an

itinerary and sometimes performs rituals at shrines visited during the journey. Mrs. Lan,

for example, often leads her group to visit Kiep Bac temple in Hai Duong province, and

nearby Con Son pagoda if she has time, before arriving at Yen Tu on their two-day trip.

She stops at the main pagoda in Yen Tu, half way to the mountaintop, to prepare for her

ritual performance that night. On the second day, after spending the night on the

mountain, she would go to Cua 6ng temple in Cam Pha, a coastal town 50 kilometers

east of Mount Yen Tu, and some additional shrines depending on the available time,

before returning to Hanoi in late afternoon. This is the pilgrimage route that Mr. Bien had

learned from Mrs. Lan and used to lead his group. He, however, makes his journey on a

25
It took my friends and me only half a day to rent a van and buy offerings for our three-day trip to Yen Tu
in 2002.
26
A chairman of the union is usually in charge of organizing trips, religious and secular, for employees in
his/her office, as in the case of the group formed by librarians and administrators at the Library of Social
Sciences in Hanoi. When this group plans to take a pilgrimage, the chairman would ask his friend, who is
working for Chinese-Vietnamese Institute and having ritual expertise, to accompany them.
 31
contrary order as his group would go first to Mount Yen Tu, spend a night at Cua Ong

temple, and visit Kiep Bac temple on their way back to Hanoi. On a one-day trip to Yen

Tu, Ms. Luang and her group go directly to the mountain and visit every single shrine

along the path until they reach the pagoda located at the mountaintop. They then go down

to have lunch in the foothills and return to Hanoi. The group of bank clerks mentioned

above leaves Yen Tu for Ha Long Bay to spend the first night of their trip in this tourist

site where their partners are waiting. Although pilgrims, as I occasionally observed at

Yen Tu, might invite a Buddhist religious to accompany their group to perform rituals

along their journey, even these groups still need a leader who they considered to be a

skilful organizer and a knowledgeable ritual performer. Since leaders of pilgrimage

groups decide the routes they would take, shrines they would visit, and rituals they would

perform, and these leaders can also change their decisions each year, there is no fixed

pilgrimage route or practices.

A common way to look for and join a pilgrimage group is introduction from

friends, and this is the method I used to make contacts with different groups in the past

few years. The owner of a barbershop near my house explained that she had visited Yen

Tu several times with a group of her friends just for 'fun' and had known nothing about

prayer before one of her friends, the owner of a coffee shop in the same neighborhood,

registered for her and some other friends to join the pilgrimage group organized by Mrs.

Lan. 'Her [Mrs. Lan] ritual performances were methodical,' the barbershop owner said

and hoped that she would register to that group hereafter.

 32
I went to Mrs. Lan's house to register for the trip just a few days before the New

Year. Writing my name and address onto the petition27 of the whole group, she asked my

date of birth to check if an additional apotropaic28 ritual were required. She then said that

this year she had only mentioned the pilgrimage plan to a limited number of the Bao An

members in order to reduce the number of pilgrims to one hundred people. 'I am getting

older and no longer can control a group of five hundred people. It was so tiring,' she

explained. Although Mrs. Lan had refused many people who came to register in the last

few weeks, about two hundred people gathered at her house in order to join the journey

and, as mentioned earlier, dozens of them had to sit on the floors of the buses during this

two-day trip.

In 1993, I met one group of students from the Biology Department of Hanoi

National University who came to Yen Tu pursuing their interest in the different types of

leaves at the mountain. On another trip in the same year, I met five young men and their

girlfriends, all in early twenties, who spent most of their time playing cards and

consuming local products at a guesthouse at the site after paying a short visit to some of

the pagodas. A colleague of mine recalled that his first trip to Yen Tu in the mid-1990s

was with his friend's classmates and his main interest was one member of the group who

S&, a red paper written requests to the deities would be read during a ritual performance and burned after
the ritual ended.
Dang sao giai han or ciing sao giai han, literally, offering/worshiping a star [in order to] avert bad luck.
It is believed that there are eight stars (i.e. Thai Bach, KiDo, La Hdu, Thdi Am, Thai Duong, Tho Tu, Thuy
Di$u, and Moc Dire) one by one affect a person annually. Only the first three stars are bad stars (sao xdu)
that require a ritual. Thdi Bach star, worshiped on the fifteenth day of the first month, causes dissipation
and monetary lost, indicated in the saying: 'Thdi Bach, sold out the house' (Thdi Bach ban sach ciea nhd).
KiDo star, causing accident, dissipation, mourning, and illness to women, is worshiped on the eighteenth
day of the first month. La Hdu star, causing lawsuit, accident, illness, dissipation, and sadness to men, is
worshiped on the eighth day of the first month. At Phuc Khanh pagoda in Hanoi, one should pay 70,000
VND to register for a ritual performed on one of these three days. At Sui pagoda in the eastern suburb of
Hanoi, a ritual to worship all three stars is organized on the fifteenth day of the first month for the villagers
and other rituals might be performed on other days by requests from visitors.
 33
later became his wife. Although they are sporadic and not part of the annual pilgrimage,

groups formed by friends, mostly young people, crowd the mountain on weekends during

a pilgrimage season.

A fifty-year-old man operating a teashop at Yen Tu recalled that men and young

people started to visit the mountain as pilgrims in the early 1990s, becoming involved in

a religious practice that was traditionally the province of laywomen. This account was

confirmed by various stories local people told about pilgrims in the past. It is readily

apparent that women still comprise a great majority of pilgrims in Yen Tu today,

however. Recent surveys found that more than 70% of pagoda-goers in Hanoi are women

(Dang Nghiem Van 2001; Hoang Thu Huong 2004). Even when a pilgrimage group is

composed of both women and men, women are in charge of preparing offerings and

performing rituals (Soucy 2003: 125).

Association of Laywomen: Gender, Merit-making and Pilgrimage

The core of many pilgrimage groups is a religious organization, similar to the

Bao An group, usually called an 'association of laywomen.'29 These organizations have

blossomed in the past two decades in Hanoi. Though people living in the same

neighborhood often form an association, members of these religious groups may also

come from other networks such as working or trading partners and friends. A survey of

how people first traveled to a pagoda, conducted in Hanoi and some other cities by the

Institute of Religious Studies in 1998, found that more than 40% of the interviewees were

29
Hoi chu ba, hoi cdc gia, literally association of elderly women. Another common term is hoi vai,
translated as association of laywomen. Although 'elderly' is not a negative term in Vietnamese but a sign
of respect, I prefer the second translation to avoid a misunderstanding in English.
 34
introduced to Buddhism by their friends (Dang Nghiem Van 2001: 250). This

differentiates associations of laywomen in Hanoi from their counterparts in rural areas

where members of such groups live inside a village's boundary.

The association of laywomen, composed of women over fifty years old and aged

widows, was a pre-1954 village organization in the northern delta of Vietnam (Phan Ke

Binh 2003: 258). Though women have actively participated in religious activities in

Vietnam, even in some periods historically recognized as the declining times of

Buddhism (Coughlin 1950: 8; Thien Do 1999), the dearth of accounts of popular

practices of laypersons makes it difficult to know about their activities in the past. 18th

century Buddhist literatures related to Yen Tu school (e.g. Thien Uyen Tap Anh; Tarn to

hanh trgng) only consists of descriptions of the lives of famous Zen masters and their

teaching. In addition, as writing has been a privilege of elite men, I have not been able to

find any biographical accounts of the lives of laywomen. In an article published serially

in two editions of Nam Phong newspaper, Nguyen The Huu narrates a trip with his

parents and their two friends to Mount Yen Tu in 1920. In only one short sentence, and in

a skeptical tone, he writes:

On the day I climbed [to the pagoda at the mountaintop], there was a band of

elderly women from the countryside leading their offspring to crowd [the pagoda]

to worship. A spoon was available in the pagoda; old and young vied with each

other to drink [water in a bronze censer]. They thought that water in this censer is

the nectar, I guessed; I was afraid of the rusty bronze. When they got trouble, they

would blame it on the Buddha (1920: 449. My translation).

 35
Intellectuals influenced by Western modernist theories became quite critical of the

religious activities of associations of laywomen when culture became a subject in the

Vietnamese nationalist discourse in the first part of the 20th century:

It is really a superstitious thing of our women and it is not beneficial to our

people... We should not blame elderly women since women in our country have

no knowledge. Women have no knowledge because the educational system has

not been spread. (Phan Ke Binh 2003: 260-61. My translation)

Such assumptions continued to be applied by researchers after 1954. As a result,

pilgrimage, a popular practice of laywomen, is perceived as informal, and more

superstitious than religious (Dang Nghiem Van 2001: 301). Though Buddhist practices

are legal according to the law of religious freedom, women's religious activities are more

often than not categorized as superstitions, which are officially prohibited. The idea that

Buddhism appeals to the weak and to those of an emotional, rather than rational,

orientation is sometimes used to explain the markedly high number of women among

Buddhist believers in Vietnam (Hoang Thu Huang 2004: 36). These explanations are

inadequate in the face of the number of well-educated retired officials and powerful

wealthy traders who participate in religious activities. Recent studies began looking at

religious practice as a mechanism for empowerment of people who are disadvantaged in

the formal structure of power (Pham Quynh Phuong 2006). Noting that women's

religious practice may be seen as a reflection of the structure of Vietnamese families,

similar to a process of patriarchal orders found in rural Taiwan by Wolf (1972), where

women are considered as outsiders, Soucy suggests:

 36
A large part of the motivation for religious participation by women revolves

around this dynamic of mothers building moral debts to exert control within the

family. (2000: 194)

Some studies have found that the ideal Confucian order of the inferior position of

women to their men (e.g. father, husband, and son)30 does not entirely apply to

Vietnamese society in practice (Coughlin 1950: 3; O'Harrow 1995: 162). Women are

respected as mothers or grandmothers and will be worshipped as ancestors by their

children after they pass away in the same way that fathers or grandfathers are worshipped

(Coughlin 1950: 11). The simple dichotomy of man/public and woman/domestic does not

adequately describe the Vietnamese gender structure since women have traditionally been

actively involved the main economic activities of the country: planting rice and operating

small businesses (O'Harrow 1995: 164). Although the public/private dichotomy does not

preclude women running the household budget, it is being out in the market place

running their own business that challenges the dichotomy.

Women usually describe their religious activities as making merit (cong dire), a

common expression found in other Buddhist societies (Ngaosyvathn 1995: 145).

According to Buddhist doctrines, merit can be gained only through self-cultivation (tu

tap) and must be accumulated in many lives in order to move toward salvation from

rebirth and achievement of Buddhahood {qua vi Phot). In practice, women believe that

Tai gia tong phu, xudt gid tong phu, phu tic tong tu, literally [a woman has to] comply with her father at
home, with her husband after marrying, and with her son after her husband died.
31
The concept of merit was defined by Bodhidhama, the first patriarch of Zen school, in his anecdote. It
was further explained by Hui-Neng, the sixth patriarch, in his 'Dharma Jewel Platform Sutra' (Kinh Phdp
Bao Dan). (Thien Phiic 2003)
 37
their merit can help their parents and ancestors to achieve salvation. They can also share

their merit with husbands, children, and grandchildren to create successful, prosperous,

and happy families. One member of the Bao An group, a former official of the Ministry

of Education, said that since she began practicing Buddhism in retirement her son had

studied better and was able to get a scholarship to study abroad. Her husband, who

worked in the same office, could not accept the fact that his wife, an educated woman,

participated in religious practices. The wife of one of my friends complained that her

husband and children do not care about religion and she had to pray and complete all

required rituals for them. Her husband, however, did not credit her religious activities as

something bringing happiness to his family but saw them as superstitious. My roommate,

a graduate student in economics in Boston, was angry when he heard that his mother had

donated a lot of money to a pagoda near her house in Hanoi. There is other evidence that

husbands and children usually view the religious activities of their wives or mothers as

superstitious and a waste of time and money (Norton 2006: 70).

Such tensions are not the result of a distinction between secular men and religious

women. Studies found that in a pre-1954 Vietnamese village, while women dominated

Buddhism and some other forms of popular religions, men participated in religious

activities performed at the communal house (dinh) and temple (den) dedicated to village

tutelary deities (Luong 1994: 92). In other words, both women and men are involved in a

complex religious world. In addition, men do not reject Buddhism but seek to find moral

values and philosophical ideas in Buddhist texts. Their approach to Buddhism is just

32
The story of one of the ten most important disciples of the Buddha, Muc Ki6n Lien (s.
Mahamaudgalyayana), who rescued his mother from the hell, is usually used to explain this practice.
 38
different from that of women, as Keyes (1984) also found in the Theravada Buddhist

society of Thailand. Women tend to follow some devotional forms of practices, such as

chanting sutras, donating Buddhist religious, and going on pilgrimages as their ways of

making merit. Men regard these practices not as merit making but simply seeking

blessings {cdu phuc) and attach much more importance to meditation as a way to find the

meaning of Buddhist teachings, a position similar to the practice of Zen Buddhist

religious.

Age, Ability and Social Status in Pilgrimage Groups

Mrs. Lan explained why women have to practice some forms and chant some

sutras different from men do:

Men and women have different karma. Because a woman has to cook for her

family, she had killed many beings in her life. Because a woman has to give birth,

her menstruation has polluted water where many beings live. Therefore, women

have to practice to reduce that bad karma. (Field notes 2002)

Some women said that they entered the association of laywomen when they were

clean, a common expression meaning postmenopausal. Phan Ke Binh (2003: 260) notes

that if a member of an association were to get pregnant she would be fined and forced to

leave the group. Menstruation and giving birth not only symbolize a difference of gender

but also pollute the purified sacred space, such that a woman who is menstruating is not

allowed to enter a pagoda, a practice dealing with menstruation as impurity which is

33
Nghiep (s. Karma), a basic concept of Buddhism, the rule of cause and effect: good or bad things that we
encounter are results of what we did in previous lives or of what we have done in this life. Karma can be
produced by activities of the body (than nghiep), the speech {khdu nghiep), and the mind (y nghiep).
 39
found in other religions as well (Douglas 2002: 196; 218). Though laywomen do not have

to follow the sexual precepts of a Buddhist nun, they often keep themselves "clean" from

sexual relations before attending a ritual ceremony or making a pilgrimage. Some also

abstain from all types of meat and alcohol. The duration of such fasting varies from one

to three days or even one week depending on particular personal commitments. They see

being "clean" as being closer to sacredness.

While many women stated that a woman would join the association of laywomen

when she turns fifty years old, in practice each individual finds her proper time to enter a

group. A former teacher of Thang Long high school, located in the same street and near

the house of Mrs. Lan, explained that she had known the Bao An group for years but did

not have time to join before she retired in 2002 at the age of fifty-five. The mother of one

of my friends was about sixty when she entered the association of laywomen in her

village in Ha Tay province after her youngest daughter married. The degree of

participation is not the same among members of an association. Fewer than twenty

members participate regularly in outings organized by Mrs. Lan to chant at pagodas on

the first, eighth, fourteenth, twenty-third, and twenty-eighth days of each lunar month,

while more than one hundred people registered as permanent members of her group.

According to Mrs. Loan, leader of an association of laywomen in Nam MSu, the village

located at the foot of Mount Yen Tu, only three women frequently participate in the

afternoon sutra chanting, though all senior women in her village have registered as

association members. My friend's mother living in Ha Tay said that except she has to
 40
donate money to the group when requested, she only participated on some special

occasions:

I know nothing about Buddhist practices. Living in a village, at my age, I should

enter the association and contribute donations if I do not want to lose my face.

However, I am too busy to join all the pilgrimage journeys and other religious

activities organized by the group. The older people have more free time. (Field

notes 2005)

The lack of available time is more marked in urban areas where employees must

work scheduled office hours. Some women explained that they were able to join the Bao

An group only after they had retired and their children were grown up.34 The fact that

when a woman becomes a grandmother she is almost free from housework and, therefore,

has more time to participate in religious activities is reflected in a saying: 'young [people

find their] happiness at home; old [people find their] happiness at pagodas.'35 Though

having free time does not explain why people turn to Buddhism, it does make sense of

the fact that the majority of members of pilgrimage groups and participants in other

religious activities are women in their late fifties and above.

In some certain villages, associations of laywomen have continued their religious

practices after 1954, retaining the traditional hierarchical structure that honors the age of

its members; there are different titles indicating people younger than and older than

seventy and a special noble title for the oldest member. There are also different titles to

34
The son of a caretaker of Cho& temple in Yen Phong district, Bac Ninh province stated that he knew
nothing about the work of his father since he had to work to feed his children. He then said that he would
learn in order to replace his father's position when he gets older. (Field notes 1998)
Tre vui nha, gia vui chua. The saying is not specific to women's activities at pagodas but refers to
religious activities of elderly people in general.
 41
distinguish new members from those who had belonged to the association for some time

(Luong 1993: 271-72). While age also partly determines the position of a man in a

village,36 the second order, entry date determining the seniority, mirrors the hierarchy of

Buddhist religious. The age of a monk or nun is reckoned from the time he/she is

ordained and is counted by the number of summer Lents he/she had attended.37

Though age is respected, knowledge of religious practices (e.g. chanting Buddhist

sutras or performing rituals) is a primary factor in the hierarchy of the Bao An group, as

reveal in their positions during a ritual performance. During several chanting sessions led

by Mrs. Lan that I observed, she sat in the front, close to the altar. Two and sometimes

three members, skilful at ritual performance, were selected as her assistants and sat next

to her. Mrs. Lan knew well who could use the drum or bell properly. Other members who

remembered the sutra by heart took their seats in a semi-circle behind her. Younger

members and some elder women sat farther away. Once I asked a woman sitting next to a

sill of the pagoda why she did not go inside and instead gave this space to younger

people. She replied that she did not remember the sutra and did not want others to laugh

at her. Her age alone does not determine her position in the group, as is sometimes

observed in the countryside. In addition to skills and knowledge, the number of

pilgrimage journeys one has undertaken, factored into the internal order of a group. To a

36
Beside age (lao hang), the position of a man in a village was determined by his dignitary (chirc sdc),
official position (chirc dich), and education (khod sinh). (Phan Kg Binh 2003: 175-77)
37
This age is called religious age (tudi dad) to distinct from natural/secular age (tudi ddi) and used to
determine his/her seniority among Buddhist religious. A monk or a nun must be forty religious years, for
example, to be nominated by the Buddhist association as a venerable monk {hod thirang) or a venerable
nun (ni truang), the highest title.
 42
great extent, the traditional hierarchy of age-based seniority is in part replaced by a new

order based on abilities and experience.

Associations in Hanoi no longer use traditional terms to identify new and old

members or terms to clarify their hierarchy; even the head of an association has no

special title. Members of the Bao An group refer to Mrs. Lan as group leader (to truang),

a modern term commonly apply to the head of a production team in an agricultural

cooperative or factory or the head of a neighborhood team38 in the city. Other official

terms, such as accountant, are also used within the association. Though associations of

laywomen in Hanoi do not share the traditional structure of associations in rural areas,

leaders of such religious groups are recognized as the ones who are skilful in religious

practices and revered as the ones who maintain 'traditional' religious institutions. The

degree of knowledge of tradition also determines the structural order within an

association.

Other non-religious elements such as wealth and social status also play a part in

determining the hierarchical order of an association of laywomen. Phan KS Binh (2003:

259) observed the high rank achieved by educated and wealthy women in some

associations in the 1930s. A seventy-year-old man I met on one trip to Yen Tu

complained that the pilgrimage organized by Mrs. Lan was more expensive than others

were and one needed to be rich enough to join the Bao An group. Since members of a

group have to contribute monetary donations not only for a pilgrimage journey but also

for a variety of religious activities, such as repairing pagodas, making Buddhist statues,

To dan pho, combining of households in a neighborhood, is the lowest level of administrative system in
the city. Above neighborhood teams are people's committee of precinct (phudng), district (qudn), and city
(thanh pho).
 43
or supporting Buddhist religious, any given association tend to be joined by women in

similar economic conditions. However, donations from different members are never the

same, and this is also reflected in their positions in the group. I observed that a former

high-ranking official of the Ministry of Transportation would always take her seat next to

Mrs. Lan at any event even though her knowledge of Buddhist practices is not considered

as good as that of some others. Such evidence suggests that women's religious

associations are the social fields where they interact with each other, exercise their

power, and gain their social prestige. In other words, participating in religious activities is

not only a mechanism for redefining the power of a woman in her home.39

Religious Activities of Lay women

There is no specific rule for how a woman enters an association of laywomen. My

friend's mother living in Ha Tay province recalled that she just prepared a tray of

vegetarian food to offer at her village pagoda on that day. Others directly registered to the

leader of a group or through an introduction from a friend. However, in order to become a

full Buddhist devotee these women must undertake a rite of veneration,40 which must be

performed by a Buddhist religious. During the main section of the rite, initiates kneel in

In an informal conversation in 2003 with the former director of the Institute of Folkloric Studies, who
conducted field research on the rite of possession for a period of time, he narrated that he observed a
woman beat her husband badly during one section of a ritual and the husband could not do anything against
the "saint" who possessed her. Many participants knew that she was already angry with him before the
ritual started. He added that we could not conclude anything on the relationship between religious practices
and the power exercise between husband and wife from such singular evidence.
40
Quy y or quy y tarn bao, literally return to and depend on three gems: Phgt, the Buddha; Phdp (s.
Dharma), Buddhist teachings; and Tang (s. Sangha), the Buddhist monks. The rite of veneration is different
with the rite of ordination (le thu gi&i), literally to receive the precepts, applied only for Buddhist religious.
The term depend on (y) is sometimes interpreted as robes since a monk would hand over to an initiate a
robe during a rite of veneration and the ceremony is sometimes called the rite of robe covering (li ddp y).
Association of elderly women is also commonly called as association of laypersons {hoi quy).
 44
front of a Buddhist altar and vow to return to and depend on the Three Gems. The monk

then bestows initiates long dark brown robes, which they themselves had prepared in

advance, for them to wear in any ritual performance hereafter. They also receive five

precepts41 that they should follow. The status of an initiated woman is linked to these two

elements of the ritual in the term: to return to the three gems and to follow five precepts

(tarn quy ngu giai).

Usually, an abbot of a village pagoda is responsible for performing the rite when

women living in that village request it of him. In some places where a Buddhist monk is

not available, as in the midland region of Thanh Son district, Phu Tho province, some

women had to go to a pagoda located in the suburb of Viet Tri city, about forty

kilometers away, in order to undertake the rite. In Hanoi, Quan Sur42 pagoda is one of few

addresses that women could come to register to be initiated. As it is the main office of

Buddhist Associations since 1934, Buddhist religious in Quan Su pagoda have

continuously been able to provide the rite of veneration to the masses. Hundreds of

people register for the rite organized at the end of a summer Lent each year, when the

monks are believed have accumulated much merit that they would share with the

participants. Mrs. Lan was initiated in one of these ceremony organized in 1980. Another

41
Ngu gi&i: gi&i sat (s. pranatipata) abstinence from killing; gi&i from (s. adattddana) abstinence from
stealing; gi&i ta dam (s. kamamithyacara) abstinence from improper sexual relations; gi&i vong ngu (s.
mrsavaca) abstinence from lying; gi&i ruau (s. suramaireya) abstinence from alcohol which causes
heedlessness.
42
The pagoda is located in Quan Sur street, Hoan Kiem district of Hanoi. It was built during the Le dynasty
(1428-1788) next to a pavilion (quan) where the envoy (su) from some Buddhist kingdoms used to stay
when they visited the Le court. Quan Sur pagoda was a head quarter of the movement of Buddhist
Revitalization in Northern Vietnam and became the main office of the Tonkin Buddhist Association (H$i
Phat gido Bac Ky) founded in 1934. It was continuously selected as the main office of the Vietnamese
Unified Buddhist Association (//pi Phat gido Thong nhdt Viet Nam) founded in 1960 and later, the
Vietnamese Buddhist Association (Gido hoi Phat gido Viet Nam) founded in 1981.
 45
famous pagoda that absorbs a great number of followers is Phuc Khanh pagoda, mainly

due to the reputation of its abbot. Schedules of the rite of veneration and other types of

ritual, sometimes for the whole year, are glued to the gate providing information for

people to come to register. As a result, there are a number of associations of laywomen

affiliated with these two pagodas.

One of the gems that initiated women must return to and depend on is the Sangha,

or Buddhist religious in general, and the monk or nun who ordained them and his/her

successors in particular. In practice, according to my friend's mother living in Ha Tay,

women in her group have to support the everyday needs of the monk, contribute

monetary donations, and participate in any religious ceremony organized in her village

pagoda. The group organized in 1987 by Mrs. Lan is affiliated to Quan Su pagoda and its

name, Bao An, was given by the abbot, who later became the second Dharma-lord44 of

the Buddhist Association. In a ceremony of giving donations led by Mrs. Lan on the last

day of summer Lent, the sixteenth day of the seventh month in 2004, she and thirteen

other members of the Bao An group stacked hundreds of robes and Buddhist books on

two tables. The tables of other groups were placed along the right-hand hallway (as you

enter) of the pagoda and were also full of donations: instant noodles, books, clothes. At

the end of a morning ritual that closed the summer Lent, when the monks, residents of

Quan Su as well as students of summer Lent school coming from other pagodas, came to

receive donations, all the women were standing at the back of these tables to receive

43
The pagoda was built in present Nga Tur So area, Tay Son street, D6ng Da district of Hanoi. It used to be
a Buddhist school organized by the Tonkin Buddhist Association organized in 1936 and was called Bang
So pagoda.
44
Phdp chit (s. Samgharaja), chief of a Buddhist association.
 46
merit from them. Since this ceremony took place at 7:00 am and it was too crowded

inside the pagoda, Mrs. Lan only invited to a limited number of members of the Bao An

group to accompany her. Other members still received the merit because they had

contributed donations, Mrs. Lan explained. Giving donations to and receiving merit from

Buddhist religious may also be practiced in a more informal way. In the summer of 2002,

Mrs. Lan received monetary donations of 700,000 VND from members of the Bao An

group to give to the cooks, who prepared food for students of summer school organized at

Quan Su pagoda. Sixteen other members in the group have contributed 50,000 VND/per

month for four years, since 2002, to support sixteen poor students of a Buddhist school

also organized in this pagoda.

In 2002, Mrs. Lan organized a 'Group for the protection of Buddhist religious'

health' consisting of about forty members, who are former doctors of Bach Mai and

Vietnamese-Soviet hospitals specializing in different fields, from among the members of

the Bao An group. During three months in the summer that year, they conducted physical

examinations of hundreds of Buddhist religious at four pagodas in Hanoi, where summer

Buddhist Lent schools were organized, and the other two summer Lent schools in Hung

Yen and Ha TSy provinces. Each time, they donated more than 2 million VND of

medicine, mostly from members of the Bao An group and their relatives. A member's

daughter, owner of an optical shop in Bach Mai street, donated 100 spectacles. The Bao

An group also donated to programs of charity organized by Buddhist religious in Quan

Su pagoda, for supporting flood victims or poor schoolchildren. These activities, still
 47
interpreted as merit making, are evidence of the emergence of some new forms of

religious practice.

Together with the offerings loading on the buses to Yen Tu, some rush mats and

aluminium trays could be observed. These supplies would be left at a pagoda on the

mountain as donations after being used for a ritual performance. A local man living in a

village at the foothills remembered that pilgrims used to bring rice and salt to donate to

pagodas in Yen Tu. Even in periods of foodstuffs shortage in the 1960s and 70s,

Buddhist religious still had a plenty of rice that he could ask for when he went collecting

firewood on the mountain. Nowadays, cash has replaced rice, and Mrs. Lan usually asked

her members to contribute money after any ritual. She then brought the collected money

and a small portion of the other offerings to donate to the abbot. The donations made to

different pagodas in Yen Tu were never the same and depended on the relationship

between a group and the abbot of the pagoda. Members of the Bao An group even

donated electric fan and television to one pagoda, while they gave little to some others.

Laywomen's practices of giving donations to and receiving merit from Buddhist

religious not only feed the Sangha, especially with monks and nuns living in remote areas

and in the hard times, but also determines their authorities in Buddhism. Relationship

between laywomen and Buddhist religious is not a one-way process. Since the mid-1980s

Renovation, monetary donations have become abundant proportioned to the rise of

individual disposable income. The amount of given donations, however, depends much

on reputation of Buddhist religious and their ability. In other words, monks and nuns
 48
should be ready to perform rituals or to provide other religious services when they are

requested in order to receive these donations.

Another obligation that initiated women have to return to and depend on is

Buddhist teaching. In practice, printing sutras in order to donate them to Buddhist

religious and to distribute to pagoda-goers is one of popular activities of laywomen. In

her report to a meeting of Buddhist followers organized by the National Front45 in Hanoi

in late 2002, Mrs. Lan wrote:

Each year, on the occasion of lunar New Year, I organized to print 200 copies of

the Sutra of Maitreya (kinh Di Lac) to donate to pagodas and distribute to

Buddhist believers. On the occasion of summer Lent each year, I printed 150

copies of the Ullambana Sutra (kinh Muc Lien or Vu Lan Bon) to offer to summer

schools. I have also printed 2000 copies of the Sutra of Infinite Meaning (kinh Vo

Luang Nghia), 500 copies of the Kuan-yin Sutra (Pho Mon Phdp Hoa kinh), 500

copies of the Prajnaparamitahrdaya Sutra (kinh Bat Nha Ba La Mat Da Tarn Kinh)

to donate to pagodas and distribute to visitors. At the recent meeting of the Ha

Tay Buddhist Association, I printed and donated 100 copies of the Amitabha

Sutra (kinh Adida). I understand that learning and propagating the Dharma is one

way to repay merits of the Buddha.

Members of each association of laywomen selected a particular sutra as their

primary sutra, something that distinguished them from other groups. This sutra would be

Mat trdn to quoc: the governmental body that controls professional organizations (e.g. Association of
Vietnamese Historians, Association of Vietnamese Architects), mass organization (e.g. Association of
Vietnamese Women, Association of Vietnamese Peasants), and religious organization (e.g. Vietnamese
Buddhist Association, Vietnamese Catholic Association), which has its branches in provinces, districts, and
communes.
 49
learned and chanted at any ritual performed by members of that association. Mrs. Lan has

attended Buddhist sermons at Quan Su pagoda since 1980 and started to learn the Lotus

Sutra46 in 1983. When a Buddhist monk from Ho Chi Minh City came to Hanoi in 1997

to preach and organize a Lotus Sutra group (Dgo trang Phdp Hod), Mrs. Lan was

selected as its leader and other members of the Bao An group also followed her. Since

then, Lotus Sutra, the king of all sutras as Mrs. Lan maintained, became the main sutra of

the Bao An group. Some people from other associations joined the Lotus Sutra group as

well. Mrs. Ly, leader of an association of laywomen in Hoang Mai village is one of them.

Members of her group, residents in that village, were all initiated at Hoang Mai pagoda.

The association is called Duac Su group since the members use the Medicine Buddha

Sutra47, believed to be the best sutra to bring a good health, as their primary sutra. From

1975 to 2004, Mrs. Ly visited Yen Tu twenty four times. Though she continues to

organize a pilgrimage group, with about 70 members of Dugc Su group as its core, to go

to Yen Tu every year, she accompanied Mrs. Lan to visit the mountain on the other

occasions and participated in different religious activities as a member of the Lotus Sutra

group. While Mrs. Lan was successful in learning and propagating Lotus Sutra, she also

got into trouble with the abbot of Quan Su pagoda as he thought she was leaving them to

follow a southern monk by practicing his method.

Dieu Phdp Lien Hoa Kinh (s. Saddharmapundarikd) or Kinh Dieu Phdp Hoa, Kinh Phdp Hoa, contains
of seven volumes. In practice, only the last seventh volume (Phdm PhdMori) dedicated to Kuan-yin,
sometimes called Kuan-yin Sutra (Kinh Quan Am), is used to chant during a ritual.
47
Kinh Duac SuLitu Ly Quang Ban Nguyen Cong Dire (s. Bhaisaya guru
vaiduryaprabhasapurvapranidhanavisesavistara), a sutra dedicated to the Bhaisaya Guru (Duac su Phat),
who manages Eastern Paradise (Thien du&ng Dong do).
 50
One afternoon in early 2002, as I was talking with Ven. Thfch Giac Bach at a

pagoda in Quang Yen district, Quang Ninh province, a woman came into the room and

asked him which sutra they should chant on that day. He replied that they should follow

what the abbot, who was away, had taught. After she left, he explained that since he was

ordained and studied in the south, his understanding might not be the same as the abbot's

practices. He was just visiting the pagoda and did not want to confuse these women. Each

Buddhist religious order has its own set of sutras and its own exegesis of the Buddhist

teachings, as well as their own ideas about the ways to use sutras for different purposes.

This fact caused disagreement between different lay groups since a monk or nun always

considers his or her ways to be the only correct ones. For instance, while the women in

Quang Yen district chanted sutras every afternoon at 6:00 pm by themselves, their

chanting should, according to Ven. Thfch Giac Bach, be led by the monk of the pagoda.

Wealth and Merit-making

The last, but not the least responsibility of initiated women is to return to and

depend on the Buddha. This duty is understood to entail taking care of pagodas, where

the Buddha is worshiped. Every day, the women's group in Quang Yen district of Quang

Ninh province assign one woman to stay overnight at the pagoda. Her duties are cleaning

the yard, burning incense, preparing meals for the monks, and keeping the pagoda when

the monks are away. For the women in Thanh San district of Phu Tho province,

responsibilities include donation of labor and material goods, on some special occasions,
 51
such as the death anniversary of the founder or the birthday of the Buddha, to the

pagoda where they received the rite of veneration. Religious activities of associations of

laywomen were an important factor that maintained the continuity of Buddhism,

especially in the period from 1954 to the early 1980s when Buddhist religious were

absent from many pagodas (Luong 1993: 289).

Besides attending five chanting sessions each month, the sermon on the Dharma

every Sunday morning, and some special rituals at Quan Su pagoda where the association

is affiliated, members of the Bao An group have different pagoda-supporting activities at

other pagodas in Yen Tu. Mrs. Lan reported activities undertaken by the group:

In 1994, we donated 500 thousand VND to repair a road on Yen Tu mountain.

Later that year, we refurbished four pagodas and forty-seven Buddhist statues in

Yen Tu. Twenty members of the Bao An have labored with twenty-one

handicraftsmen we rented for a month at the mountain. We donated 40 million

VND for this occasion. Years late, we donated 50 million VND to rebuild a road

at the top of Mount Yen Tu. We also offered 40 million VND when the new Giai

Oan pagoda in Yen Tu was build.

Donating Buddhist statues, another way of returning to the Buddha, is considered

by both religious and laypersons a great method of merit making, although it is mainly

practiced by urban associations. In 2001, the Bao An group donated statues that worth

130 million VND for the newly constructed Van Tieu pagoda at Yen Tu mountain. A

year later, they again donated two bronze statues, each costing about 50 million VND, to

48
Gio to. Since abbots are appointed by the Buddhist Association and lineages of some pagodas
discontinued by different reasons, there are two death anniversaries at some pagodas today. One is
dedicated to the abbot's teacher. The other is offered to the founder of that pagoda.
 52
other two pagodas at Mount Yen Tu. Mrs. Loan complained that since she and other

members in Nam Mau village are poor and she could only donate vegetables from her

garden to the pagoda, the monks at Yen Tu only paid attention to city dwellers, who,

according to her, have a lot of money. Tension between local people and pilgrims has

become more obvious since the mid-1980s Renovation as pilgrims from the city have

more disposable income to spend on donations. On some occasions, Buddhist religious

have to receive an unwanted donation in order to get other supports. An abbess of a

pagoda located in eastern suburb of Hanoi complained that she had to move a 15

century statue of Amitabha Buddha and other old statues to her kitchen to leave room for

ugly new statues donated by a group of believers from Hanoi, who gave her money to

rebuild the pagoda.

A Buddhist monk said that they know each specific address in Hanoi where they

can ask for a donation of statues, funds for repairing or rebuilding pagodas, or printing of

Buddhist texts and other support since each association usually favors one specific

practice. These practices involved far more people than were engaged in the monthly

chanting sessions. Mrs. Lan's three daughters contributed to her donations on each

occasion, for example. Some businesspeople who are not members of the association also

donate when a chance to accumulate merit is announced. The religious activities of

associations of laywomen in the city are a crucial factor in the resurgence of Buddhism in

present day Vietnam.

 53
According to the abbot of Bao Sai pagoda in Yen Tu, the progress of cultivation49

of Buddhist believers would go faster if they had met the Buddha. For people who live in

the time after the Buddha has left this world, visiting relics of the Buddha has the same

effect. Not all pilgrims share the same understanding but most of them consider

pilgrimage a way of making merit. The merit they accumulated depended on the number

of pilgrimage journeys they undertook and the quality of Buddhist religious and

pilgrimage sites they visited. Pilgrimage journeys to holy Buddhist sites have been made

more possible by politic and economic changes since the mid-1980s Renovation. Mr.

Bien, for example, had visited Perfume Pagoda three times in the early 1990s, following

a belief that if one goes to a pagoda three times in three successive years one will get

more merit than those who go in three discontinuous years. Mrs. Ly used to organize a

group on a one-month trip to the south, worshiping at most of the pagodas along the way.

In addition to the annual pilgrimage journey to Yen Tu, on the first day of the first month

each year, Mrs. Lan organizes a trip to Quan Su pagoda and the other pagodas that lay in

the direction determined to be a good direction for that year. She also organizes a

pilgrimage to Perfume Pagoda in Ha Tay province on the second month of lunar

calendar. These trips involved considerably more pilgrims than permanent members of

the group.

Religious Motivation of Pilgrims

Mrs. Lan in talking about her encounter with Buddhism always starts with

relating the following episode about her first trip to Mount Yen Tu in 1963:

49
Tu, following the path (dgo) given by the Buddha.
 54
When I was pregnant the fourth child, I got a serious illness. After a few months

staying at the hospital, doctors could not find out what happened to me though my

health was failing fast. One day, I left the hospital without permission in order to

see my children. On the way home, I met an old woman. When she knew I was

sick, she said that she was going to Yen Tu and persuaded me to accompany her.

This was the first time I visited that mountain. (Field notes 2002)

After this trip, she recovered from her illness and gave birth to her daughter. This

explains why the pilgrimage to Yen Tu is the most important journey of the different

trips she organizes during the year.

Although people do not visit a pagoda or a pilgrimage centre only when they get

sick, health is one of the general concerns that motivate such journeys. Most of my

interviewees said that they pray for good health when going on pilgrimage to Yen Tu or

going to other pagodas. A common expression used to describe their motivation is "go

for cold" (di cho mat me), where "cold" may be interpreted as light, clean, and healthy. A

survey conducted in 2002 showed that 70.1% of informants go to pagodas to pray for

good health, compare to 39.1% praying for good fortune and 9.8% praying for salvation

(Hoang Thu Huong 2004: 41). This evidence supports the assumption that women's

activities at pagodas are less religious. It may also be interpreted from a Marxist point of

view that people turn to religion because of their limited education and poor health; they

are "socially marginal" people who have no access to modern science (Ngo Huru Thao

2004: 6). Such assumptions seem to belie the sophistication of religious activities in some

developed countries today. The participation of many wealthy and educated city dwellers
 55
among pilgrims at Yen Tu also fails to support this explanation. Some member of the

Bao An group are medical doctors working at Bach Mai hospital, one of the biggest

hospitals in Hanoi, and the Vietnamese-Soviet hospital, a special hospital for high-

ranking officials. In practice, seeing a doctor and using Western medicine or performing

a ritual are only two among different forms of treatment Vietnamese turn to, as is

indicated in the saying: to kowtow four directions when you get sick.50 Buddhist monks,

at the same time, do not reject modern treatments. When the 'Group for protecting

Buddhist religious' health' led by Mrs. Lan organized a physical examination for students

at the summer Buddhist Lent school at Lien Phai pagoda in Hanoi in 2003, there was a

healer, a woman in her forties from Nam Dinh province, among the group. While some

doctors were examining and providing medicine for the monks and nuns and some

members of the Bao An group, the healer used lemon to cure pain. Some people took

both types of treatment. There was always a crowd around her waiting for their turn.

When a woman told her that she had headaches and backache, the healer cut a lemon and

rubbed it on this woman's forehead and back. She then hit hard on these parts three or

five times. Mrs. Lan explained that this woman has a special energy and she had cured

many people in Nam Dinh province by this method. Since many people wanted to try this

healing, I was not able to make an experiment with my own stomachache.

Although Western medical treatment has undergone remarkable development

over the last century, some new deadly and uncontrollable diseases, such as AIDS, have

appeared and resulted in tragedy at the end of the 20th century, and other threats, such as

50
Co berth thl vdi tirphuong, literally when you get sick, you should use as much as possible all available
treatments.
 56
SARS or H5N1, are emerging. When cancer took the lives of three men in one year,

including the person chosen to be the next director, the Institute of Historical Studies in

Hanoi organized in 2003 a Buddhist ritual to pray for the health of all members. The

story of an eighty-eight-year-old man, a member of the first Communist Party cell

organized in the vicinity of Yen Tut in 1943, is a good example of why religion is still a

source that people turn to when they get sick:

As a communist, I had to abandon rituals that were considered superstition.

However, as a member of the Dao ethnic group, I must attend ritual performances

as the head of my clan. I, therefore, got a lot of criticism from the Party cell even

though I did not practice. When I got sick and doctors at the district hospital failed

to heal me, I returned home and Dao rituals cured me. I do not know whom I can

believe. (Field notes 2004)

When I visited his house in the summer 2004, three Dao priests were performing

a ritual to catch his spirit in a cap placed on a tea table. At the end of the performance, his

wife took the cap and put it on his head. 'When the spirit returns into my body, I will be

recovered from illness,' he explained. Though his house is located not far from the Yen

Tu pagodas, he only participated in Dao rituals and did not engage in Buddhist practices.

A former actress living in Ho Chi Minh City once narrated the story of how she became a

Buddhist devotee. She had visited Buddhist pagodas with her mother and friends when

she was young but never took it seriously. When her daughter, an employee of a foreign

company, got a disease and they could not find the reason after consulting several

hospitals in the city, she made a prayer at a Buddhist pagoda following advice from one
 57
of her friends. Her daughter then found the problem and got well, using Western

medicine. The former actress now actively participates in Buddhist activities and has

become one of the main patrons of that pagoda. As Keyes (2006: 21) has observed, when

people are confronted by "ultimate conditions" such as chronic or incurable illnesses,

they tend to look for sources in their cultural background in order to confront these

conditions.

Mrs. Lan started to visit Buddhist pagodas more often and learned to chant

Buddhist sutras after her husband died in 1980. To some extent, this crisis, what Keyes

(2006: 21) terms a "universal condition," has turned her to religion. Once I visited the

father of my former classmate a few weeks after his granddaughter had died in a train

accident in Belgium. The whole family lived in an atmosphere of grief. He kept saying

that he could not understand why a young, healthy, well-behaved, and good student had

to die. In a Vietnamese way of sharing sympathy, I told him that since she died young,

she must have joined the angels in heaven already. He replied that 'since I joined

revolution when I was very young and do not believe in any religion, I cannot think in

that way and this is my problem.'

Although people are more concerned with the immediate problems of their

everyday life than with life after death or rebirth, a proper death ritual is extremely

important to both the elder and their offspring. During the complex process of a funeral,51

51
As I observed in the past five year, a Vietnamese funeral is usually a combination of at least three parts:
an official ritual performed by co-workers of the decease with a funeral oration read by an official; a
'traditional' ritual performed by family members with elements derived from the book Thp Mai Gia Li
(Rites of Mai Family) and local practices; and a religious ritual performed by Buddhist religious and
elderly women. In some occasion such as an abnormal death, a priest (thay cung) is also invited. For more
information on the book of funeral, see Patricia Buck Ebrey, Chu Hsi's Family Ritual: A Twelfth-Century
 58
a Buddhist ritual to pray for salvation is performed by Buddhist religious and laywomen

on the first three days and the forty-ninth day and sometimes on the death anniversaries

of the first three years.52 Rituals are more intense for some abnormal deaths, such as an

unjust, accidental, or premature death. In the main part of this ritual, the chanting section,

a sutra of Pure Land (kinh the giai cue lac) is chanted for people who passed the rite of

veneration and followed the five precepts. Other sutras such as Law of Death (kinh quy

luat cdi chef) and Pulling out the Sad Arrow (kinh nho mui ten sdu muori) are chanted for

someone who did not pass the rite of veneration and for heartbroken relatives who do not

understand the reasons for suffering. There are also the sutra Offering the Deceased (kinh

cung thi nguai mat) and the sutra of Karma and Rebirth (kinh nghiep bdo tdi sanh) for

people who do not know the Buddhist teaching of karma and rebirth (Thich Nhat Tu

1998). In short, Buddhist rituals and other practices that makes it possible for people

facing the ultimate conditions of their existence to move in time and emotion toward

some sort of acceptance or even transcendence of these conditions. Since chanting

Buddhist sutras is "an essential component of any funeral," associations of laywomen

were allowed to continue their religious activities after 1954 while new socialist forms

replaced almost every other traditional association in Vietnamese villages, suggests Hy

Chinese Manual for the Performance ofCappings, Weddings, Funerals, and Ancestral Rites (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991).
52
Le cdu sieu, ritual to pray for a good rebirth, can be started eight hours after death when the soul leaves
the human body and enters a new temporary one. The ritual should be performed everyday until rebirth is
completed on the day forty-ninth, especially on every seven days when the temporary body of the soul is
changed. According to Buddhist explanation, the soul can be reborn in a better world if it hears sutras
chanting and receives merit on these days. In practice, the ritual is interpreted as to pray for entering the
Pure Land or Western Paradise (Tdy Phuxrng cue lac) managed by Amitabha Buddha (Adidd Phgt) and
usually be performed on the third day, believed as the day when the tomb opens its doors (ma cica md), and
on the forty-ninth day after death. It is also performed on the fifteenth of the seventh lunar month, the day
when the hell opens its doors (ma ciea nguc), and the death anniversaries.
 59
Van Luong (1993: 289). That "essential component" was the reason many senior men in

Nam Mau village also joined the association of laywomen, as Mrs. Loan recounted:

I have been the head of the association of laywomen in this village for ten years.

The association first gathered of seventy members. Now we have one hundred

and sixty people on the list. All senior people joined the association. Men wrote

their name on the list in order to die happily. Sometime, their wives registered for

them. Men did not participate in religious activities or attended at pagoda. When

they die, many people would come and chant sutras. Some jokingly called our

group as the association of death. (Field notes 2004)

In recent years when Lan pagoda in Nam Mau village was replaced by True Lam

Zen Institute and the monks refused to perform the ritual to pray for salvation at

villagers' houses, Mrs. Loan has encountered the problem of losing members of her

association. At the same time, she could not invite Buddhist religious from other pagodas

in Yen Tu when someone died. 'They said that I should invite the monks at the pagoda I

am affiliated with,' she complained. 'I was given the rite of veneration at Lan pagoda and

cannot leave it.' According to Mrs. Loan, the monks' refusal to perform ritual is one of

the reasons that only two women in the village still go with her to the pagoda.

Since Buddhist monks are only invited to perform the main ritual, chanting sutras

for the deceased, started right after the body is placed into a coffin,53 is one of the

responsibilities of the association of laywomen. The association chants sutras for its

members and also provides ritual performances for close relatives of members, such as

53
Linhgp quart, the first ritual of a funeral, when the death is officially announced and family members
start to wear mourning.
 60
parents or children. Mrs. Lan describes this as the privilege of members of the Bao An

group; the group has provided proper rituals for twenty members when they passed away.

They also pray for the salvation of wandering ghosts as part of some of the rituals

performed on Buddhist celebration days or at special places such as a pilgrimage centre.

This ritual is particularly essential in a country where many families could not find the

bodies of their relatives for decades after the wars ended, and therefore could not perform

a proper funeral, and where deaths brought about by disasters and epidemics break out

every year. On the nineteenth day of the second lunar month in 2006, the day Kuan-yin54

is believed to appear, a ritual to pray for salvation performed by 800 Buddhist religious

was organized in Binh Duong province, 30 kilometres north of Ho Chi Minh City. The

organizer, a businessman who had migrated from central Vietnam, announced that the

aim of this ritual is to pray for salvation of all Vietnamese people, not discriminating

good or bad person, this or other side... with a desire for "salvation of the dead,

prosperity of the living" (Pham Cudng 2006). Similar rituals were organized for people

who starved to death in the 1945 famine and soldiers who were buried at cemeteries in

Truong Son Mountain. Recently, controversial rituals were organized by a Zen Master,

the abbot of Plum Village in France, in three cities of southern, central, and northern

Vietnam for the casualties on both sides during Vietnam-American war.

Dlness and death are two of pilgrims' various concerns. While pilgrims usually go

on pilgrimage in groups, their desires and intentions are always individual. That makes

54
Quart ThiAm Bo Tat (s. Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva), popularly call Quart Am or Phgt Ba Quart Am, is
celebrated three times per year according to Mahayana tradition in Vietnam. They are the nineteenth day of
die second, sixth, and ninth lunar months. On these days, the Bodhisattva appears to save the mankind and
protect the world (ctm nhart do the).
 61
the generalization of Morinis (1992) on pilgrims' motivations became impossible.

Pilgrims, however, share a common understanding that pilgrimage is one of important

practices of making merit, which assist them and their relatives achieve a salvation from

irresolvable problems of their existence. Although Buddhist religious and men reject this

view as superstitious, leaders of pilgrimage groups building around associations of

laywomen have been able to assert their meaning of pilgrimage reflected on the

resurgence of Buddhist pilgrimage since mid-1980s Renovation.

Chapter Summary

This chapter provides an introduction to the renewed significance of Buddhist

pilgrimage in Vietnam, especially northern Vietnam. Although all types of religious

practices, including Buddhist pilgrimage, were banned or strongly discouraged by the

Socialist government from 1954 until the late 1980s, since the adoption of the policy of

Renovation in the mid-1980s, there has been a dramatic upsurge of religious practices.

Such practices have been found once again to offer ways whereby people can confront

such irresolvable problems such as chronic or incurable diseases or death. For some in

northern Vietnam, Buddhist pilgrimage has become such a means.

In this chapter I have examined different aspects of pilgrim's practice: the

formation of groups, hierarchical structures within the group, and the religious

motivations and activities of pilgrims, in order to explore the institutions of pilgrimage, a

popular Buddhist practice that has become a phenomenon in contemporary Vietnam since

the mid-1980s. Buddhist pilgrimage today, as in the past, is carried out primarily by

laywomen. They gather in religious groups called associations of laywomen, one of the
 62
traditional types of village organization in the northern delta of Vietnam. Pagodas

provide a field where women interact and exercise their powers. While urban associations

are no longer constructed traditionally, religious knowledge and traditional institutions

still play an important role in defining their structure. Differences in the way men and

women approach Buddhism are derived to a great extent from Buddhist traditions.

Women in particular have found Buddhism to provide religious meaning for their lives.

The resurgence of Buddhist pilgrimage, however, cannot be fully understood without the

context of political change in the mid-1980s, which will be examined in the next chapter.
 63

Chapter 2: Political Change and the Religious Resurgence

About an hour into the pilgrimage trip to Yen Tu, we stopped in the western

suburb of Hai Duong City for breakfast. Since the new road No. 5 connecting Hanoi and

the eastern seaport of Hai Phong was constructed in the late 1990s, this part of Hai

Duong has rapidly changed from paddy fields into a commercial area with many new

factories, hotels, restaurants and shops. A number of these new establishments belong to

companies that manufacture green bean cakes. The businesses are grouped into

complexes resembling American strip malls. Within these complexes, one can have a

bowl of noodles or buy different types of cakes other and local products. This area is also

a stop for buses on their way to and from Ha Long bay, a popular tourist site in Vietnam

today. A former tourist bus driver said that in order to get more customers, the owners of

these shops have to develop relationships with bus drivers. The drivers are given free

meals any time they stop at a complex, and sometimes also receive cigarettes or tips.

When we arrived, there were more than five buses in a lot in front of one of these

restaurants. Some local women approached these buses to hawk rice cakes and lean meat

pies, hardboiled eggs, and crispy rice they carried in baskets. It was clear that these buses

were all rented for pilgrimage journeys as each of them had a small triangle colorful

festival flags in the front.

After breakfast, we drove on to KiSp Bac temple,55 35 kilometers from Hai

Duong City in Chi Linh district. This temple is the chief shrine of Saint Tran,56 TrSn

55
Den, the term distinguishes a Taoist temple from a Buddhist pagoda (child), a Mother goddess' palace
(phu), or a deities' shrine (jniiu).
 64
Hung Dao (1228-1300), a general who defeated the Mongol armies in the 13th century

and who was later honored as one of the prominent national heroes recognized in official

Vietnamese history. He has long been worshipped as a powerful deity who could control

bad spirits (Pham Quynh Phuong 2006: 34). Saint Tran, therefore, is a patron deity of

fortune-tellers, healers, sorcerers, and mediums. Popular practices of the cult of Saint

Tran in the first half of the 20 century was rituals performed by male mediums (thanh

dong) to exorcize evils from sick women (Phan Ke Binh 2003: 429).57 After decades of

building new Socialist culture and struggling against superstitious activities since early

1960s, such rituals have been prohibited and rarely observed in Kiep Bac temple

nowadays. Saint Tran, however, remains a powerful deity and his main temple is one of

important pilgrimage sites.

Alongside a cement road from parking lot to the temple were many small straw

huts built by local people to provide services to visitors. In some huts, old men with

printed petitions (so) and pens were ready to write names, addresses of their customers.

One had to pay double for a petition written in Chinese, about 10.000 VND, instead of

5.000 VND for a petition written in Vietnamese, since a petition with Chinese letters was

considered more "traditional" and therefore more accurate. One of my friends whose

family owns a similar temple in Hanoi has studied Chinese for years to write petitions.

56
Due thdnh Tran. Although his given name was Tran Quoc Tuan, Vietnamese usually refer to him as Tran
Hung Dao, a combination of his family name, Tran, and his title, Hung Dao Vucmg.
57
In a ritual, it was believed that Pham Nhan or bad spirits would possess a sick person. The medium then
beat the sick person until evils were exorcized (Phan K€ Binh 2003:429). Pham Nhan was a sorcerer who
had magical power that enabled him to grow a new head after being beheaded and who, after his death,
became an evil capable of making gyniatrics, sterilities, and miscarriages. The legend of Trail Hung Dao,
who was able to kill Pham Nhan by beheading him, has made Saint Tran a source of power that is able to
defeat evils (Toan Anh 1969: 211). Saint Tran and his followers can also possess a medium to fight bad
spirits (Ngo Due Thjnh 1996: 38).
 65
He said that the most difficult part of the job was to write Vietnamese names, as they

came from various sources. Another friend joked that although he could not read

Chinese, he could recognize that only a few characters appeared repeatedly in petitions

and he preferred a Vietnamese petition so that he could check his information. In addition

to petitions, these old men also sold incense and flower to use as offerings. In other huts,

people sold rice wafers58 and boiled sweet potato. At the front gate of the temple, some

local women with small change (one, two, and five hundred VND notes) were asking

visitors if they wanted to change money for offerings, while other women offered small

plastic trays for rent.

Mrs. Lan asked me to bring a box of offerings and accompany her to the temple.

Another woman, a doctor at the Vietnamese-Soviet hospital who had been a member of

the Bao An group for almost ten years, was in charge of displaying these offerings on

different altars in the temple. Even though the main festival of this temple is on the eighth

lunar month, in this visit taken on the first month, I could observe a crowd of visitors

worshipping inside the temple since most pilgrimage groups stopped at this temple on

their journey to Yen Ttr. All of the altars were full of offerings and it took us 15 minutes

to find a place for our own. Mrs. Lan then started to pray on behalf of all the members of

our group.

In this chapter, I will examine syncretic practices of pilgrims in connection with

State's policies and Buddhist disciplines in order to explore the active role of laywomen

in keeping their activities through different periods.

58
Bdnh da, a round dry flat rice cake with sesame seeds, about 30 centimeters in diameter, which should be
fired above charcoal before eaten.
 66
Syncretism of Buddhist Pilgrimage and the Classification of Religion

Mrs. Lan knelt down in front of the altar of Saint Tran and prayed for a

prosperous year and a propitious journey. Once she had finished praying, her manner

suddenly changed. She stood up; her eyes were fiery; she swung her arms and loudly

shouted. For a few seconds, she prostrated herself on the floor and repeatedly entreated

the deity for forgiveness. On the way back to our buses, Mrs. Lan said that Saint Tran had

possessed her and asked her to serve (hdu) him. Since she has devoted herself to Buddhist

teachings, she had to beseech him to release her. She added that she has a fate (can) to

serve Saint Tran. Initially she was hesitant to talk about her worshipping of Saint Tran

when I met her for the second time, in early 2002. Later that year, in one of our

conversations, she narrated the condition that drove her to this practice and spoke more

openly about her participation in the cult of Saint Tran:

I was sick. When I followed people to participate in some rituals, they told me

that I must enter mediumship (ra dong). A rite of entering mediumship was

organized for me at Dam Sen temple in Dinh Cong village, [a southern suburb of

Hanoi], in the late 1950s. People taught me how to perform a ritual. I was still

sick. After I visited Yen Tu, my sickness faded away. I devoted myself to

adhering to Buddhist teachings. Buddhist religious persuaded me to stop

participating in other non-Buddhist practices. I organized a rite of exiting

mediumship (thai dong). (Field notes 2002)

Mrs. Lan did not stop performing medium rituals immediately after her first trip

to Yen Tu in 1963, as I had observed her performance to serve Saint Tran in this same
 67
temple during our previous journey in 1993. She sat in front of the altar dedicated to

Saint Tran, dressed in a colorful mandarin like costume and covered her head with a red

veil. A local musician (cung van) was hired to play the liturgical music (chdu van)

needed for that ritual (Ngo Due Thinh 1992; Norton 2000). After a few seconds, her head

and the whole body started shaking, behavior that was interpreted as a sign of possession

by the spirit. She then took off the red veil and asked for a cup of wine and a cigarette,

which marked the male character of the spirit. Later, she stood up, gesticulating and

fighting with a wooden saber held in her right hand. She pointed the other hand to some

members of her group to give orders as to what they should do. She also threw many 500

VND notes to the crowd gathering around her.

Mrs. Lan's performance was typical of a rite of possession,59 a popular form of

ritual performance associated with the Mother Goddess religion.60 The cult of Saint Tran

was no longer observed as a practice restricted to male mediums; it had been merged with

the Mother Goddess practice and rituals were performed by both men and women (Pham

Quynh Phuong 2006: 40). The anniversary of the death (gio) of Saint Tran was combined

with the anniversary of Lieu Hanh, one of the Mother Goddesses, to form the most

important binary religious celebration of the Mother Goddess religion.61 Saint Tra^i was

sometimes ranked at the same level with the five "Mandarins" in the pantheon of this

Len dong or hdu dong, literally to serve the spirits.

Dgo Mdu, a practice that centers on worship of four or five Mother Goddess who manage four palaces
(tuphu): Mother Goddess of Heaven {mdu thucmg thieri), Mother Goddess of Mountains and Forests {mdu
thwmg ngdri), Mother Goddess of Water {mdu thodi), Mother Goddess of Earth {mdu did) and Lilu Hanh
Mother Goddess, and their following deities (Ng6 Due Thinh 1996: 14).
61
Thdng tarn gio cha, thdng ba gidme, literally the death anniversary of the father [Saint Tran] is in the
eighth month; the death anniversary of the mother [Lieu Hanh] is in the third month. (Ngo Due Thinh
1996: 17)
 68
religion. The process of combining the cult of Saint Tran with the Mother Goddess

practice, suggested Pham Quynh Phuong (2006: 51), was primarily the result of political

conditions in Vietnam in the second half of the 20th century. Worshipers belonging to the

Mother Goddess religion were forced to use Saint Tran, an official national hero, to

legitimize their practice, which had been strongly prohibited since 1954. Mrs. Lan

recalled her experiences in the 1960s when she planed to perform a rite of possession, she

had to divide up her ritual clothes63 and give them to her friends to bring to a temple

where the ritual would be performed before she went to that temple in order to avoid

attentions from her neighbors. Some rituals were performed without music in order to

keep them secret (Norton 2000). This suggestion, however, is somehow inadequate since

the special rituals of the cult of Saint TrSn performed by sorcerer-male mediums were

also banded although he was officially honored. In addition, Saint Tran has been merged

with Buddhism as well. Altars of Saint Tran and his followers {Tran trieu) appeared in

many pagodas, especially in the northeast provinces, sometimes replacing the altar of

Due Ong, a guardian of Buddhist pagodas. Buddhist pagodas did not require the same

sort of protection from Saint Tran that shrines of the Mother Goddess practice might

require, since Buddhism, a legally recognized religion, was officially protected. When I

Arrangement of the pantheon of the Mother Goddess religion (from the top down) is as follows: the Jade
Emperor (ngoc hoeing); 4 Mother Goddesses (mdu); 5 Mandarins (quart); 7 Ladies (chdu); 10 Princes (ong
hoang); 12 Princesses (co); 12 Young Princes (cdu); 5 Tiger Spirits (quan ngu hd) and Snake Spirit (ong
lot). (Ngo Dure Thinh 1996: 22)
Only more than twenty of about seventy saints in the Mother Goddess pantheon more often incarnate in a
rite of possession (Ngo Due Thinh 2006: 27). Each medium I knew has a fixed number of incarnated saints,
learned when they were initiated, and they have a specific set of clothes to dress when they are possessed
by a particular saint. Ritual clothes of a medium normally fill a big suitcase.
64
Due Ong is Tir Dat Da (s. Sudatta), a wealthy bourgeois who donated his all property to charity. He
attained enlightenment after listening to the teaching of the Buddha and became the divinity who manages
all Buddhist pagodas. Images of Due Ong have appeared in Vietnamese pagodas since the 19* century
(Tran Lam Bieii 1996: 171).
 69
asked a woman why we needed to visit Kiep Bac temple, a shrine not regarded as a

Buddhist temple, in our journey to Yen Tu, she said that we could only ask for good

health from the Buddha in Yen Tu, so we should stop at this temple to ask for prosperity.

Her explanation might not be the same as others' when Saint Tran was seen as a source

of health and security while the Mother Goddess pantheon brought fortune (Pham Quynh

Phuong 2006: 53). This evidence reveals that for most of pilgrims, there is no clear

distinction between Buddhism and Saint Tran or Mother Goddess. They combine to form

a world, as one monk expressed it, where believers could turn to find the meanings of

their different crises. Ms. Luang, a medium, organized a trip to Yen Tu for group of

market traders in addition to her many other trips to different temples and palaces to

perform the rite of possession. Ki£p Bac temple is still an important destination on any

pilgrimage journey organized by Mrs. Lan, though she is no longer a medium and has not

performed the rite of possession for years. The evidence indicates a long tradition of

syncretism in Vietnamese Buddhism observed Adriano di St. Thecla in the 18th century

(Dror 2002). It should be noted that Buddhism is only one important part in Vietnamese

religious world where Buddhism merged with Confucianism and Taoism to form a triple

religion (tarn gido) (Condominas 1987; Keyes 1995: 196-99). Socialist policies,

therefore, are only one factor that supported the syncretic process of Buddhism.

Official Vietnamese researchers tend to criticize such syncretism as non-religious

practices, asserting that these are instead the fraudulent activities of some people who

have identified a spiritual need to satisfy their monetary motivations. This position is

illustrated in a statement by the former Director of the Institute of Religious Studies:

 70
This sort of belief is in full conformity with the pragmatism advocated by a group

of traders engaged in illegal business, belonging to circles of dealers, smugglers

and corruption. (Dang Nghiem Van 1998: 250)

While some mediums said that they started to worship Saint Tran or Mother

Goddesses to confront personal economic crises, many others said they entered

mediumship on the suggestion of others after they themselves had been sick for a long

period of time and had found no cure despite using different types of treatments. Their

stories were similar to the story of Mrs. Lan. In 2003,1 accompanied a group of mediums

and their relatives to Thanh Hoa province, about 150 kilometres south of Hanoi, to

participate in two rites of possession. When we left Hanoi about 1:00 am, the medium

who was going to perform the rituals was seriously ill; she leaned on her husband's

shoulder and fell asleep. Others were excited about the trip and talked until we visited the

first temple at 4:00 am. After two rituals were performed, activities which lasted from

7:00 am to 6:00 pm, with each ritual lasting about five hours, and only a one-hour break

for lunch and travel from one temple to another, the medium talked and laughed

energetically on the way back to Hanoi while the other pilgrims were utterly exhausted

and fell asleep. This story is one of various pieces of evidence indicating that the rite of

possession is not simply as "a mechanism for generating income" (Fjelstad and Nguyen

Thi Hien 2006: 16).

Catholicism has been a dominant model used by Western religious studies to

build a definition of religion since religion became a subject of scientific interest in the

late nineteenth century (Bowen 1998). Similar to what has been observed in other Asian
 71
countries (Keyes et al. 1994: 5), a Catholic-like definition of religion has influenced

accounts on religious practices in Vietnam since the first half of the 20 century (Phan

Ke Binh 2003) and official 'scientific' studies of religion since 1954 (Dang Nghiem Van

2001). Based on these studies, the ordinance signed by Vietnamese President in 2004

defined a religious organization as follows:

A religious organization is an assembly of believers with the same system of

doctrines, canons, rites, and is organized in a specific structure recognized by the

State. (Chu tich nuac 2004: Article 3.3. My translation)

Without an organization "organized in a specific structure," similar to a Buddhist

association, the cults of Saint Tran and Mother Goddess have been categorized as a belief

{tin nguong) instead of a religion (ton gido). Within this scientific paradigm, a belief was

regarded as a lower form of religion in an evolutionary process, a situation similar to

what Grant Evans (1985) found in the classification of ethnic groups in Vietnamese

anthropology. Such religious classification was not simply conducted for a scientific end,

it played an important role in policy making regarding religious practice. Most beliefs

were not officially recognized by the State, and therefore, not protected by law. One of

the officials in charge of writing the 2004 "Ordinance regarding beliefs and religion"

recalled that an early draft of the ordinance did not cover "the field of beliefs' activities"

before they received comments from the chairman of the National Front, regarding a

great number of followers of unrecognized religions (i.e. Beliefs were left outside the

official laws regardless their great number of followers) (Bui Due Luan 2004: 48).
 72
After a ritual performed at a famous temple in Hang Quat street in Hanoi, the

temple medium65 (dSng din) asked the former Vice General Secretary of the Association

of Vietnamese Folklorists why the practice of Mother Goddess worship was not

recognized as a religion when his followers called him as "teacher" (thay), similar to the

address of Buddhist monk.66 In practice, the relationship between a network of mediums

has with a temple is similar to the connection an association of laywomen has to a

pagoda. In both cases, local groups know little of other such groups, and have even less

knowledge of a central Association. In each case, group members learn doctrines, canons,

or ritual performances from a temple medium or an abbot with whom they are affiliated.

These local practices were one of the reasons for the failure of an attempt, during the

establishment of Thien Tien Thanh Giao67 in 1953 (Nguyen Hiru Thong 2001: 56), to

organize a unified association of Mother Goddess practice in central and southern

Vietnam. In 2003 when I visited the official temple of this association, built in 1965 in

Hue\ in central Vietnam, it was almost abandoned, while the Hon Chen shrine in a suburb

of the city had a crowd of believers. In other words, building a formal association is not

the main concern of believers.

The former director of the Institute of Folkloric Studies in Hanoi deserves credit

for his studies of Mother Goddess practice as part of an effort to seek official recognition

for this religion. He and his colleagues have conducted research and published a number

5
Dong den, a medium who takes care of a temple and who is capable of leading a ritual called a rite of
palace opening (le maphu) to initiates a medium, in which the temple medium would teach an initiated
medium how to perform a rite of possession.
66
Notes are from an informal conversation with Professor Tran Qu6c Virgng in 1995.
67
Thien [Ban] district, Tien [Huang] village in Nam Dinh province in Northern delta of Vietnam is
believed as the place where Lieu Hanh Mother Goddess descended. The term Thanh Gido (religion)
expressed the hope of its organizers that it would be recognized as a religion (Nguyln Hthi Thong 2001:
57).
 73
of books on Mother Goddess practice since the 1990s, and have organized an

international conference on this topic in Hanoi in 2001. His term "Mother Goddess

religion" (dgo Mdu) has been used by some temple mediums. However, worship of the

Mother Goddess pantheon has not yet been officially recognized as a religion and the

prohibition on this practice has not been lifted. In addition, many mediums I knew were

not aware of that new term and continued to call their practice "serving the spirits."

On one occasion, Mrs. Lan narrated that it was the abbot of Quan Su pagoda who

persuaded her to stop practicing the rite of possession. Efforts to separate other practices,

especially the Mother Goddess religion, from Buddhism were previously undertaken in

the movements of Buddhist Revitalization in the 1930s. These efforts were successful in

Hu6, where most of altars of Mother Goddess were detached from Buddhist pagodas (Le

Nguyln Luu 1995). However, this movement was interrupted in Northern Vietnam in

1954 with the establishment of the Socialist state. Most pagodas have continually

constructed in a common pattern of "Buddha is in the front; Mother Goddess is in the

back."69 In 1994,1 observed a ceremony organized before a summer Lent in Dinh Quan

pagoda in Tvr Liem district, a western suburb of Hanoi. After the abbess had finished her
70

rituals and moved to the "founders' hall," local women started to perform a rite of

possession at an altar to the left of the Buddhist altar. It was common in a number of
In unpublished documentary film, Love Man Love Women, conducted by Nguyen Trinh Thi, the main
interviewee, a famous temple medium in Hanoi, used the term "Mother Goddess religion" and otfier
information from Ngo Diic Thinh's book, Dgo Mdu a Vi$t Nam (Mother Goddess religion in Vietnam), to
describe his practice.
69
Tien Phgt hgu Mdu, literally a Buddhist pagoda/altar is built in the front and a shrine/altar of the Mother
Goddess is built in the back of that pagoda/altar.
70
Nha td or td dieting, a building where altars of B6 D6 Dat Ma (s. Bodhidharma), believed as the first
patriarch of Zen school, founders of the abbot's monastery, and religious who used to stay at the pagoda are
placed. The building, located at the back of a pagoda, is also used to receive visitors and has a room for the
abbot to stay.
 74
villages to find that the women who chanted Buddhist sutras in a pagoda and the women

who worshiped Saint Tran and Mother Goddess at an altar or a shrine nearby were the

same people.

An abbot of a pagoda in Hai Duong recalled that he had to rebuild a shrine of

Mother Goddess next to his pagoda in order to draw followers. 'If you did not have an

altar of Mother Goddess in your pagoda, even local women in your village would leave

for another pagoda to worship and donate,' he said. He and some other monks he knew

used to learn and perform the rite of possession when it was requested. He explained that

according to Buddhist teachings, a religious can use any means to attract people to

pagoda. Then one could teach them to follow Buddhist teachings and persuade them to

abandon other practices. He added that performing the rite of possession was not wrong

since Saint TrSn and Mother Goddesses were deities in the same world controlled by the

Buddha. A short ritual performed outside a temple or palace before any rite of possession

I observed was explained to me as a rite dedicated to the Buddha, Kuan-yin, and local

guardian deity. Another monk, an abbot of a pagoda in Dong Tri&i district, Quang Ninh

province, known for his beautiful performances of the rite of possession in Yen Tu

mountain in the 1980s, simply said: 'Those women needed a ritual; I needed some

money.' It was not that mediums had to combine Mother Goddess with Buddhism, an

official recognized religion, in order to legitimize their practice. In contrast, the syncretic

practices of believers have supported Buddhist monks and protected many pagodas when

monks were absent.

 75
'Abolish Depraved Customs and Preserve Cultural Values'

Marxism, the dominant perspective toward religion in northern Vietnam after the

war of resistance against the French ended in 1954, assumed that religion would be

replaced by a new scientific worldview in the process of socialist industrialization. In

addition, government campaigns based on this assumption have, since the 1960s, tried

actively to bring an end to practices labeled 'superstition'71 and to build a 'new socialist

culture'. A lesson to cultural cadres' responsibilities from the Party Secretariat in 1961,

repealing the Resolution of the third General Meeting of the Vietnamese Communist

Party (VCP) in 1960, stated:

The goal of the socialist revolution in ideologies is to cause the ideology of

Marxist-Leninism fully dominate the spiritual life in our country and become the

ideological system of all people, the foundation for the building of a new morality

of our people... We should actively, through cultural activities, propagate, teach,

and mobilize the masses consciously to practice new way of life, slowly get over

backward habits and way of life, and abolish superstitions and depraved customs

to build the new man. (Ban Bi thu 1961. My translation)

The view that superstitious activities are backward elements incompatible in the

process of modernization could be traced in Vietnamese nationalist discourse and that of

some other Asian countries in the first half of the 20th century (Keyes et al. 1994: 2). The

impact of this political change on religious practices was best described in the story of an

71
Me tin di doan: Regulations 56-QD/CP in 3/18/1975, signed by Deputy Premier Le Thanh Nghi, defines
superstition as practices of telling fortunes (xem boi), horoscopy (xem sd), palmistry (xem tu&ng), spirit
mediums (goi hon), possession (len dong), shaking divinatory wands (xoc the), using amulets (yim bha),
worshipping ghosts (cung ma), exorcizing (bat ta trie ma), carrying joss-stick pots (doi bat nhang), burning
votive papers (ddt vang ma), faith healing (phu phep chita berth). (BVHTT 1979: 16)
 76
eighty-eight-year-old man who was a member of the first communist cell of a commune

in Yen Tu in 1943:

In French times, rituals were not banned. They allowed us to perform big rituals,

but there was no money. I joined the communists to fight against the French for

freedom. When we were liberated, rituals were prohibited. (Field notes 2004)

According to a former cultural cadre who was in charge of Yen Tu pagodas from

1973 to 1983, his work was mainly to guide pilgrims and prevent superstitious activities.

In 1976, all mediums and priests in Uong Bi town gathered at cultural office for a month

to learn the policies against superstition, taught by this man and a police officer.

Officially, organized religions enjoyed the status of freedom in comparison to

superstitious activities, which were strictly prohibited. In practice, there was no room for

religion in the "socialist morality" of the "new socialist man" (Marr 1986: 130; see also

Truong Huyen Chi 2004: 124-25). Article 2 of the Fiat signed by Vietnamese President in

1955 order religious professionals to complete all the obligations of a citizen (Chu tich

nuac 1955). As a result, Buddhist monks were expected to work as members of

agricultural cooperatives. The abbot of a pagoda in Hai Duong province once showed me

some documents written by his teacher; one of them was a record of the 1964 competitive

quota of the Buddhist monks in Tu Liem, a suburban district of Hanoi. I quote here

from my notes:

Chi tieu thi dua, a norm proposed by a cooperative at the beginning of a year for its members competing
to achieve. A trick used to be applied was to propose a lower norm so that the cooperative would produce
over norm {yuat chi tieu) at the end of a year and its members would receive bonuses.
 77
Saving money: 6,000.00 VND;73 Planting different types of trees: 2220 trees;

Raising 370 pigs and 2220 poultry; Producing 370 tons of fertilizer. (Field notes

2004)

Buddhist religious also had to work in the fields provided to them by local

officials after the 1954 Land Reform, to supply their everyday needs and to pay

agricultural dues (Chu tich nuac 1955: Article 10; 12). The monks and nuns received

support from cooperatives on some occasions when more labour was needed, such as

harvest time, as I observed when I was evacuated from Hanoi and stayed in a pagoda in

Ha Tay province in 1972. State policies have, to a certain degree, destroyed the

charismatic character of Buddhist monks, which has resulted in their losing respect

among local people. Some Buddhist religious recalled that all religious professionals used

to be discriminated against as idle agents in a country where everyone should contribute

their labors to build a socialist society.

The documents mentioned above also show that most of 109 Buddhist religious in

Tu Liem district in 1964 were fifty-years-old and above; the oldest nun was the abbess of

Phu Do pagoda in Me Tri commune, about ninety-three-years-old. From the point of the

Prime Minister's 1964 Notification to implement religious policies, which required that

ordination and nomination of religious professionals should be approved by an

appropriate office, until 1981 when the Vietnamese Buddhist Association was

established, there were almost no ordinations. Many Buddhist religious in Tvr Liem

Income of a new State's employee was 36.00 VND/month in 1960s. There were 17 monks and 92 nuns
taking care of 74 pagodas in Tir Liem district in 1964, according to these documents.
 78
district had no student and some of them died a few years later without successor; their

pagodas were abandoned.

Some studies have found that socialist cultural reform strongly targeted the ritual

activities of men in communal houses (dinh), the former centre of political power in the

feudal and colonial past. As a result, practices were banned and communal houses were

dismantled or converted to offices for village cadres and party members (Luong 1994:

92-94). However, it did not follow that because the ritual activities of women in pagoda

were not a threat to new political order, their practices were accepted and pagodas were

safe, as suggested Malarney (2002: 102). Although all pagodas and religious edifices

were protected by 1945 Fiat and the freedom of belief and worship were protected by

1955 Fiat, both signed by the Vietnamese President, Buddhist practices were "merged

into the broader category of superstitions and were therefore suppressed" (Malarney

1996: 551). Reactions of village officials toward pagodas and other religious edifices

after 1954 varied from place to place. Once the Prime Minister signed a Decree to

regulate the preservation of historical heritage in 1957, an officially recognized historical

pagoda received greater protection than other pagodas. An abbot of a pagoda in Hai

Duong province recalled that in the 1960s, his teacher and other monks had to entrust

worship objects that they thought valuable to some historical pagodas in the province,

such as Con Son pagoda, in order to protect them. Second, a pagoda located near the

central administration was safer than a peripheral one. A student from Quang Binh

province, 640 kilometers south of Hanoi, said that she had never seen a pagoda in her

hometown before she came to study in Hue\ The director of the Central Institute of
 79
Cultural Studies explained that all pagodas in that province were destroyed in the late

1950s and early 1960s.74 Third, a pagoda protected by an abbot would not be used for

other functions or destroyed, unlike the situation of pagodas where religious were absent.

The situation of Buddhist pagodas in this period can bee seen in the 1960 Instruction

from the Party Secretariat:

[Officials] should not use pagodas that are for worshipping the Buddha for other

purposes. [Officials] should protect historical pagodas, places of scenic beauty

containing ancient relics. Other buildings around pagodas that have not been used,

[officials] should get permissions from Buddhist monks if [officials] want to

borrow and should not force [the Buddhist monks]. If it really needs for a school,

[officials] can borrow non-historical pagodas where people have not worshiped

for a long time and Buddhist monks are absent. However, [officials] should not

use them for some purposes that might offend the beliefs of Buddhist followers,

such as storage of fertilizer, an obstetric clinic; and should not destroy statues or

sell statues and worship objects. Pagodas, which are ruined, not worshiped in for a

long time, or absent of Buddhist monk... can be dismantled. (Ban Bi thu 1960. My

translation)

This Instruction revealed the fact that violations of Buddhist pagodas and

religious edifices in general have been carried out by local officials since 1954, and these

violations did not stop after the Instruction was issued. When I accompanied my

grandfather to visit a pagoda in Ha Tay province in 1972, it was occupied by a military

74
A similar story of destroying religious buildings took place in a commune in Nghf An province, a
revolutionary region since 1930s, was narrated in a recently banned V6 Van Tree's novel, Cong reu dirai
day ao (A moss in the bottom of a pond), (Hanoi: Nxb Hoi Nha Van, 2007).
 80
unit. Since the pagoda was being used as a kitchen by the soldiers, he had to ask a soldier

to scoop the coal that covered a stone stela which he wanted to read. The abbess of Pho

Minh pagoda, an official historical site in Nam Dinh province complained that the pagoda

had been used as a warehouse by a local cooperative for many years, a common story that

could be heard in many villages in pre-Renovation Vietnam (Luong 1994: 94). 'Only the

main altar was untouched. The rest was a mess, especially during harvest time,' she said.

The pagoda was returned to her in the late 1980s when the cooperative broke up, and the

famous stupa of this pagoda became a tourist attraction. A caretaker of Choa temple in

Bac Ninh province could remember the names of the officials who had dismantled some

parts of the temple to build their houses after 1954 and how they and their children had

gone mad or died of unusual or abnormal causes. Although he could not provide a clear

connection between the activities of destroying shrines or statues and ill fortunes, he and

other villager believed that there is a spiritual punishment for these acts. Such beliefs also

existed among the officials. A sixty-year-old man in Thanh Ba district, Phu Tho province

recalled that in the 1954 land reform campaign, local cadres ordered his uncle, a landlord,

and some other counterrevolutionaries to destroy village shrines with the fear that they

might get mad if they did it by themselves. 'These cadres all died young anyway,' he

added.

In Hanoi, as well, new settlers have occupied most of the land around pagodas

and other religious edifices since 1954. Many pagodas could no longer use their front

doors since they were blocked by houses and believers had to go through tortuous alleys

to enter these pagodas. An official of the Department of Preservation and Museum,

 81
Ministry of Culture, once complained that many of the people building their houses

around pagodas in Hanoi were cadres who had been officially provided the land with

legal papers, and this slowed present restoration projects at some pagodas that were

officially recognized as historical sites. Official decisions that changed pagodas and

religious edifices into residences or opened them to public use have disenchanted

religious practices and secularized religious spaces, indicated in the saying: "Familiarity

breeds contempt."

Since religious practices were considered a waste of time and money

incompatible with the activities of the new socialist man, agricultural cooperatives, state

factories, and government offices all forbade their employees to participate in these

practices. However, Buddhist practices were not totally abandoned during three decades

of building a new socialist culture, especially when the new form failed to provide an

alternative meaning insert to that of a Buddhist ritual. For example, chanting sutras helps

the soul of a deceased go to the other world and the socialist ideology did not offer and

acceptable alternative funerary ritual (Luong 1993: 289; Malarney 1996: 551). During my

three month stay in a pagoda in 1972,1 observed local women performing rituals at this

pagoda at least twice a month, on the first and the fifteen days of the lunar calendar and

also on some ceremonial days. Mrs. Lan recalled that her ritual performances used to be

shorter. It was partly due to her limited knowledge of performing rituals before attending

in lectures operated in Quan Su pagoda since 1980. 'My offerings were poorer because I

was poor,' she repeated a common expression of most Vietnamese about the period

before the 1986 Renovation. Buddhist practice were suppressed but never prohibited,
75
Gdn chua goi But bSng anh, literally when one lives next to a pagoda, one calls the Buddha as brother.
 82
especially inside a pagoda. This was partly due to the role of Buddhists in the

Vietnamese-American war, indicated in the 1960 Instruction:

[Officials] should know that Buddhism in the North still has a certain importance.

There are 4,000 Buddhist monks and some believers in the North. Buddhism also

has a larger force in the South and has international influence, especially in

Southeast Asia. If we do well the official tasks toward Buddhism, [we] not only

win over Buddhists in the North, but also are better positioned to mobilize the

Catholics, advantage to win over Southern Buddhists, and win over public

opinion of international Buddhists. (Ban Bi thu 1960. My translation)

Just as Mrs. Lan concealed her participation in Mother Goddess practice, so too

was Buddhist pilgrimage carried out secretly. A woman living in Quang Yen district

remembered that she had to hide offerings at another place before going to Yen Tu.

Members of her production brigade, observing her leaving home with nothing in her

hands, would not know that she was making a pilgrimage, an activity that might cost her

many work points. While pilgrims were not prohibited from visiting pilgrimage centers

and other destinations along their journeys, they had to hide their practices from officials

and neighbors at their point of departure. This was a common experience among

pilgrims, described in their stories about their journeys to Yen Tu in the pre-renovation

period.

It is interesting to note that the campaigns against superstition made Yen Tu

popular. The former cultural cadre recalled that before office building of the Management

Committee was built in 1992, officials such as local cultural cadres, police officers, and
 83
members of the National Front could only stay on the mountain during the daytime

because of its remote location. At night, visitors were free to perform their rituals,

especially the rite of possession. Pilgrims have continuously found their way to Yen Tu

since the early 1960s, only pausing during the short period of time when the border war

between Vietnam and China broke out in 1979.

The loosening of State control over religious practices after the 1986 Economic

Renovation program launched by the Vietnamese government has brought a resurgence

of religion, observed by researchers:

Christianity, both Catholicism and Protestantism, is in full swing. Ancestor

worship has come to occupy a prominent position. Buddhism has prospered.

Ritual festivals, pilgrimage, mediums, divination and horoscopy are animated.

Some "new religious phenomena" have made their appearance. Churches,

pagodas, temples, shrines, ancestor worship halls, tombs and graves continue to

be built or restored. Ceremonies of betrothal, marriages and funerals, birth and

death days are observed; feasts and parties are held to celebrate promotions or

housewarmings. (Dang Nghiem Van 1998: 233)

The resurgence of religious activities led to the Decision 24 of the VCP Political

Bureau that recognized "religion, as a need felt by part of the population, will exist for a

long time" (Quote from Dang Nghiem Van 1998: 233). Not only did the VCP give up the

Marxist phrase "disappearance of religion," the Party also begun to consider religion

something worth preserving and promoting, as part of a distinctive Vietnamese national

culture. This change was partly due to the concern that Vietnamese national identities
 84
would be lost in the process of globalization when Vietnam enters the world market,

something about which Vietnam has no choice (Soucy 2003: 129).

Under the umbrella of preserving 'traditional culture,' many religious texts such

as sutras, precepts, teachings, and research have been published and republished in

different forms, as books, compact discs, and audio tapes. In the 1998 "Temporary

Regulations," the Ministry of Culture decreed that only officially recognized religious

associations are able to put out publications and that they should register with only the

three appointed publishing houses. However, one could find different types of religious

publications from various publishers selling at a bookstore located next to the gate of

Quan Su pagoda and two others on the other side of Quan Su street, not mention some

vendors selling their books on the sidewalk outside the pagoda.

Religion is no longer a sensitive subject and conducting research on religious

activities has become more accessible and encouraged in order to find elements of

Vietnamese national culture. Some religious practices which had been classified as

beliefs were promoted as pure traditional Vietnamese religions, such as the ancestor

worship religion (Dgo tha cung to fieri) and the Mother Goddess religion (Dao Mdu)

(Dang Nghiem Van 1996: 87; Ngo Due Thinh 1996: 14).

The liturgical music (chdu van) played in a rite of possession was collected and

published as an effort to preserve this Vietnamese traditional music (Ngo Due Thinh

7
Hanoi Publishing House is responsible for publications of religious organizations whose offices located
in Northern Vietnam (From Thanh Hoa province to the north). Thuan Hoa Publishing House is responsible
for publications of religious organizations whose offices located in Central Vietnam (From Nghe An to
Binh Thuan province and three provinces in Central Highland). TP H6 Chi Minh Publishing House in
responsible for publications of religious organizations whose offices located in Southern Vietnam. (B6 Van
hoa Thong tin 1998)
 85
1992). A festival of "Folkloric Performances to Serve Spirit" (Dien xuang dan gian hdu

Thanh) was organized on the death anniversary of Saint Tran in 2006 at Kiep Bac temple

by the Ministry of Culture, and participated in by some provincial ensembles. The

Chairman of the Association of Vietnamese Folklorists commented that although the

performances of these ensembles were not the same as rituals performed by believers, the

festival marked the first official recognition of the spiritual and artistic values of the rite

of possession (Viet Van 2006: 5). The head of the Kiep Bac Management Committee

announced that the festival script, written and directed by the Institute of Cultural Studies

in Hanoi, would affirm the distinctive feature of Kiep Bac festival and limit superstitious

and negative elements of the rite of possession (TTVH 2006).

Superstitious activities are still prohibited according to Article 5 of the 1991

Decree, "Regulations on Religious Activities," from the Council of Ministers and Article

8.2 of the 2004 "Ordinance regarding Beliefs and Religions." However, defining which

activity is superstitious varies from one province to another and from one shrine to

another. During a one-day trip in 2003 with a group of mediums and their relatives to

Thanh Hoa province, about 150 kilometers south of Hanoi, I saw a big board that list all

superstitious activities that should not be performed in the temple placed in the front gate

of every temple we visited. I could not, however, see any local cultural cadre or police

office who came to check the two rituals, each lasting for five hours, that were performed

at two temples on that day. This is contrary to the experience of mediums before 1990s as

they reported it to me. In another trip in 20041 accompanied the association of laywomen

of Hoang Mai village to go to a pagoda in Thanh Son district, Phti Tho province, 100
 86
kilometres northeast of Hanoi, to donate some Buddhist statues. A local cultural cadre

came to the pagoda and ordered them to stop performing a ritual. The organizer of the

group, Mrs. Ly, had to explain to him that she and other women were going to perform a

rite of calling spirits to enter statues for the donated images and that since this was a

Buddhist ritual she did not have to ask for permission. She also added that the ritual

would bring much merit to the village. At the end, the official had to allow them to

perform the ritual but for reasons of security, they had to leave the pagoda before sunset

instead of starting to perform after sunset as they had planned. It was interesting that the

cultural cadre also used Buddhist canons in his argument when he asked Mrs. Ly why she

had not invited a Buddhist monk to perform the ritual as it should be performed. Thanh

Son is the farthest district of the province; Buddhist monks are absent in this hill area.

Women in some villages of the district had to travel 20 kilometers to Viet Tri, the

provincial town, to find a monk. They had built this pagoda two years before, but they

were too poor to buy Buddhist statues. One villager settled in this new economic zone in

1960s returned to her hometown, Hoang Mai village, and asked Mrs. Ly and her group to

donate some statues. However, they could not afford to invite a Buddhist monk from Viet

Tri to perform the ritual. Since no such ritual had been performed in this district, the

official was more anxious about their activities. In other words, the openness of local

officials toward religious practices is not only directed by central policies but also shaped

by local political and economic conditions.

Pilgrims no longer have to hide their activities. State officials participate in

different religious practices without the fear of being fined. Although some officials
 87
come to religious festivals to carry out their secular duties, attending opening ceremonies,

many others joined groups to participate in religious rituals or to visit pilgrimage sites as

a result of religious motivation. Criticism of officials for misusing official and state-

owned vehicles to go to pagodas has appeared in newspapers for years (Le Hong Ly

2003).

The Establishment of Vietnamese Buddhist Association

Buddhism, with its connections with two heroic dynasties in official Vietnamese

history, the Ly (1010-1225) and the Tran (1226-1399), was considered a significant

component of traditional Vietnamese culture, an important part of a nation-building

process that could be found in other new nation-states in Asia (Keyes et al. 1994: 5). Ly

and Tran dynasties are also the symbol of a 'golden age' of Vietnamese Buddhism when

Buddhist monks and nuns were 'unified' in one single orders and Buddhism was the

'national' religion. The construction of a unified Buddhist association was one of the

main themes raised by the movements of Buddhist revitalization,77 in which some

nationalist and Western-educated intellectuals were involved in the 1930s (Le Nguyln

Lira 1995). The outcomes of these movements were the establishment of three Buddhist

organizations in Saigon (1930), Hug (1932), and Hanoi (1934) (Nguyln Lang 1994: 22-

23). It was not until 1981, however, that a meeting of delegates to unify Vietnamese

Buddhism was held in Hanoi to establish the only legal Buddhist Association in

Phong trao Chan hung Phgt gido: results of these movements were the establishments of Cochin-China
Buddhist Studies Association (Hoi Nam ky Phgt hoc) in the South in 1931, An Nam Buddhist Studies
Association (Hoi An Nam Phgt hoc) in Hu§ in 1932, and Tonkin Buddhist Association (Hoi Phgt gido Bdc
ky) in Hanoi in 1934. (Nguyln Lang 1994.3: 22-23)
 88
Vietnam78 (Thich Trf Thu 1981: 2). Since then, the Association and its provincial

branches have become the sole authority with the right to organize a rite of ordination.79

This rite is usually organized at the end of a summer Lent, when Buddhist monks are

believed to have accumulated more merit, and takes place in a pagoda where the main

office of a provincial Buddhist association is located. After being ordained, a new monk

will receive an identification card issued by the Association. On the one hand, this

regulation promoted the continued existence of Buddhist orders, especially in rural

northern Vietnam where having a novice was not easy in the 1960s-80s. Many Buddhist

monks died without students and their pagodas were abandoned for decades. People who

were later devoted to the care of these pagodas found it difficult to get instruction and be

ordained.81 They sometimes had to go to cities in order to find teachers who were able to

ordain them. Finding instruction might have been impossible, however, without the

support of the state.

On the other hand, novices and monks were no longer permitted to be ordained

by their own schools. Ven. Thich Giac Bach explained that according to Buddhist law,

ten monks are sufficient to organize a rite of ordination; in a peripheral area where

78
Beside the United Vietnamese Buddhist Association (Gido hoi Phdt gido Viet Nam Thdng nhat) formed
in Saigon in 1964, a number of Buddhist schools, such as the Long Hoa Hoi, a millennial movement
worshipping the Maitreya Buddha and a number of deities and national heroes, in Quang Ninh province,
have continually and unofficially existed since 1981.
19
Giai dan (s. mandarava): in an official form, a broad that performs this rite is formed by ten Buddhist
monks including three teachers (i.e. a head of the rite, a manager of ritual orders, and a teacher (s. acaryd)
who gives precepts to the ordained people), and seven observers.
80
A Buddhist ID includes a picture, birth name and Buddhist name of ordained monk, names of the three
teachers, and the date of ordination.
81
In a rite of ordination organized in 2006 in VTnh Phuc province, a hill region northwest of Hanoi where
monks were rare, 36 people were ordained. Among them, three were monks (tang); seven were nuns (ni);
others were novices (sadi) (Phuc Thinh 2006). In a similar rite organized in the same year in Ba Ria Vung
Tau province, southeast of Ho Chi Minh City, 883 people were ordained. There were 331 monks and 552
nuns (Thich An Lai 2006).
 89
Buddhist monks are rare, only four monks are enough to perform the rite, as they need

only one observer. He had been ordained in a similar rite performed by the abbot and

other monks of a Zen institute in Ba Ria Vung Tau province, where he entered the

monkhood in 1995. Three years later, he and the other monks of this Zen institute had to

be ordained again in a rite of ordination organized by the Ba Ria Vung Tau Buddhist

Association in order to receive identification cards and be registered by the provincial

authorities as legal Buddhist monks. He has had no contact with the provincial monks

who ordained him after the rite ended and he has continually studied with the abbot of bis

pagoda.

Insisting that the unification of different practices is the goal of his school, a

lecturer I met in 2004 at a summer school organized at Co Le pagoda in Nam Dinh

province, 110 kilometres south of Hanoi, said that the development of Vietnamese

Buddhism could only be achieved by building a strong unified Buddhist Association

similar to the Catholic Church. This monk's comparison does not result from the fact that

Nam Dinh province is one of important Catholic regions in Northern Vietnam. In fact, the

Catholic organization as a model of religious development began in 1930s with the

movements of Buddhist Revitalization. Western-educated intellectuals had introduced a

new Buddhist studies program with elementary, secondary and college levels, imitating

the secular modern system of education. This model was criticized as contravening the

traditional practice of studying Buddhism during summer Lent82 and, therefore, was not

82
An cu (s. vasa): literally to stay in calm, a practice Buddhist monks have to comply with during three
months in every summer inside a pagoda. The retreat extends from the 16* of the fourth lunar month to the
16* of the seventh month for northern schools and from the 15* of the sixth lunar month to the 15* of the
ninth month for southern schools. Religious age of a Buddhist monk is counted by the number of
 90
accepted by some Buddhist schools in Hanoi (Nguyen Lang 1994.3: 193). One of the

organizers of an association of Buddhist students in Hu6 in the 1960s recalled that he

took the organization of boy scouts as a model for building his association. He then added

that he knew he had made a mistake when the association was formed because the

flexibility of Buddhist practice could not be placed under strict administrative rules.

Although Zen is considered as the highest form of practice in the official

discourse of Buddhist literatures, there are evidences of a mixture of different schools83 in

Buddhist practices. Ven. Thfch Giac Bach explained that there is no prohibition on the

use of sutras or methods of other schools and the division among these three schools, in

practice, is not clear as a monk might meditate himself, use tantras in ritual performances

and teach the sutra of the Amitabha Buddha to laypersons. The use of different religious

traditions, according to him, is considered to be a means (phuang tien; s. upaya) to attract

followers and, therefore, is not in contradiction with the Buddhist teachings. These

common practices, however, were quite objectionable to some contemporary Zen masters

(Tbich Thanh Tir 2002: 28-29).

According to the opening speech read at the meeting of unification in 1981,

different Buddhist schools are allowed to maintain their traditional practices (Thfch Tri

Thu 1981: 3). In addition, chapter four in the Association's charter set up a Council of

"summers" he/she has passed. This practice is also called after a ceremony that starts the summer: kiit ha
(s. varsana).
Tong: the term is used to make the distinction between northern school (Bac tong; s. Mahayana) and
southern school {Nam tong; s. Hinayana or Theravada); it is also used to distinguish Zen Buddhism (Thiin
tong) to Tantrism (Mat tong) and Pure-land Buddhism (Tinh Do tong).
 91

Justification,84 formed by representatives of different former associations and schools, at

the highest level of the Association. One attempt to harmonize the differences between

various schools was the development of institutes of Buddhist studies85 where students

from different Buddhist schools were taught using a single curriculum. In my

conversation in 2003 with some students of a Buddhist institute in Hanoi, one monk

humorously criticized that the curriculum saying that "Buddhist studies" (Phgt hoc), i.e.

the study of Buddhism as a researcher, is not "studying Buddhism" (hoc Phgt) as a monk

should do. This curriculum is also used for summer schools (trucmg ha) where Buddhists

spend their three-month summer Lent. Once the Association was established, Buddhist

monks no longer returned to their teachers' pagodas to study in the summer, but instead

were required to spend their summer Lent at schools organized by provincial branches of

the Association. Some monks complained that the requirement that they spend their

summer Lent according to administrative locations was an effort to separate them from

their schools.

The Association's regulation is less effective in the South where hundreds of

monks gathered at one pagoda, as at True Lam Zen institute in Da Lat city and its

branches in and around Ho Chi Minh City. Buddhist monks of such large pagodas usually

84
Hoi dong chung minh: the council is formed by venerable monks who are seventy years old and above
and have at lest fifty religious years (i.e. have spend fifty times of summer Lent), representatives of
different schools. A member of this council would keep his position for the rest of his life. The first 50
members were nominated at the meeting of unification in 1981. There are 85 monks in this council in the
term 2002-2007. A standing committee of this council will be reelected every five years.
85
An Institute of Buddhist Studies (Hoc vi$n Phgt gido) was organized for the first time in Hanoi since the
socialist government was established in northern Vietnam in 1954 and the first B.A. students were
graduated in 1985. Other institutes were established in Hue and Ho Chi Minh City. Thirty secondary
schools (Trung cdp Phgt gido) with a four-year program were founded in these three cities and other
provinces. Some elementary schools (Sa cdp Phgt gido) were organized for southern schools' members and
newly ordained monks. (Thfch Thanh Tir 2004: 54)
 92
took high positions in the provincial Buddhist Associations. None of monks from these

pagodas enrolls in the Association's Buddhist studies institutes. Instead, they study in

their own pagodas. They could also get permission from their provincial associations to

organize summer schools in their own pagodas.86 The abbot of the institute in Da Lat and

the patriarch of this Zen school wrote all their own textbooks. This situation is common

even in less powerful pagodas. The monk of a Zen institute in Ba Ria Vung Tau province

said that every year during the summer, about three hundreds monks, nuns, and

laypersons stay in his pagoda and comparable numbers of people stay in other pagodas in

the province, three of which are branches of True Lam Zen institute. No one in the

provincial Association dared to gather these crowds and there is no pagoda that would be

able to hold thousands of people. He habitually stayed in his pagoda in the summer and

studied with the abbot. In northern Vietnam, where an abbot generally stays alone at each

pagoda, most of the monks must go to summer schools organized by provincial

associations. Many monks register at Buddhist studies institutes, as this is the only way to

study further. Some Buddhist monks said that there is an unwritten rule that two monks

are not allowed to stay at one pagoda. Therefore, all novices must leave their teachers

after being ordained and become abbots of new pagodas, sometimes in other provinces.

In a "Notification of organizing summer Lent" from the Management Committee of the Vietnamese
Buddhist Association in 2006, the Committee encouraged monks and nuns to spend their summer Lent in
schools organized by provincial Buddhist associations. For pagodas where monks and nuns were many and
if they wanted to organize summer schools in their own pagodas, they should get written permissions from
provincial Buddhist associations (Hpi d6ng tri syr GHPGVN 2006).
7
Though I still could not find the text of this rule, Thfch Due NhuSn's proposal read at the meeting of
unification in 1981, when he requested the government to permit from two to five monks to stay at one
pagoda depending on its size confirmed this regulation. It was one of his three requests when he accepted
the position as Dharma-lord (Phdp chu), head of the Association.
 93
Among the nine associations and Buddhist schools represented at the meeting of

unification in 1981, eight were from central and southern Vietnam. One reason is that a

Vietnamese United Buddhist Association (Hoi Phgt gido Thong nhdt Viet Nam) was

officially organized in Hanoi in 1960. In addition, Buddhist schools in the north do not

possess the sort of noteworthy published sets of doctrines and practices associated with

schools in the south and central regions. Buddhist monks are grouped at and

distinguished by their monasteries (son mon, literally the door of a monastery). One

significant aspect that ties members of a monastery is its lineage. A teacher, his students,

and his students' students are informally described as father, sons, and grandsons, as in a

family. An abbot of a pagoda in the suburb of Hanoi, for example, had to bring offerings

back to his teacher's pagoda in Nam Dinh province every year on the death anniversary

of the teacher's teacher, who he called grandfather of the founder (to). He also brought

some young men from his hometown in Nam Dinh to Hanoi to study as his novices. The

one monk per pagoda policy, to some extent, helps to expand the region of influence of a

monastery, crossing provincial boundaries. When a monk acquires a position in the

provincial or central associations, it is easier for his "brothers" or "children" to find

positions within that association. These "family" members support each other in pursuit

of higher positions. They may also appoint other "family" members to be the abbots of

pagodas in the area they control.

Believers can describe the geographic division of such monasteries and their

special skills. Buddhist monks from Nam Dinh pagodas, for example, dominate some

provinces in the Red River delta (i.e. Nam Dinh, Ha Nam, Thai Binh provinces) and
 94
Hanoi, and are known by the melody of their chanting voices and some technique of

ritual performances (e.g. playing drums; dancing). In Ha Tay province, students of the

former abbot of the famous Perfume pagoda and the patriarch of a Tantric monastery are

distinguished by their use of spells.88 Monastic differences are the cause of disagreements

among different groups of Buddhist believers as well as different pilgrimage groups.

Although some aspects of Buddhism, such as rituals performed by laywomen,

were discouraged, other features have been selected in the quest for a Vietnamese identity

(Nguyen Tai Thu 1992; Minh Chi et al. 1999). In 2001, Tran Due Luang, former

President of Vietnam, visited Mount Yen Tu and planted a memorial tree {cay luu niem)

in the foothills, emulating a well-known activity of Ho Chi Minh, the first President,

officially to recognize this historical site once again.

Chapter Summary

Buddhist pilgrimage in Vietnam entails a variety of syncretic practices derived

from different religious traditions. The state, in order to control religious activities, has

defined and classified religious practices into those which derive from "beliefs" and those

which are classified as "religious" because they are sponsored by officially-recognized

religious organizations. This tendency toward classification is similar to the practice of

some religious professionals of organized religions who tried to monopolize their

believers. Beliefs, considered to be lower forms of religion in an evolutionary process

were labeled superstitious activities and have been officially prohibited since 1954.

Religions, in contrast, were protected by law. Only some aspects of Buddhism were

88
CM (s. mantra): the incantations employed in Tantrism.
 95
recognized as being elements of Vietnamese national culture while other aspects, such as

ritual performances, were considered to be superstition and were suppressed. While some

Buddhist pagodas were preserved as historical sites, the heritage of an official

Vietnamese history, others were dismantled or used for other functions. However,

Buddhist religious could still protect their pagodas partly because they were regarded as

an important force in the war. Buddhist practices were not abandoned, especially when

Buddhism played an important role in a life crisis ritual, the funeral. Laywomen have

continued their practices secretly from 1954 until the State loosened its control over

religious activities in the 1986 Renovation. The next chapter will examine how pilgrims

assert their own meanings on their practices in the interaction with other religious and

secular agencies.
 96

Chapter 3: Pilgrimage Center

We arrived at Mount Yen Tu, the main destination of our journey, around 11:00

pm. Because of traffic, it took almost 30 minutes to travel the fourteen-kilometer

mountain road that connects provincial road No. 18A from Dong TriSu district to Uong

Bi town with the mountain. Once we had arrived at the foothills, we had to wait another

30 minutes before our bus was able to enter the parking lot. Hundreds of buses and mini

vans parked on the right side and thousands of motorbikes parked on the other side of the

road. Around the edge of the parking lot, there were more than ten new two-storey

buildings housing restaurants and guesthouses. The owners of these guesthouses used to

have small shops along the road to the mountain, but they were forced to move months

before as part of a relocation project organized by Yen Tu Management Committee.

Other straw huts I have seen a year ago also had been moved further away from the

entrance and relocated in a new built market. One restaurant owner complained that she

lost many customers after moving to the parking area in the foothills, as it is too far from

the pilgrims' road.

 97

Dong pagoda

; An Ky Sinn statue

Ti«u pagoda
JM^nT««up«»
BaoSai pagoda

Dug* shrine
ThiinDinhcave»- -f~fk*Ytn pagoda

Hot Quang stupa

Hon Ngoc plot

YteTifijothUb

i ' Lin pagoda

^
'+-Kbe!M village ^ ^ village Vang Danh coal mine-*

i 1 CamThvcpagoda

<' Su6i Tim pagoda

Road No. 18A

* ••-Hanoi
» — — — 130 km ....
Ha Long Bay 40 km—
* BfTbuong pagoda

Figure 2: Diagram of pilgrimage route in Yen Tu mountain

After the buses stopped, many local women and children gathered around asking

to carry our bags or selling bamboo walking sticks. Usually, they could earn 30.000 VND

transporting a load to the main pagoda located at half way to the mountaintop. People
 98
from our bus separated into many small groups. Some bargained the price with carriers

and started to climb up the mountain. Others entered restaurants to have lunch or browsed

through the market. A large crowd of pilgrims and local people was moving back and

forth in the foothills of Yen Tu. Lao Dong newspaper reported that more than 10.000

people visited the mountain on that occasion, the opening ceremony of Yen Tu festival

(Le Quang Vinh 2003).

The scene described above has been observed since the U6ng Bi mining company

constructed a cement road in the early 1990s to facilitate coal transportation. According

to Mrs. Lan, in the 1980s, she and other pilgrims to Yen Tu had to leave their buses at the

road No. 18A and walk for a day on a muddy trail, crossing "nine" streams89, to get to the

mountain. They could visit several pagodas located along the trail, a practice that used to

be a part of a pilgrimage journey. Nowadays, these pagodas are nearly abandoned since

buses can go directly to the foot of Mount Yen Tu\ The cement road provoked two

contrasting opinions. On the one hand, some Buddhist scholars argued that the old road

was a symbol of the suffering that one must endure in order to find the Buddha and that

modern elements (e.g., commercial values) would easily enter the mountain through this

new road to destroy its sacred values. On the other hand, local officials supported the

change because the number of visitors to Yen Tu had rapidly increased since the road had

been built. This debate reflects a tension between Buddhist religious and state officials in

their efforts to control the site and assert their meanings on this pilgrimage center.

Although the number of the streams is not exactly nine, people still called them "nine hills, nine
streams," that implied the notion of "many." In fact, there is only one stream that crosses the road in some
parts.
 99
Ignoring this debate, local people and pilgrims make use of the advantage from the new

road to extend their practices with their own implications.

This chapter will examine different meanings applied by officials, Buddhist

religious, and pilgrims and their strategies for controlling Yen Tu mountain. My

suggestion is that a pilgrimage center is not merely a place where "communitas"

generates as suggested Turner (1973) or a "contesting" site between secular and religious

discourses (Eade and Sallnow 1991). It is a field where pilgrims negotiate with other

groups to have power over the use of the center and emphasize their meanings. These

meanings constitute the "spiritual magnetism" (Preston 1992: 33) of a pilgrimage center.

A Sacred Mountain and a Buddhist Pilgrimage Center

At 1,068 meters above the sea, Yen Tu is the highest mountain in the

Northeastern part of Vietnam. Administratively, Mount Yen Tu today is situated in

Thuomg Yen Cong commune, Uong Bi town, Quang Ninh province, about 130 kilometers

northeast of Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam. Yen Tu itself is sacred the combination of

several features it has in common with other pilgrimage centers: a peripheral location, far

from urban areas and other inhabitants; geographical splendor with century-old fir trees

along the way and a rare bamboo grove forest on top and a number of "brooks, steep

slopes, deep abysses, and small winding roads" leading to the top making it difficult to

access (Do Phuong Quynh 1995: 78). The worship of high mountains through the

creation of legendary stories and the practice of pilgrimage is similar to practices found in

Chinese traditions (Eck 1987). The tale of "Divine Mountain" (son tinh) who defeated

"Divine Water" (thuy tinh) by raising Mount Tan Vien above the flood was a popular
 100
legend of two major groups in Northern Vietnam: the Kinh, the majority group in the Red

River delta, and the Muomg, an ethnic group occupying the valleys of the mountainous

areas in Hoa Binh and Ha Tay provinces.90 Son Tinh or Tan Vien, the name of the

highest peak of Mount Ba Vi, Ha Tay province, 48 kilometers west of Hanoi, became one

of the "four immortals" {tit bat tit) of the Vietnamese Taoist deities, and the legend was

recorded in the annals of Vietnam in the fifteenth century (Tran Tir 1996: 368).

Mount Yen Tu was recorded as the "land of happiness" (phuc did) in the books of

the Tang and Song dynasties in China. In 1370, the Ming emperor sent an ambassador to

the mountain to worship and draw a map. In 1850, King Tu Dure classified Yen Tu as a

famous mountain and wrote of it in the imperial "encyclopedia," the book of rules for

worship (Dia Die Chi 1940: 37-40). Within the cosmological ideology of Chinese

geomancy, the idea of "wind and water" (phong thuy) provides part of the sacred

meaning for Yen Tu today. The former vice-director of the Yen Tu Management

Committee explained that position and arrangement of Hoa Yen pagoda, with the

mountain at the back and two waterfalls on both sides like a throne facing south, is,

symbolically, the location of power. The position of Dong pagoda at the mountaintop is

considered to be a meeting point between heaven and earth.

At the end of the Hung King period (the first legendary kingdom in Vietnamese history), the emperor had
a very beautiful daughter named My Nuong. One day, two men came to see the emperor to ask to marry
My. Nuorng. They were Son Tinh and Thuy Tinh. Because they came at the same time, the emperor decided
that he would select whoever brought his betrothal gifts first on the next day. Son Tinh came with jewels,
gold, silver, mountain birds, and forest animals early in the morning and married My Nuong. He then
brought his wife to Mount Tan Vi§n. Thuy Tinh came late. In anger, he called the rain to raise the water to
fight Son Tinh. Son Tinh also raised the mountain. His followers built a dike for protection from the water
and used bows and arrows to kill many Thuy Tinh's followers. Thuy Tinh could not trespass on the
mountain. Since then, Thiiy Tinh comes to fight Son Tinh every year at the flood time [from June to
August] (Joan Thu Vol. 1. 1993: 133-35).
 101
In other words, mount Yen Tu provides a symbol of cosmic order in Vietnamese

Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. It is worth noting that the mountain was selected

as a proper site for religious practice by Taoists and Buddhists long before the arrival of

Tran Nhan Tong. Yen Til was formerly called "Elephant mountain," "White cloud

mountain" or An Tu, after the name of the legendary Taoist priest An Ky Sinh91 (Huu

Ngoc 1998).

As a result of their geographical differences from the plains where people live,

and their relative inaccessibility, forested mountains were seen as the home of a variety

of spirits, including the ancestors. The dead also used to be buried in the forest, and the

old phrase "be hidden in the mountain" {khudt nui) is a traditional euphemism for death.

Pilgrims at Yen Tu worshipped not only at Buddhist pagodas but also at the rocks, trees,

brooks, and other features and entities. An altar dedicated to ninth-lady (co chin), a deity

belonging to the pantheon of Mother Goddess (mdu) is found in a small room of a

military unit next to the image of An Ky Sinh, a big rock near the top of the mountain. In

recent years, an altar dedicated to Ho Chi Minh, the famous revolutionary leader and

former president of Vietnam, was placed in the same room. Observing such practices,

Cadiere suggests "the true religion of the Vietnamese is the cult of spirits" (1989: 6).

Buddhism did not replace animist beliefs but the two co-existed as important elements in

popular religion. In this syncretic religious tradition, large rocks have even been

worshipped as a "growing Buddha" (but mgc). The worship of big, sacred "growing

stones," the "divinization of the energies of the soil," what Mus (1975: 21) terms

91
An Ky Sinh was a legendary Taoist who trained and concocted special drugs at mount Yen Tu in the
period of Warring Kingdoms China, 2nd century (Nguyln Duy Hinh 1977: 10).
 102
"cadastral religion" and suggests as a popular practice in Vietnam and Southeast Asia

long before the influence of Indian religions, have remained an important element that

defined the sacredness of mountainous pilgrimage centers.

Since 13th century, Yen Tu has become an important symbol of Vietnamese

Buddhism associated with Tran Nhan Tong (1258-1308). Succeeded as the third emperor

of the Tran dynasty (1226-1399) in 1278, during twenty years on the throne, Tran Nhan

Tong defeated the Yuan militaries in 1284-1285 and 1287 and became a mighty emperor

of the Tr&n dynasty (Nguyen Lang 1994: 355). He was ordained as a Buddhist monk in

Yen Tu in 1299 and later founded True Lam (Bamboo Grove) Zen school,92 considered

by a number of Buddhist scholars (Thfch Thien An 1975; Nguyen Lang 1994; Minh Chi

et al. 1999) to be the first national Buddhist association in Vietnam. True Lam school was

presented as a unified body of three former Zen schools: Vinitaruci, Wu Yan Tong, and

Tsao T'ang93 (Nguyen Lang 1994: 257).

Yen Tu is also a symbol of Vietnamese Buddhism because the teachings of True

Lam Zen school are considered the only Vietnamese version of Buddhist practices:

Most of Zen schools came from China... Most of founders of these schools were

Chinese or Indian. Only True Lam Yen Tu Zen school and the first founder True

Phdi: the term is usually translated into English as 'school' or 'sect'. Sine phdi is not a group that has
separated from an established Church as a sect, I prefer to use the term school, a group with a common set
of beliefs and practices and its social structure.
Vinitaruci (Ti Ni Da Luu Chi) (?-594), an Indian monk arrived in northern Vietnam in 580 and
established a Zen school at Phap Van pagoda (also called Dau pagoda) in present Thanh Khirong village,
Thuan Thanh district, Bac Ninh province, 20 kilometers northeast of Hanoi. (Thiin Uyin 1990: 165-166)
Wu Yan Tong (Vo Ngon Thong) (?-826), came from Guangzhou in 820, founded another Zen school at
KiSn So pagoda in present Phu D6ng village, Gia LSm district, Hanoi. (Thien Uyin 1990: 27-31)
Tsao T'ang (Thao Duvng) was captured in Champa, a kingdom in central Vietnam, in 1069 and nominated
by King Ly Thanh Tong (1023-1072) as a "National Preceptor" (qudc sv). He then set up his school at
Khai Qu6c pagoda (also called Tran Qu6c pagoda) at West Lake in Hanoi. (Nguyln Lang 1994: 223-224)
 103
Lam Dai Dau Da were purely Vietnamese. Only Vietnamese founder could

understand aspirations and customs of the Vietnamese and could educate in

accordance with motivations of Vietnamese believers. (Thich Thanh Tu 2002: 8.

My translation)

A National Cultural Heritage Site

In 1958, an official report was conducted at Mount Yen Tu as part of a project

that aimed to document remains of different historical sites in Northern Vietnam, carried

out by the Department of Preservation and Museum, Ministry of Culture. It was not until

1974 this mountain was given official recognition from Ministry of Culture as a national

historical site, one type of national cultural heritage. A retired cultural official said that

though they have been in charge of the mountain year-round since the early 1960s, their

responsibilities were mainly to keep pilgrims from superstitious practices during three

months in the spring. Moreover, "since we did not have our office at the mountain and

we had to go home in the afternoon, pilgrims were free at night to do what they wanted",

he added. The number of pilgrims to Yen Tu increased to thousands of people each year

in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and in 1992, the Yen Tu Management Committee94

was established to control the site. The Management Committee's office was built at the

foothills for officials to stay overnight at the mountain.95 During three months of

pilgrimage season, a number of police officers and local soldiers were recruited to work

94
Ban qudn ly di tich Yen Tic, governed by a district branch of the Department of Culture {Phong Van hod)
of Uong Bf town and a provincial branch of the Department of Culture (Sa Van hod) of Quang Ninh
province.
5
When I visited Yen Tir in 1993, there were only five permanent officials working for this Committee; the
number of full-time employees in the Committee has increased to 65 people in 2002.
 104
in the mountain as part-time employees. One of the first jobs that newly established

Management Committee carried out was to sell tickets to this historical monument. This

change has created many conflicts between pilgrims and officials. An official I met in

1993 was sent to another office in town after beating a pilgrim. Other officials

complained that some people refused to buy tickets. Many pilgrims asserted that they

preferred donating a million VND to the pagodas to buying a 5.000 VND entry ticket,

since they went to the mountain to worship the Buddha and they did not come for

sightseeing. I observed that Mrs. Lan and seven other elderly women entered the gate,

built by the Management Committee in the foothills, without any ticket.

Another job done by the Management Committee was to organize an opening

ceremony of the Yen Tvr festival on the 10 day of the first lunar month each year. This

ceremony was attended by many local officials, some provincial officials, and few

honored guests from Hanoi. Some Buddhist monks from Hanoi and Hai Phong were also

invited. Some local associations of laywomen and many schoolchildren were recruited to

participate in this event. A wooden stage was built at the parking lot. The Quang Ninh

ensemble started the ceremony with a singing and dancing performance that expressed

the happiness of different ethnic groups living in Quang Ninh province when they

welcomed Tran Nhan Tong to Yen Tu and recounted some of his legendary heroic

activities. Then a group of schoolchildren performed martial arts. Later, the chairman of

Uong Bf People's Committee had a short speech and opened the Yen Tu festival by

beating a drum. The Ceremony ended with all invited participants lighting incense at an

altar on the stage. I observed that most of pilgrims paid no attention to this ceremony,
 105
perhaps in part because its script has not changed since I first watched it in 2002.

Pointing to a stream of pilgrims walking to the mountain alongside the parking lot where

the opening ceremony was performed, the former head of the Management Committee

said that this official ceremony was politically constructed and not the religiously

constructed ceremony that interested the pilgrims. In other words, pilgrims neglected the

official commemoration of Tran Nhan Tong since it only served "particular interests and

ideological positions" of the organizers (Gillis 1994: 7).

The central job of the Management Committee is to preserve and restore this site;

a part of this task is conducting historical research. While Tran Nhan Tong as a king has

been honored in official Vietnamese history as a national hero, the second part of his life

as a Buddhist monk was almost absent from this official history (see, for example, Dai

Viet Ste Ky Toan Thu Vol.2 1993: 50-64). Ngo Thi Nham, an 18th century historian, and

other modern historians continuingly interpreted Mount Yen Tu as a military outpost

where Tran Nhan Tong stayed to guard the northern border (quote in Thanh Tu 2002:

15). This approach was favored in the studies of Tran Nhan Tong and the new official

historical site of Yen Tu, especially during the wars from 1960s to the early 1980s, a

process of constructing heritage that "clarifies pasts so as to infuse them with present

purposes," suggests Lowenthal (1996: XI). Studies on this mountain have examined

material objects to find out their historical meanings and values of a heroic era in order to

keep them unchanged. Religious elements, if mentioned, were incorporated in other

categories as historical values or traditional culture. The presence of pilgrims at the

mountain and their religious activities were completely ignored.

 106
About more than one hour climbing the mountain, we arrived at Hue Quang

stupa, located about eighty meters below Hoa Yen pagoda, main shrine of Yen Tu. This

stupa, believed to contain some of the relics96 of Tran Nhan Tong, is one of the important

historical remains described in Buddhist literatures and tourist handbooks:

The main stupa, ten meters high, has six levels, and its lower basement is made of

big pieces of stones with bas-relief sculptures in the pattern of sea waves. Its base

has the form of a 102-petal lotus flower cup on which is placed the stupa, which

becomes thinner as it goes higher. At a higher level, the stupa has a door, which

opens to the South, and shows a statue of Kinh Tran Nh&n Tong, clad in a monk's

robe with his right shoulder laid bare sitting in deep meditation. Tran Nhan

Tong's white stone statue is supported by a stone base covered with sculptural

designs in the form of a dragon. The main stupa is located on a square land area,

dimensions 13 x 13 meters, and surrounded on four sides by 2 meter-high walls

made of over baked bricks, with outer edges looking like sea waves. The southern

and northern parts of the walls have vaulted doors, and the road leading from the

northern door to the mountaintop is paved with big-size square bricks, with

decorative designs in the form of chrysanthemum flowers and concentric circles.

(D6 Phuong Quynh 1995: 79-80)

Hue Quang and other stupas in this plot were the focus of archeologists and art

historians and the objects of cultural preservation projects. According to D6 Van Ninh

96
Xd If (s. sari): objects that are believed to remain after a body has been cremated. The number of these
remains depends on the level of religious enlightenment (gidc ngo) of the deceased. The Buddha, for
example, left 84,000 relics. Trill Nhan Tong's one thousand of relics were divided into two parts. One of
them was placed inside a stupa at Yen Tu (7am T6 1971: 16).
 107
(1976), except for the platform containing motifs of waves commonly observed in 14l

century arts, other parts of Hue Quang stupa were rebuilt during 17th century. Though

Vietnamese archeological discoveries usually have little effect on the sacredness of a site,

belying Hubert's comments on the threat of the work of archeologists to sacred sites

(1994: 10), projects of preservation sometimes physically damage historical remains. The

project to preserve a "chrysanthemum road" that was paved with 84 pieces of square

brick (40 centimeters each side) with "decorative designs in the form of chrysanthemum

flowers" connecting the northern door of Hue Quang stupa to Hoa Yen pagoda was a

good example. According to some archeologists, these bricks were among few historical

traces of the Tran period at Mount Yen Tur (Nguyen Duy Hinh 1977). With the aim of

preserving the bricks, in the late 1980s, the provincial cultural office ordered them dug

out of the road and replaced with cement. Unfortunately, most of the bricks broke and the

plan to exhibit them as the art of the Tran period was abandoned. When I visited the

mountain in 1993, only a few pieces of bricks were left scattered in a corner of Hoa Yen

pagoda. Later, they were displayed in a new 'traditions room' built on the west side of the

entrance to the mountain. In the late 1990s, another restoration project replaced the

cement road with new bricks of lower quality. Historical and artistic values of these

bricks, however, did not interest the pilgrims. They walked on this "chrysanthemum

road" every year without noticing the changes.

Research on pilgrimage has found the worship of icons to be a common

characteristic of various religious traditions in the world (Turner 1978; Bowen 1998). For

Buddhism in particular, these icons are usually the presumed relics of the Buddha or are
 108
97

famous religious edifices (Eiki 1987). A special ritual performance at the stupa,

described by some Buddhist monks to me, however, is no longer observed. A local

woman who worked as cleaner at Hue Quang stupa to receive gifts during pilgrimage

season complained that some visitors did not know the crucial meaning of this stupa

where relics of the founder are kept. The ground outside the walls with many other stupas

was sometimes used as a stop for people taking a rest after a long climb and having their

meals. Though pilgrims lighted incense and made a short prayer at the stupa, it was not

the central object attracting visitors. The main destination of the pilgrimage is Hoa Yen

pagoda, located at the middle of the mountain:

Hoa Yen pagoda is the founding place of Mount Yen Tu\ and therefore is called

Main or Yen Tu pagoda. The former name of this pagoda was Van Yen. King Le

Thanh Tong (1460-1497) when visiting the pagoda and seeing beautiful flowers

changed its name to Hoa Yen. (Nguyen Ba Lang 1972: 113. My translation)

At the end of the year 2002, a new pagoda funded by the government was built as

part of a 65.4 billion VND project aimed at restoring Tran-era architectural values at the

site. Several meetings between historians, architects, cultural cadres, and local officials

were held over a period of three years to discuss how this pagoda should be built. The

main issue was the authenticity of its motifs and size. While the first question could be

answered easily since there were some Tran architectural remains in other provinces

ready for copying, the size of a future Hoa Yen pagoda involved many disagreements.

Constructors and local officials wanted to build it larger to correspond to a past-abode of

Nhieu thdp: a ritual performed at a stupa, in which participants hold incense and chant sutras while
walking around the stupa in a counter-clockwise direction.
 109
a great King on a small plot. Some scholars and the director of the Department of

Preservation and Museum criticized such tendency to build new edifices but not to pay

enough attention to archeological studies to find the real values of this historical site

(Thanh Nien 2001). Pilgrims, however, did not know about these arguments. Fewer than

twenty people attended the rite of groundbreaking for constructing of Hoa Yen pagoda

organized in the summer of 2002, and most of them were officials, while a crowd of

pilgrims attended a similar ritual performed by Buddhist monks of True Lam Zen

Institute also in Yen Tu earlier that year. Mrs. Lan called me to accompany her and two

other members of Bao An group to go to Yen Tu on that day. She was invited by the

former head of the Yen Tu Management Committee to take care the "spiritual part" of the

rite. Two Buddhist monks from Hai Phong city were also invited to fulfill the same task.

The ceremony began with a ritual observed in other official ceremonies before a new

building, road, or bridge were constructed, with about four noble guests, including local

and provincial officials and representatives of a Hanoi-based construction company,

performing the official rite of groundbreaking, scooping sand from a box to pour onto the

ground. Then Mrs. Lan and one Buddhist monk carried out their requested performances.

They used shovels to dig in the ground while softly chanting Buddhist spells." In

addition to this performance, Mrs. Lan and the other two women also chanted Buddhist

sutras the previous night and in the morning at the plot before the officials arrived. She

later said that because officials knew nothing about how a Buddhist rite of

Le dong tho, a ritual performed before a building is constructed.

Chu (s. dharani), Buddhist incantations.
 110
groundbreaking should be conducted their performance had no effect and no merit could

be gained from it.

Hoa Yen pagoda has been repaired and reconstructed several times. Two larger

reconstructions were recorded around 1729-1731 and 1735-1739 and the latest

construction, suggested by archeologists, was built in the second half of the 19th century

since its architectural features were similar to other pagodas built in that period (Nguyen

Duy Hinh 1977). In fact, the whole building of Hoa Yen pagoda was rebuilt in 1968.

According to some local men, they themselves constructed the most recent version after

the former pagoda, a small wooden building, was burned in an accident in the winter of

1967:

The cooperative ordered the local military unit to build the pagoda in the

following year. We were about thirty men. We worked for merit, bringing rice

from home to eat. We did not receive any work points100 from the cooperative.

We cut the wood in the forest and worked for a month between July and August,

after harvest time. (Field notes 2004)

When I asked a seventy-five-year-old man, one of the men who built the pagoda,

if any of them knew how to build a religious edifice; he laughed and said that they just

built a house. The former abbot was the one who drew its blueprint. Disregard for, or

ignorance of scientific concepts of restoration, an attitude criticized by cultural officials,

is not limited to local practices. When I visited Lan pagoda, located on the road to Yen

Tu, in the summer 2002, the Buddhist monk who was the engineer in chief of ongoing

Cong diem, cooperative mark provided for work done by its members. The grains they received after a
harvest are depended on these work points.
 Ill

constructional works of the True Lam Zen institute expressed that he wanted to build a

new pagoda with the imprint of the contemporary era instead of following an old

architectural style. That 'imprint of the contemporary era' is a common element of any

rebuilt edifice, religious and secular, in Vietnam and directly conflicts with official

projects of restoration which claim to reconstruct the 'authenticity' of a given heritage

site.

Common images worshiped at Yen Tu pagodas are statues of the three founders

of True Lam Zen school: Tran Nhan Tong and his two successors, Phap Loa and Huyen

Quang. The fire in 1967 had burned or damaged most of the wooden and clay statues, and

according to the former head of the Management Committee it was difficult to evaluate

the historical value of those remaining at Hoa Yen pagoda. The custodian of Hoa Yen

pagoda had gathered them from different deteriorating pagodas in the mountain over a

long period. In 2002, all of the statues were moved to the former guesthouse to leave

room for new statues when a new pagoda was built.

The issue of how a statue of Tran Nhan Tong should be made was raised when the

Quang Ninh People Committee planned to build a one-hundred-ton bronze statue of Tran

Nhan Tong at the top of Mount Y6n Tu. Some cultural officials said TrSn Nhan Tong

should be built standing since he was a great King, a national hero in the Vietnamese

history. Some Buddhist monks supposed that the statues should be in the form of sitting

to meditate because Tran Nhan Tong was a founder of a Zen school. Pilgrims believed

that Tran Nhan Tong's statue of entering Nirvana, lying on a lotus, was more appropriate

to his role as a Buddha. A meeting between representatives of the Ministry of Culture,

 112
provincial officials, cultural cadres of the Yen Tu* Management Committee, some

historians and Buddhist monks, was organized on December 2006 by the Quang Ninh

People's Committee to solve that ongoing debate and to find a proper form of the future

statue. The abbot of Phuc Khanh pagoda in Hanoi proposed in the meeting:

Tran Nhan Tong was a King who was ordained to be a Buddhist monk and

achieved enlightenment to be a Buddha. Therefore, when he stands, sits, or lies,

he is still a Buddha. (Tran Ngoc Linh 2006)

Vice Minister of the Ministry of Culture ended the meeting by saying that all

forms, standing, sitting, and lying, are acceptable, provided that the statue should be

created beautifully (Tran Ngoc Linh 2006). Pilgrims have disapproved samples of the

future Tran Nhan Tong statue, some mixtures of different motifs from a secular King to a

Shaolin Buddhist, displayed by the Quang Ninh People's Committee in Yen Tu in 2007.

Some criticized that this sacred mountain should not be made as a monument of victory

in the modern Vietnamese official history as the officials have made of Dien Bien Phu101

(Tran Ngoc Linh 2007).

Yen Tur Buddhist Religious and Orders

In my conversation with local people in Nam Mau village, they could remember

the names of only a few of the Buddhist monks and nuns who have stayed on the

mountain since 1954. These monks and nuns came to the mountain alone at different

times and had no contact with each other. In other words, there was no Yen Tu school but

a group of Buddhist religious coming from different schools. Some stayed for a few

101
A valley in the northwest region of Vietnam, the battlefield ended the French-Vietnamese war in 1954
and became one important historical site.
 113
years, while others spent the rest of their lives in the mountain. Some of them moved

from one pagoda to another, which confused those trying to recall how many monks and

nuns had stayed on the mountain, how long they had stayed, and in which pagodas they

had lived. In the stories of a nun who local people called a "fat nun" (ba sir bed), for

example, no one could remember when she arrived or when she left, although they all

agreed that she had served as the abbess of Hoa Yen pagoda. Some people remembered a

monk who had farmed a piece of land provided by the cooperative in the 1960s, but they

could not recall his name or when he had left the mountain. A seventy-five-year-old local

man explained that the everyday needs of Buddhist religious mainly depend on offerings

from pilgrims and the pagodas never lacked rice and salt. The pilgrimage stories of Mrs.

Lan also confirmed that before 1990s, rice and salt were the only donations that pilgrims

could bring with them on a pilgrimage journey to Yen Tur. A retired village cultural cadre

recalled that since the mountain was too far from town, any monk who came to take care

of a pagoda was welcomed. "Life was hard. It was harder in the mountain. No one

wanted to live in that remote area. We had to flatter them to stay in the pagodas. Even

when we knew that the abbot of Hoa Yen pagoda was having an affair with a nun in

another pagoda, we could say nothing," he added. Religious were still absent from many

pagodas and village officials were appointed to take care of these pagodas during

pilgrimage season in the 1980s.

When I visited the mountain in 1993, except for a nun and her student staying in

Giai Oan pagoda in the foothills, there was only one elderly woman living in Hoa Yen

102
The only person who remembers names of all Buddhist monks and nuns and pagodas where they are
staying is a police officer who is in charge of religious matters in this area. He, however, does not know
religious who died or left before he came to the mountain in the late 1980s.
 114
pagoda. This custodian of Hoa Yen pagoda is a local resident of Nam Mau village and

used to be a servant103 of the former abbot of this pagoda. One villager explained that

after her husband, the head of a communal detachment of the army,104 passed away in

1968, the village cooperative appointed her to work at the pagoda. She then could grow

crops on the farm that the cooperative provided to the monk. There is a rumor among

pilgrims about exploitation of the mountain by her family members, especially after one

of her sons received contracts for construction from the government's restoration projects

to rebuild Van Tieu and Hoa Yen pagodas. However, some villagers and officials who

knew of her contribution said that she deserved to receive the gifts. When the abbot left

the mountain in the early 1980s, this woman was the only protector of several pagodas at

the site for a decade. A small and active woman in her sixties when I first met in 1993,

she could make the thirty minute trip on foot to buy vegetables at the bottom of the hills

and then climb back to Hoa Yen pagoda, a distance that might take more than one hour

one way for a visitor. Living alone in a hut built next to the pagoda, she went to different

sites that were in ruins to collect Buddhist statues and brought them back to Hoa Yen.

She built huts to preserve altars and other edifices at Bao Sai and Van Tieu pagodas.

Narrating the reason that she had come to stay at the mountain, the custodian of Hoa Yen

pagoda talked about a call she heard in one night from the Master (ngai). When I wanted

to know who the Master was, she said he was the Founder (to), a respectful reference to

103
Chap tdc: the term applies for people, usually laywomen, who stay at Buddhist pagodas and work as
servants for Buddhist monks or nuns. They are different from novices (tidu), who were ordained and follow
precepts of sadi (s. sramanera).
104
Xa dot a local military unit organized at a commune, directed by district (huyen dpi) and provincial
offices (tinh dot). Members of this unit are recruited among villagers and they receive working points from
their cooperative.
 115
Tran Nhan Tong. The abbot of Bao Sai pagoda narrated a similar story, explaining that he

decided to stay at Yen Tu after hearing a call from the Founder when he visited the

mountain in 1994.

Ms. Linh105 was the custodian of Mot Mai pagoda. When I met her in the spring

of 2002, she had already been living at this pagoda for a few years. In her fifties, she

came from a pagoda in her hometown in Dong Trieu, a district next to the town of Uong

Bi, to Yen Tu in 1985 and had stayed at three different pagodas along the road to the

mountain, arriving at Hoa Yen fourteen years after her arrival at Yen Tu. Recalling her

motivation for becoming a Buddhist nun and the reason that drove her to Yen Tu, Ms.

Linh said:

I was a worker in a mining company when I got sick. I had to take leave in order

to cure my illness. I spent time between a village pagoda and my home. Then I

realized that my life depended on pagodas because any time I returned home, I

got sick again. However, the village pagoda was too poor, so that I still needed

full support from my family. There were more visitors at Yen Tu. Therefore, I

came to this mountain to beg the gifts (loc) from the Buddha. (Field notes 2002)

The term loc frequently indicates offerings, such as fruits or cakes, taken from an

altar after a ritual or prayer. Believers asserted that these offerings contain divine powers

that worshipers can bring them home and share with their friends and relatives. In both

political and religious contexts, loc is a gift or bequest from a higher power or authority.

105
The formal term of address both monks and nuns is teacher (thay). In practice, the term aunt (co) is
usually used to address Buddhist nuns (or grandmother (ba) for senior nuns). Local people in Yen Tu also
call Buddhist monks and nuns by their birth names instead of their Buddhist names (e.g., they call co Linh
instead of thay Dam Loan).
 116
It consists of a benefit to the recipient but also engenders a relationship of debt and

subordination, which is often characterized as patronage. A monk gives gifts, such as

books, strings of beads, or fruit, to visitors. The power of these gifts can be received by

eating or using them. Visitors' donations are also considered gifts, but from the Buddha

or the Founder to Buddhist religious. There is a common expression that a monk or nun

stays at a pagoda to an loc, literally to eat/receive the gifts, of this shrine. That expression

usually leads to an assumption that material benefits are the motivation for people staying

at Yen Tu. Though sacred values of a pagoda would provide many gifts, Yen Tu was not

a source of economic benefits compared to other pagodas in urban areas, however,

especially during the period before 1990s. The abbess of Giai Oan pagoda I met in 1993,

a woman who married an electrician and left the mountain a few years later, complained

that she hardly found anything to eat during the off-season when pilgrims rarely visit the

mountain and vendors at the market at the foothills, organized for three months after the

New Year, went home. In addition, she criticized the Management Committee's control

over donations. As noted above, the Committee was established in 1992 to replace the

village as the agency managing the site. Only officials working for the Committee can

open the merit-receipt boxes106 placed next to altars for receiving monetary offerings.

This situation is common for any pagoda officially recognized as a historical or cultural

site by the Ministry of Culture, once a powerful local management committee has been

formed. Recently, a merit-receipt table was put next to every pagoda in Yen Tu with one

or two officials receiving donations directly from visitors during the time of each festival.

106
Horn cong dire: a red metal box put next to an altar where visitors drop their money in for merit-making
{cong dire). Theoretically, the abbot or the abbess will collect this money for maitaining and repairing their
pagodas and for their everyday expenses.
 117
The Committee then provides an allowance of about 200.000 VND/month to religious at

the pagoda.

Once established, the Management Committee has the right to receive or refuse

monks appointed by the provincial Buddhist Association. Recognized for her

contributions, the woman who used to take care of Hoa Yen was allowed to stay at the

pagoda. However, she and Ms. Linh could not officially register107 as abbesses since they

were not ordained and can be evicted at any time. According to Ms. Linh, in order to

register for an ordination, she had to complete a number of required papers, both secular

and religious. These included an agreement letter from her parents or an elderly member

of her family, an introduction letter from the People's Committee of her commune to

certify her official residence, a high school certificate, a letter of registration from her

official teacher, and an agreement from a board who would ordain her. An official

teacher is a monk or nun who belongs to the Association and, therefore, has the right to

register his/her students to the board organized by a provincial association. To find a

proper teacher was difficult for these two women in 1990s since the former religious of

Yen Tu had left or died. An abbot of a pagoda in Quang Yen district, 70 kilometers from

Yen Tu, recalled that he had stayed at Hoa Yen pagoda for a few years in the 1970s.

Since he could not be ordained, he left the mountain for a vacant pagoda, of which there

were many in Quang Yen at that time. He later found a Buddhist monk in Hanoi who

could ordain him but never had a chance to study with his teacher. Ms. Linh tried to study

with a Buddhist nun at a pagoda in Ha Long, the provincial city of Quang Ninh, but

107
Any Vietnamese has to register one's resident (ho khdu, literally, mouths of a household) to a local
administrative office. Buddhist monks and nuns are no exception.
 118
resigned in the middle of her course of studies. The reason, according to her, was that the

contribution she had to provide to each religious celebration organized at her teacher's

pagoda was too much. A small and poor pagoda such as hers could not afford to meet

these requirements. As a result, she remained as a non-registered servant at Yen Tu until

a Buddhist monk from a pagoda in Ba Ria Vung Tau, a province southeast of Ho Chi

Minh City, visited the mountain in the late 1990s and offered her the opportunity to study

at his pagoda. For four years, she went to the South every summer to study and she was

ordained in the summer of 2003.

After officially registering as an abbess of Mot Mai pagoda, Ms. Linh became a

member of provincial Buddhist Association and was required to go to the summer school

for Buddhist nuns organized by the Quang Ninh Buddhist Association at Long Tho

pagoda in Ha Long city, the capital of the province. Another school for Buddhist monks

was organized at Quynh Lam pagoda in the district capital of Dong Trieu. While some

religious disapprove the rule that separate them from their orders, Ms. Linh maintained

that this regulation is also good because she does not have to go far to the South every

summer. However, as they teach differently in Quang Ninh, she sends her novice to the

pagoda in the South where she herself once studied, to learn Buddhism before the novice

is ordained. Ms. Linh did not send her novice to her own school out of a desire to

maintain the lineage. Rather, she only wanted to provide the novice a better education.

Some northern Buddhist monks I knew also sent their novices to study in the South since

they considered the teaching of Buddhism in the South to be better. Mrs. Lan once

explained that southern monks have a greater knowledge of Buddhism since they could
 119
continue their study during the war and could even go study abroad, while northern

monks had to join the army and had no chance to study.

Divisions among different Buddhist orders in Northern Vietnam limited the

effectiveness of efforts of the Association to unify Vietnamese Buddhists, even in one

location such as Yen Tu Mountain. The abbot of Bao Sai pagoda left his teacher in Ha

Tay province for a teacher in Ho Chi Minh City. He, therefore, spends the period of

summer Lent in the South. The nun at Hoa Yen pagoda, ordained by the provincial

Buddhist Association in 2003, is too old to leave for the summer school organized in Ha

Long city, 50 kilometers from the mountain. Except for occasional meetings with local

officials, according to Ms. Linh, religious at Yen Tu never see each other, although they

are all members of provincial Association. Their relationship provides a practical picture

of contemporary Vietnamese Buddhism: a unified structure at the administrative level

and separate monasteries/pagodas in everyday practice.

During the pilgrimage season, three months after the Vietnamese New Year, a son

of Ms. Linh's brother stays at the pagoda to help her and her novice. Besides chanting

twice a day at 5:00 am and 5:00 pm, one of them is always inside the pagoda, where they

clean the altars, guide the visitors, and receive monetary donations from early morning to

late afternoon. On some occasions, in addition to other standard rites at the pagoda, Ms.

Linh performs rituals requested by groups of pilgrims with whom she has or hopes to

have a relationship. Buddhist religious normally develop such relationships with specific

pilgrimage groups who provide the bulk of their subsistence. The Bao An group, for

example, usually gives donations to the nun at Giai Oan pagoda. Since there is a tension
 120
among Yen Tu religious who belong to different Buddhist orders, a similar disagreement

exist among their followers.

Though most pilgrims pay respect to any Buddhist religious with whom they

interact with on their trips, the monastic community on Yen Tu is not their main interest.

Most of pilgrimage groups performed rituals and other religious activities without a monk

or nun in attendance and pilgrims only paid a short visit when they brought donations to

an abbot. Some visitors had no contact with religious at all. Pilgrims sometimes criticized

the monks' lack of Buddhist knowledge or their inability to perform a ritual properly. In

addition, three of the four Buddhist religious at Mount Yen Tu are women, and two at

pagodas on the road to the mountain are also women. Some visitors expressed their hope

that the mountain should be run by a man, a monk with age and experience. Mrs. Lan

stated that if a monk has agreed to stay at the newly rebuilt Van Tieu pagoda, her group

would provide everything for his subsistence. In short, the magnetism of Yen Tu does not

come from the monks, in contradiction with the phenomenon observed at some famous

pagodas in cities, where believers are mainly attracted to pagodas by the charismatic

characters of their abbots.

At the death anniversary of Tran Nhan Tong in December 2002, a branch of True

Lam Zen institute was built at the site of Lan pagoda, one kilometer from the foothills of

Yen Tu. Though Zen classes organized by the institute attracted a number of new

followers, mostly retired officials from Hanoi, the existence of this new pagoda did not

change pilgrims' destinations. Visitors only stopped at the institute when they had time

on the way back from the mountain. The method of meditation introduced by this school
 121
could not replace popular religious practices, worship and ritual performance, which are

more familiar to Northern laypersons. It should be noted that the teaching of True Lam

Zen Institute was rejected by some other Buddhist orders in the South as incorrect. They

argued that each individual must find the meanings of Zen stories independently (Dai

Lan). Other Buddhist religious disapproved of gathering women for weeks in pagodas to

practice meditation, saying that it was wrong because these women should complete their

roles, according to Buddhist teachings, as mothers in their families; religious practices

should not prevent women to complete their Buddhist roles, they argued. Some women

complained that their friends became disoriented after practicing meditation introduced

by the Zen institute and they had to find another Buddhist religious who could cure them.

However, the rapid expansion of this institute, supported by wealthy Southern

businesspersons and overseas Vietnamese,109 created anxiety among officials, both

religious and secular, that the institute would take away their followers and, therefore,

their claim to the mountain. I met a number of women, old and young, who came from

Hanoi to work at the construction site of Lan pagoda in the summer of 2002. They were

all impressed by the lectures of the abbot of True Lam Zen Institute: his appearance, his

voice, his Buddhist knowledge. A great number of his books, as well as compact discs

and cassettes recording his lectures, have been sold in bookstores located in front of Quan

Su pagoda and circulated among followers since the late 1990s. A woman in her sixties, a

former medical officer in the army, recalled that she came to stay at the Zen institute in

108
Tdu hod nhgp ma, literally the power got into a wrong way, a mental state one might enter when he/she
practiced an incorrect way of meditation or martial arts.
09
The True Lam Zen Institute built nine branches in the United States and six others in Canada, France,
and Australia, <www.truclamvietzen.net>
 122
Da Lat city for three months in 2000 to study meditation through an introduction from

one of her friends. She added that she has persuaded many friends to participate in

meditation classes110 operated by this Zen institute since she returned to Hanoi. In 2002, a

huge complex at Lan pagoda was completed in three months. In 2005, another larger Zen

institute was built at Mount Tay Thien in VTnh Phuc province, 60 kilometers northeast of

Hanoi. Their high concrete buildings were different from the Northern pagodas' style and

created disagreement on the subject of cultural restoration. Opinions expressed in this

debate revealed the regional differences of Vietnamese Buddhism, not only with regard

to practice but also in other aspects such as meaning and emotion. Some Buddhist

scholars in Hanoi said that these tall, bulky structures are not pagodas but meeting-halls

and would destroy traditional cultural values and reduce the feeling of sacredness.

It is noteworthy that there have been attempts to prevent the expansion of this

Southern Buddhist school in Yen Tu over the years. In a bus to the mountain in January

2002, a representative of the True Lam Zen institute was in his mission to arrange for a

rite of laying a stone,111 supposed to be performed by the abbot at Lan pagoda in that

spring. He complained that they had been attempting to reconstruct Cam Thuc pagoda,

located on the road to Yen Tu, for many years but could not get the necessary permission.

Since they had received permission to rebuild Lan pagoda, he had traveled back and forth

from Da Lat to Quang Ninh more than ten times but he was not sure that when all

agreements would be met. Some Buddhist monks used to say that Yen Tu mountain

Classes of meditation have been organized at Sung Phuc pagoda in Long Bien, a suburban district of
Hanoi. Other classes are later operated in Yen Tu and Tay Thien mountains.
111
Le dot da: A ritual performed before a pagoda is started to be built or restored, in which an abbot or a
senior monk will place a stone at a hole, dug at the central line of that future pagoda.
 123
119

would be the site of more development if it were under the control of a venerable monk

who has a greater knowledge of Buddhism. They also complained that the Management

Committee did not arrange for new abbots appointed by the provincial Buddhist

Association to stay at the site and instead retained powerless and poorly educated nuns as

caretakers of the pagodas in order to control the mountain. This issue was officially

raised in the petition of Quang Ninh Buddhist Association in its meeting in 2007, which

included a request for a clear division of administrative authorities (BTSTHPG Quang

Ninh 2007). Expansion of the new Zen institute in Yen Tu, however, has led to a decision

of the Management Committee and Quang Ninh officials in 2004 to invite the abbot of

Phuc Khanh pagoda in Hanoi, who has a great number of followers, some of them are

high-ranking officials, to be the abbot of Van Tieu pagoda. Their expectation was that

this powerful Buddhist monk would prevent the "southernization" of the historical Zen

center, though he is well known by his tantric ritual performances, according to the

former head of Thuong Yen Cong National Front. The ongoing competition for the

legitimacy of Yen Tu mountain is between not only "state, association, and temple"

(Ashiwa and Wank 2006: 355) but also involved different Buddhist schools/monasteries

and pilgrims, the source of resources whose allegiance is sought.

Hoa thuong, a title invested by the Buddhist association to a monk who is at lest sixty-year-old, has
passed 40 Buddhist Lents, and has a good reputation.
In one of our informal conversations, the former head of the Yen Tu Management Committee told me
that he did not want to receive new monks to the pagodas in the mountain because they would make their
jobs more complicated. What he needed were educated officials in order to take care of the site.
 124
Pilgrims' Practices and Meanings

The True Lam school went into decline in the mid 14th century for unknown

reasons (Nguyln Lang 1994: 450-51; see also Minh Chi et al. 1999). Buddhist texts of

the True Lam school were later collected and published by Chan Nguyen (1646-1726),

the abbot of Long Dong pagoda,114 located on the road to Mount Yen Tu, and his

students (Nguyln Lang 1994: 120). The book "True Lam's principles of sound" {True

Lam Tong Chi Nguyen Thanh) published at the end of the eighteenth century was another

occasion when True Lam doctrines were revised. The first part of the book, "Activities of

the three founders" {Tarn To Hanh Trang), narrates the lives of Tr&n Nhan Tong and his

two successors, Phap Loa (1284-1330) and Huyln Quang (1254-1334). {Hanh Trang

1971; Nguyln Lang 1994: 269-72). Notwithstanding these publications, and the

continued discussion of the True Lam doctrines, the formal rite of succession115 and

many of the practices of the school have been lost, however.

Despite this loss, believers of the syncretic Three Religions and followers of local

beliefs, in which Buddhism plays an essential part, have nurtured Buddhism since it lost

support from the state in the 15th century (Thien Do 1999: 255-59). Some former main

pagodas of True Lam Zen School, such as Quynh Lam pagoda in Dong Trilu district,

Quang Ninh province, Vinh Nghiem pagoda in BSc Giang province, Bao An pagoda in

Bac Ninh province, became village temples. Statues of the three founders of True Lam

were worshiped in a number of pagodas in the northeastern provinces and Tra^i Nhan

114
Long D6ng, also called Lan pagoda, is at Nam Mlu village, Uong Bi district, Quang Ninh province
(Nguyln Duy Hinh 1977: 13).
Truyen thica: a rite in which a Patriarch formally recognizes a person as his successor by giving him his
robe and bowl {truyen y bat), which he received from the former Patriarch, is essential in Zen tradition.
 125
Tong's religious activities were narrated in folk poems.116 These poems were chanted on

his death anniversaries and on the pilgrimage road to Yen Tu. From the 15th century

through the 21st, Yen Tu mountain symbolically became one of the most important

pilgrimage centers in recognition of the meaningful act of renunciation and devotion by

one of Vietnam's culture heroes and kings.

"Hundred years making merit and leading a religious life,

One has yet to be emancipated if not returning to Yen Tu."117

This anonymous poem, popular among pilgrims, emphasizes the significant

position of Mount Yen Tu for Vietnamese Buddhist believers, a sacred place where Tran

Nhan Tong lived as a Buddhist monk and became enlightened as a Buddha. Although this

aspect of the life of Tran Nhan Tong was almost absent from later official history,

fragments recording his monastic life can be found in Buddhist literature and oral

histories. Pilgrims in some slightly different versions narrated the meanings of different

pagodas located on the road to Yen Tvr and in the mountain

Suoi Tam (literally, bath brook) pagoda built next to a small stream was the place

where King Tran Nhan Tong took a bath on the way from the capital to the

116
Ke hgnh: narrate stories of Tran Nhan Tong and his two successors through poems, still practiced on the
day of his death anniversary, the 1st day of eleventh month, at Bao An pagoda, Bac Ninh province.
117
Tram nam tich due tu hanh
Chua ve Yen Tu- chua thanh qua tu
Literally, although one has accumulated merits and cultivated by following a Buddhist path for one
hundred years, one has not completed the cultivation if one did not visit Yen Tu. There are some different
versions and interpretations about this poem. NguySn Lang (1994: 496) says that the poem was transmitted
from the Tran period (13* century). It reveals the hope of Buddhist monks at that time because Yen Tu has
not enough room to accommodate every monk for summer Lent. Similarly, Nguyen Quang Tuan (1990: 86)
sees the poem as the introduction to the sacredness of Yen Tu\ where Tran Nhan Tong, the first Buddhist
founder, lived and died. Pham Ke (1996: 59), on the other hand, explains that because the access to the
mountain top of Yen Tu is too difficult, one can continue his/her "path" (dao) if he/she has passed this
suffering. Hftu Ngoc (1998) uses the poem to start his article "The Mecca of Vietnamese Buddhism" to
introduce an important character of this pilgrimage center: the uniqueness.
 126
mountain in order to get rid of all the dust of the secular world before entering the

religious life. Cam Thuc (taking food) was the pagoda where the king had his first

vegetarian meal at the mountain. Giai Oan (clearing unjust charges) pagoda was

built at the foothill after Tran Nhan Tong performed a ritual for his concubines

who jumped into a brook nearby and drowned when he ordered them to return

home. Hon Ngoc (emerald) or Ha Ki|u (landing sedan) plot was the point at

which the king's son Tran Anh Tong and other mandarins had to get out of their

sedans and walk to Hoa Yen pagoda when they came to visit him. On the right

side of Hoa Yen as you go up the mountain is Mot Mai (one roof) pagoda where

Tran Nhan Tong spent time reading Buddhist surras. Further left is Dugc

(medicine) shrine where he prepared medicine. Thien Dinh (meditation) is a cave

on the right side where the king used to meditate in Buddhist Lent in the summer.

(Field notes 2002)

These legendary stories were transmitted among believers, from the old to the

young and from experienced pilgrims to new visitors. They have subsequently been

included in published form in books and tourist guides and on web pages. The

heartbreaking story of the concubines who accompanied Tran Nhan Tong to the mountain

and killed themselves after Tran Nhan Tong did not allow them to follow his religious

life and wanted to send them back to their hometowns was reenacted as a dramatic

performance at every official opening ceremony organized by the Management

118
Thi Sanh, Yen Tic, (Quang Ninh: Ty Van Hoa va Thong Tin, 1980); Pham Ke\ Danh son Yen Tic
(Famous Mountain Yen Tu), (Hanoi: Nxb Lao Dong, 1996); Tran Tnrong, Chua Yen Tit (Yen Tu pagoda),
(Ha Noi: Nxb Van hoa Thong tin, 2002); <www.vnstvle.vdc.com.vn>: <www.vir.com.vn>;
<www.vietnamstopover.com>; <www.saigon-tourist.com>; <www.vietnamtravelguide.com>;
<www.vietnamtourism.com>; <www.halong.com>.
 127
Committee. The monastic life of Tran Nhan Tong and his religious activities are

interpreted in narratives of the pagodas and other significant landmarks on Yen Tu: ritual

purification by bathing, renouncing the splendors of the imperial court to follow an

ascetic life, practicing meditation, reading Buddhist sutras, and preparing medicine were

all elements that built up the magnetism of this mountain. These legendary stories of Tran

Nhan Tong's sacred life associated with Yen Tu before achieving enlightenment, not his

formal teachings, were the source of attraction for most pilgrims, a situation criticized by

the abbot of True Lam Zen Institute (Thanh Tu 2002a: 15).

Repairing and reconstructing pagodas are popular methods of accumulating merit

in Buddhism. Mrs. Lan narrated that in the summer of 1994, members of the Bao An

group donated 40 million VND to repair some pagodas on the mountain. Since Mount

Yen Tu was by then officially recognized as a historical site, it took a number of months

for her to get the permission to repair these pagodas. The Management Committee later

asked her to organize the repair of Lan pagoda, but she refused, suggesting instead that

they could give this pagoda to the abbot of True Lam Zen Institute in Lam Dong

province, who at that time was waiting for permission to rebuild another pagoda in Yen

Tu. The need for official permission to repair a pagoda, an activity which is considered a

religious practice, is a common problem at other officially recognized 'historical'

pagodas as' well. Though official recognition might protect these pagodas from local

encroachment, some Buddhist monks I talked with did not want this recognition applying

to their pagodas. They said that since donating for repairing a pagoda is considered as a

good way of merit-making, when a monk has not been able to repair or extend his pagoda
 128
for a few years he would lose his followers and might be required to go to another pagoda

to give his pagoda for another monk who is good in constructing.

Since reconstructing a pagoda is a common Buddhist practice, pilgrims did not

pay any attention to the historical remains of a pagoda or its authenticity. They all

performed rituals and made prayers at Hoa Yen pagoda because it was the place where

Tran Nhan Tong, the founder lived and found enlightenment. Even in the period from

1960s to late 1980s, when religious practices were discouraged, according to some local

people, Hoa Yen pagoda was never entirely abandoned. There were always some groups

of laywomen visiting the pagoda through three months after the New Year. The former

head of the Cultural Department of Thuong Yen Cong commune narrated that because

the pagoda is far from town, pilgrims were free to perform rituals, especially the rite of

possession that was strictly prohibited at that time.

As repairing or reconstructing 'historical' pagodas is officially restricted, donating

statues has become more popular among believers. Generally, Buddhist monks, or

cultural officials as in the case of Yen TUT, would ask different groups of believers for

some specific statues they needed. Sometimes, a monk proposes statues he is going to

make and asks for monetary donations. Some Buddhist monks I talked with knew the

names and contacted addresses of the women, living in Hanoi or Hai Phong city, whom

they might ask for statues. These women, usually the heads of some association of

laywomen, would then raise donations from their members and relatives. Besides

repairing forty-seven statues at Mount Yen Tu in 1994, Mrs. Lan and the Bao An group
 129
also donated most of the statues to the newly constructed Van Tieu pagoda in 2001 and

some of those at Hoa Yen and Giai Oan pagodas, as well as other decorative materials.

On some occasions, believers decide which statues are appropriate to a pagoda

and ask the abbot to receive them. The abbot of Bao Sai pagoda once complained that he

had to receive a statue of Kuan-yin in a white robe (Quan Am bach y) because one of the

donors was the wife of a general. Some Northern Buddhist monks dislike that image of

Kuan-yin standing and holding a gourd of nectar of immortality, usually seen in the

garden of Southern pagodas.119 Since followers might transfer their allegiance to other

monks in other pagodas when an abbot refuses their donations, in most cases, the abbots

have to accept statues that they do not like in order to maintain other supports.

In an interview in Lao Dong newspaper, the vice director of the Department of

Cultural Heritage, addressed the question of "the archetypical, authentic, entire, and

continuous" requirements of restoration works and the phenomenon donating new

statues:

This is a sensitive dilemma because pagodas are both cultural heritages and places

where people practice their religion. Donating statues is a good tradition for many

generations. The laws of cultural heritage only protect historical sites and objects

which are recognized but do not regulate new objects. However, in order to

prevent new donated statues that may have bad effects on the historical sites, we

119
Popular images of Kuan-yin (s. Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva; Quan Am bo tat) in northern pagodas is the
statue of Kuan-yin sitting on a white elephant, placed at the left side of Amitabha Buddha (Adida Phat) on
the main altar at the second line from the top. The statue of Kuan-yin with thousand eyes and hands (Quan
Am nghin mat nghln toy), is also placed below on the main altar. The statue of Cundi Bodhisattva (Quan
Am chudn de) with three heads and eighteen hands is placed at the left side of a pagoda. The statue of
Kuan-yin with a child standing at her feet (Quan Am tong tic) is placed at the back corner on the right side.
In some pagodas, a statue of Kuan-yin holding a child (Quan Am Thf Kinh) replaces this statue.
 130
should have some method to propagandize and improve the knowledge of the

abbots on this matter. (P. Duy 2003. My translation)

The active creativity of donors in this practice is obvious. When Mrs. Lan

received a request from the Yen Tvr Management Committee for a statue of Tran Nhan

Tong, which would be placed at Van Tieu pagoda, she and other members of her group

went to a pagoda in Nam Dinh province several times and took many pictures of a statue

of Tran Nhan Tong. Once a picture was chosen, she had to find a good sculptor, through

her own contacts, who could follow her order to make a sample. Then she conducted a

cost-comparison of bronze casting crafts persons. An artisan in Ngu Xa village, the

famous bronze casting village located next to the West Lake in Hanoi, was willing to

donate his labors for merit and only charged for the materials he used. A statue of

entering Nirvana (nhdp niet ban), usually depicting the Buddha lying on the right side on

a lotus, was made for Tran Nhan Tong, lying on the left side, in accordance with her

understanding that Tran NhSn Tong was a Vietnamese Buddha. While the appearance of

this statue was controversial for some visitors, it should be noted that a sign of the

Buddha, a '+' 120 character in the middle of the chest, could be observed on statues of

Tran Nhan Tong at pagodas in Yen Tu and some other provinces. His Buddhist titles,

Dieu Ngu Gidc Hoang,121 are also some of the Buddha's titles.

During the pilgrimage journey in 2003, the wife of this same artisan donated a

similar statue of Tran Nhan Tong and an image of his student to the newly built Hoa Yen

120
Van (s. sauvastika or srivatsa): symbol of the sun, light, and power; an auspicious sign of the Buddha.
121
Diiu ngu(s. damya): literally, 'regulate and rule', one of ten titles of the Buddha, who could regulate
and rule people and guide them to the Path. The term Gidc hoang or Gidc vuong, an enlightened king,
contains similar meaning with and dedicates to the Buddha.
 131
pagoda and asked Mrs. Lan to perform an essential rite of calling spirits to enter the

statues.122 About 8:00 pm on the first night of the pilgrimage, these statues, to which

many Buddhist talismans123 had been glued, were placed on the main altar and covered

with two pieces of red cloth. The main altar and all other altars in the pagoda were full, so

some people had to put their trays of offerings on their own heads. Mrs. Lan and other

members of the Bao An group sat in the front of the main altar while the artisan's wife

and her relatives sat in the back. After one hour chanting the Kuan-yin Sutra, an excerpt

from the Lotus Sutra, a prayer of penitence was read and all lights, lamps and candles,

were extinguished. The group started to chant the Great Mercy mantra (chu Dai Bi), the

412 sacred words believed to carry the power from Kuan-yin; this session had been

performed for half an hour in the dark. While many people could read the Kuan-yin Sutra

and penitence prayer from copies distributed by Mrs. Lan, only permanent members of

Bao An group participated in the second session as they remembered the mantra by heart.

At the end, the lights were turned on and Mrs. Land threw two trays of offerings, small

notes of 100 VND, golden rings, needles and thread, grains of rice and corn, to the crowd

while other members of the group shouted "peaceful world" (thien ha thai binh) and vied

with each other to collect these offerings, believed to bring prosperity. Mrs. Land then

removed the red cloths and talismans from the statues and gave half of them to the

1
Ho than nhdp tuxrng, sometimes called a rite of putting statues in places (an vi tuong), a ritual
performed for any new statues to make them sacred and worshiped. Before this ritual, a statue is a piece of
wood or metal that can be placed on the ground. Another rite of asking spirits to leave statues (xudt thdn) is
performed when a statue is needed to be repaired or thrown out.
23
Bua, a small piece of yellow cloth, about 3 centimeters wide and 30 centimeters long, with read signs
printed in it, is believed to contain sacred power after the ritual is performed.
Sam (s. ksamayati), regret for having done wrong and seek forgiveness.
 '132
artisan's wife. The other half were thrown to the crowd. These red cloths and talismans

were believed to contain sacred power that protects their bearers from bad spirits.

A woman explained that when a child frequently cries at night, a small piece of

this red cloth put under his pillow would help him sleep well. She then criticized Mrs.

Lan for performing a ritual that must be performed by Buddhist monks. It was not that

Mrs. Lan did not know the Buddhist institution since she could explain to me all the rules

of this ritual. However, in practice, one or another rule was sometimes neglected. I had

participated in two similar rituals, organized also by Mrs. Lan in the previous year and

none of them was the same as the others. The first ritual was organized on early January

2002 in the newly built Van Tieu pagoda on Yen Tu mountain. She invited the abbot of

Quan Sii pagoda and five other monks from Hanoi and Hai Duomg province to perform

the ritual; she wanted to invite all one hundred monks who were studying in Quan Su

pagoda but they could not come because of an exam. Some other associations of

laywomen were also invited to participate in the rite. The second ritual was organized in

Quynh L3m pagoda in Dong Trieu district on December 2002. Because the group had to

go back to Hanoi on that day, the abbot of Quynh Lam pagoda performed the ritual at

noon. When the lights were turned off, all doors and windows had to be closed. Though

everyone knows and says that this ritual must be performed at night, I observed two other

groups also perform it in the daytime. Mrs. Lan later explained that she had to perform

the ritual instead of going back to Hanoi to invite a monk to go to the mountain to

perform the ritual at another time because the wife of the artisan wanted to bring the red

cloth home. Though Buddhist principles was known and understood and followed as
 133
closely as possible, people gave priority to the outcome of practices. The ritual must be

completed in order to bring gifts home and to gain merit.

Since donating statues and participating in the rite of calling spirits to enter

statues are two of best occasions for merit making, many pilgrims from other groups

attended at the ritual performed by the Bao An group. It was also not easy for the

artisan's wife to donate the statues without the help from Mrs. Lan, who has developed a

closed connection with local officials, not mention many high-ranking Buddhist religious.

Other statues of the three founders of True Lam Zen school were previously donated by a

Buddhist monk, who has a long relationship with the Management Committe, from Hai

Phong city and his followers.

The sacredness of Mount Yen Tu was made known among pilgrims by narratives

on miraculous occurrences. Mrs. Lan kept telling me and other members of her group that

when she climbed to the top of the mountain during her first trip in 1963, she saw water

spring from a small cave. After washing her face and drinking water in this cave, she felt

better and her illness was gone. Though this cave no longer existed at mountaintop, the

use of spring water to cure illness continues. A twenty-year-old man, catching water

falling from the mountainside at the back of Bao Sai pagoda into a small bottle, said that

drinking this water is good for health and he wanted to bring some back to his home.

Around him were a number of people with empty bottles and cans in their hands waiting

for their turn. That practice is strengthened by stories that link it to activities of the

founders. For example, the abbot of Mot Mai pagoda usually explained to visitors that

Buddhist monks in earlier times used to obtain water from a cave next to the entrance of
 134
the pagoda and that rice came from the other cave. Pilgrims then placed a small amount

of money at the side of the cave while taking some water after praying at different altars

in the pagoda.

Pilgrims also looked for forest products, believed containing special values that

would bring good health, in order to bring them home. The most popular such product of

Yen Tu is bamboo shoots collected from the grove by local Dao people in the early rainy

season. Although the Management Committee has prohibited this activity to protect the

proposed national park, bamboo shoots are sold along pilgrims' road and around the

parking lot at the entrance to the mountain. Bamboo shoots are also consumed on the spot

at a number of restaurants near Hoa Yen pagoda and at the foothill. Different types of

leaves and roots commonly called southern medicine, some collected locally, others

imported from different areas, are sold everywhere people can stop. Recently, the

vendors, mainly from Bac Giang province on the other side of the mountain, were

relocated to the market next to the parking lot. Another type of forest product is the meat

of wild animals such as barking deer. Even though game meat has been officially banned,

it still finds its way to some restaurants at Yen Tu. The naturalness of these rare special

products {dac sari) is magnetic especially for city dwellers whose living standards

improved in the past two decades and who were aware of and worried about the dangers

of fertilizers and other chemicals within industrial products.

In narratives about the mountain, reference is often made to wild and rare animals

to demonstrate the holiness of the site. Mrs. Lan said that she once met two white tigers

playing on the road from Van Tieu to Hoa Yen pagoda and they only went away after she
 135
told them the reason why she came to the mountain: to repair some statues and pagodas.

A nun at Giai Oan pagoda told the story of how a big black snake lay under her bed for a

few nights and a big yellow monkey sat outside the window after she arrived on the

mountain. The appearances of these holy animals were described as signs of the approval

of the narrator's acts from the mountain, known as the lord (ngai).

Buddhist charms such as bracelets, necklaces, or emblems and small statues were

also popular with pilgrims at Yen Tu. These souvenirs were found in a number of stalls at

the foothill market, near Hoa Yen pagoda, and beside the road to the mountaintop. A

young soldier from the military contingent at the mountaintop who was selling tea and

snacks at a shop next to one such stall said that all of these mementos were made in

Hanoi. Knowing this fact does not stop pilgrims buying them in order to bring them

home. Some different kinds of orchids, that could not survive more than a few days, were

also bought and sold at the site. There is one small bookstore, built next to Hoa Yen

pagoda, owned by the wife of the former head of Management Committee. Except for

three books on Yen Tu and few others on Tran Nhan Tong, most of the books, including

books of Buddhist sutras and books on divination from physiognomy and astrology,

could be found at any pagoda and were all published in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City.

However, similar to the Buddhist charms, these books became gifts when they receive

them from Buddhist monks or nuns. When pilgrims donated or offered an abbot part of

their offerings after a ritual or prayer, the monk usually gave them some charms or books

in return.
 136
Chapter Summary

The worship of sacred mountain of Vietnamese had a long tradition before it

associated with Buddhism. Mount Yen Tu was officially selected as a historical site

because of its connection with Tran Nhan Tong, a national hero in official Vietnamese

history. The projects of preservation and restoration this national heritage is part of a

larger process of national building carried out by cultural officials on this mountain,

which, to some extent, interfere with the Buddhist practices of pilgrims, who considered

repairing pagodas and donating statues, are some best ways of merit making. Yen Tu

mountain has also been a symbol of a unified Buddhist Association and a Vietnamese

version of Buddhist practices that has led to a contest between secular and religious

factions striving to legitimize their authority over the site. Tension exists not only

between officials and Buddhist religious but also between different Buddhist orders.

They, therefore, have to gain supports, both material and spiritual, from pilgrims although

to some extend disapprove of their practices, which focus on rituals than Buddhist texts.

Laywomen, at the same time, by developing a 'good' connection with different factors,

religious and secular, have been able to continue their practices with their own meanings.

The next chapter will examine how economic Renovation in the mid-1980s has provided

pilgrims an advantage to continue their practices and how women's religious activities

has changed economic and social lives of local people in the pilgrimage center.
 137

Chapter 4: Religious Resurgence and Economic Renovation

My opinion about the construction of cable car in the area of Yen Tu pagodas...

is: I do not agree! The reasons are quite simple: 1. [The cable car] would destroy

the ancient socio cultural ecological environment of Yen Tu. 2. [The project]

violates the Law of Cultural Heritage (Article 32, 35) which was enacted by the

National Assembly. 3. [We] should not 'forget' the meaning of the 'pilgrimage to

the original point' in the old time of the Tran and Le dynasties in favor of

someone 'who are too lazy to walk.' 4. [We] should not 'secularize' blatantly the

site that was considered as holy land. (Trin Quoc Vuong 2002: 4. My translation)

This opinion of the Vice General Secretary of the Association of Vietnamese

Folklorists can be seen as a summary of the objections raised by opponents of a cable car

system which was under construction at Mount Yen Tu by the Import-Export Company

of Quang Ninh province in the mid-2001. When completed, the 1.2 kilometer cable car

system would include a gigantic station complex next to the comparatively small Giai

Oan pagoda in the foothills, as well as a number of steel pillars standing out against the

green carpet of trees on the mountain, generated great controversy with strong opinions

on both sides expressed in numerous articles published in different newspapers

throughout the country.125 The debate, which lasted until early 2002, involved various

groups and individuals including historians, architects, artists, writers, photographers,

religious leaders, cultural cadres and local officials and led to an order from the Ministry

125
Some articles covering this debate were published in Lao Dgng (Labour), Nhdn Dan (People), Ngiceri
Cao Tuoi (The Elderly), Gia Dinh - Xd HQI (Family - Society), Khoa Hoc Dai Song (Scientific Life),
Thanh Men (The Youth), Thi Thao & Van Hoa (Sport & Culture).
 138
of Culture and Information (official correspondence 3370/VHTT-BTBT in 8/23/2001), to

halt construction pending inspection (Thanh Thuy 2002: 4).

As a member of the Association of Vietnamese Historians, I had a chance to

observe the final official meeting convened, in early January 2002 in the town of Uong

Bi, Quang Ninh province, to resolve the issue. The meeting, which occurred less than a

month after my return to Vietnam to conduct fieldwork, was attended by the Vice

Minister of Culture and Information, the President of Quang Ninh People's Committee,

the Director of Quang Ninh Department of Culture and Information, the head of the Yen

Tur Management Committee, the Director of the Quang Ninh Import-Export Company,

the President of the Association of Vietnamese Architects, an official from the Ministry

of Technology and Environment and some journalists from newspapers which had

covered the debate since the beginning. It should be noted that no religious leader, let

alone the pilgrims, were invited to the meeting. After provincial officials made their

statements, mostly on the need for the cable car and the difficulties they faced defending

the project, specialists and cultural cadres from Hanoi began to criticize different failures

from different perspectives, based on their professions. Even though the meeting had to

be prolonged until 7:00 pm so that all criticism could be voiced, every participant

recognized, after examining the construction site at Mount Yen Tu on the morning of the

same day that nothing could be changed. The Ministry of Culture and Information, in its

report to the Deputy Premier, (report 495/VHTT-BTBT in 1/30/2002), "basically

accepted" the cable car project and suggested that the Quang Ninh People's Committee

should adjust the cable car system further away from the traditional road of pilgrims on
 139
the mountain, something which was undoubtedly impossible, and implement specific

measures to limit further changes to the environment, which was already significantly

damaged. This report was mocked in newspaper coverage (Nguai Lao Dong 2002).

A similar controversy erupted at another Buddhist pilgrimage center, Perfume

pagoda in Ha Tay province, about 70 kilometers southwest of Hanoi, when a cable car

system was planned for the site in the mid-1990s. Public disagreement about the Perfume

pagoda cable car was so strong that construction was delayed and did not start until 2004.

Underneath arguments about the environmental, legitimacy, religious, and

cultural implications of these projects was the critical issue of the relationship between

religion and economic development, particularly the expansion of a tourist economy

(Durong Trung Qu6c 2002). Though the Provincial Committee Secretary126 of Quang

Ninh explained that the cable car would "preserve and enhance cultural and historical

values of the heritage" (Ha Hien 2002), the project at Mount Yen Tu, with an investment

of 37 billion VND from the provincial budget, was in fact a part of preparation by Quang

Ninh People's Committee for a tourist year in 2003 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of

the establishment of Quang Ninh province. The tourist year would start with the opening

ceremony of the festival in Yen Tu, the proposed tourist site in the west of the province,

and close in Ha Long bay, the well-known tourist site in the east (BVHTT 2002: 7).

This was not the first time Yen Tu appeared at the center of a dilemma between

cultural preservation and economic development. In 1998, a heated discussion broke out

relating to the exploitation of some coalmines belong to Vietnam National Coal

Corporation (Vinacoal) at the site. At that time, in his "Open letter to the Chairman of
125
Bi thir Tinh uy: Head of provincial office of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP).
 140
People's Committee of Quang Ninh province" in Van Hoa (Culture), Tran Quoc Vuong

wrote:

To preserve cultural heritage, [you have to] accept the sacrifice of some economic

benefits. If [you] get economic benefit by destroying a great cultural heritage such

as Yen Tu historical site, you would be responsible for your decision towards

Vietnamese generations today and in the future. (My translation)

Religion as a Reflection of Economic Base

Thurong Yen Cong commune is composed of eleven villages located along side

the foot of Yen Tu Mountain, almost 20 kilometers on the direction from east to west. In

the first half of the 20th century, this area was inhabited mainly by Dao people, an ethnic

group, living in seven villages in the commune. In 2004 Dao comprised more than 50%

of the total population of the commune. They live mostly in the uplands where they

practice swidden agriculture. The Dao people have their own religion127 and because they

are not Buddhists they do not pay any attention to the pagodas. A woman living in Khe

Su, the farthest Dao village in the west and the most difficult to access area of the

commune, recalled her innocent of Buddhist practice:

I used to stop at pagodas in Yen Tu a few times for drinking water when I

went collecting firewood on the mountain. I stood at a door and saw

statues in the dark room but never dared to enter. I was frightened of

ghosts. (Field notes 2004)

The most important religious activity of Dao people, according to everyone I talked
with, is the ritual that gives a name to a man (le cdp sdc). This rite of initiation was
categorized as a superstitious practice and was strictly prohibited after 1954.
 141
Some ethnic Chinese also live in the central valley of Thuomg Yen Cong where

they cultivate paddy fields. In a conversation in 2004, a seventy-eight-year-old man, also

living in Khe Su village, said that in 1950s, except for three Kinh households, all other

families at Nam Mau village, the communal centre where all administrative offices are

located today, were Chinese. Chinese comprised 40% of the total population of the

commune in 1960 when agricultural cooperatives were established. According to some

local observers, the Chinese worshiped their ancestors at home and never visited the

Buddhist pagodas on the mountain. Most of the Chinese left for China when the

Vietnamese-Chinese border war broke out in 1979. A few families remained in the

commune and were relocated in the town of Uong Bf for security reasons. In 2004,1 met

only one Chinese who brought his family back to the commune after the war was over.

A seventy-eight-year-old Dao man recalled that in "French times,"128 he had

observed strangers of unknown origin visiting Yen Tur pagodas. He labeled these

strangers "lowlanders." One of these lowlanders, an eighty-year-old woman who used to

live in Yen Due commune, about 30 kilometers from Yen Tu, remembered her first trip

to Yen Tu pagodas with some women from her village on the plain at the base of the

mountain:

It was after the fall harvest.129 I was playing with other children in the field when

a group of women from my village passed by. I saw my mother and when I heard

A common expression indicates to the pre-1945 period when Vietnam was under
French colonial rule.
129
Vu mua: in the 10th month of the lunar calendar, is the main harvest of rice cultivators
in the Red River delta. Some festivals in rural areas were organized at this time of the
year.
 142
that they are going to Yen Tu, I ran after them. We walked to the mountain. I was

too small to remember everything. I did not encounter other people there except

some Buddhist monks. It took a few days to visit the pagodas and return home.

(Field notes 2002)

Given the rarity of written accounts of pilgrimage journeys, what we know from

different stories of local people and pilgrims is that before independence of Vietnam was

attained in 1945, pilgrimage to Yen Tu was carried out only occasionally. There was no

organized spring festival or pilgrimage season since pilgrims decided to visit the

mountain when they had free time. There was hardly any interaction between pilgrims

and local people or between different pilgrimage groups. Access to Yen Tu was difficult

so that a pilgrimage from Hanoi might take seven days to complete (Kiem Ho 1926).

This continuous pattern of religious practices, according to the seventy-eight-

year-old man, was interrupted when Chinese bandits130 occupied Nam Mlu, a village,

along the road to Yen Tu pagodas, in 1943-45. During the war of resistance, from 1946

to 1954, the whole region became a front line between French and Vietnamese guerillas,

which made pilgrimage to the mountain impossible. Buddhist monks also left the

pagodas in this period. Pilgrims started going back to Yen Tu in the second half of the

An eighty-two-year old man recalled that the bandit in northeast provinces was Ngai
people. They were skillful in fighting and were supported by the French to establish a
Nung Autonomous Zone in these provinces, he said. From 1946 to 1950, he was the
commander of 300 Chinese in Quang Ninh province, with the support from Chinese
troops, to 'mobilize' the Ngdi to follow Vietnamese revolutionaries. The Ngai today are
mostly living in Quang Ninh, Lang Son, Cao Bang, and Bac Giang provinces with a total
population of 1,154. For information of the process of ethnic classification of the Ngai,
see Andrew Hardy and Nguyen Van Chinh, "A Policy Balancing Act: The 'Ethnic
Question' in the Highlands" in: Viet Nam Contemporain. Stephane Dovert and Benoit De
Treglode, eds, (Paris: Indes Savantes, 2004).
 143
1950s. Hundreds of people visited the mountain each year from 1955 on and a three-day

festival was organized in the spring of 1956 (Tran Quoc Tuy 1958).

Since 1954 when a socialist state was built in Northern Vietnam, Marxist theory

of the relationship between economic base and political and ideological superstructure

dominated the field of cultural studies. This theory entirely subordinated religion to the

economy. As a result, religion was seen as a reflection of the past feudal and colonial

economy containing backward elements. Religion, according to this theory, would

disappear in the process of building a modern socialist economy which combines

industrialization and electrification.

In 1955, Hong Quang zone, an industrial region combining the former Hong Gai

special zone and Quang Yen province, was established (Presidential fiat 221-SL in

22/2/1955), and in 1963 this zone merged with Hai Ninh province to form Quang Ninh

province, specializing in coalmines. The area around Yen Tu changed dramatically after

the Thuomg Yen Cong commune was put under a plan of locating coal deposits in 1959

and was later annexed to the newly established town of Uong Bi in 1961. This plan was

in accordance with an economic model that considered heavy industry the key to socialist

industrialization, the economic goal of Northern Vietnam after 1954. Coal from Hong

Quang zone (latterly Quang Ninh province) helped fuel such industry, including thermal

power stations, cement factories and steel mills, that Vietnam built from the first decade

of independence (Birchall 1999). From 1959, the exploitation of coalmines brought many

new Kinh settlers who were foresters, geologists, and miners to the site. According to the
 144
131
former head of the National Front of Thuong Yen Cong, the prospecting program

alone recruited about six thousands men and women. Talking about the economic and

religious values of Mount Yen Tu, he said:

We started to prospect for coal in 1959, digging trenches and finding a plot to put

drilling machines. Searching was completed in 1960 and the machines arrived in

1963. The department of technology was located at the place that is now the

parking lot at the foot of Mount Yen Tu. There was no reaction to the process of

prospecting. There was no issue raised about cultural heritage at that time. Coal at

this mountain is of good quality with rich deposits. The provincial office only

ordered coalmine companies to stop their operations in the late 1990s. (Field

notes 2004)

The construction of a road to the mountain in the early 1960s in conjunction with

the plan to industrialize the region led to the destruction of some stupas on the mountain.

By gathering a great number of young people in newly established military style of

dormitories, separated from their former cultural contexts, in an industrial area, it also

built a way of thinking which privileged economic benefit over cultural preservation.

This attitude resulted in a disdain for religious practices and extended the conflict

between coal companies and cultural officials until the late 1990s. To a certain degree, it

was the Vietnamese-American war that saved the mountain, because the American air

131
Mat trgn to quoc: the governmental body that controls professional organizations (e.g. Association of
Vietnamese Historians, Association of Vietnamese Architects), mass organization (e.g. Association of
Vietnamese Women, Association of Vietnamese Peasants), and religious organization (e.g. Vietnamese
Buddhist Association, Vietnamese Catholic Association), which has its branches in provinces, districts, and
communes.
 145
attacks on Quang Ninh province, starting in August 5, 1964, slowed down the expansion

of mining companies. As the highest mountain in the region, Yen Tvr was occupied by

signal corps and air defense forces in 1964 to protect the thermal power station in the

town of Uong Bi, one of the main targets of American bombs. The Yen Tu area also

became a training ground for soldiers who were to be deployed in the south in the 1960s.

Another economic program that changed the lives of people in Northern Vietnam

since late 1950s was cooperativization and collectivized agriculture (Kerkvliet 1995: 68).

This program transformed the Yen Tu area into a new economic zone. Numerous Kinh

people from districts of Hai Phong city and Hung Yen province and Dao people from Ha

Bac province resettled in Thuong Yen C6ng commune in 1964. These new settlers

actively participated in the creation of the Yen Tu festival from the mid-1980s on. In

addition, Yen Tu pagodas were turned into village shrines and Buddhist religious were

administratively controlled by a newly established cooperative in Nam Mau village.

The former secretary of the Commune's Communist Party, who had arrived in

Nam Mau in 1957 and served as a production brigade leader in the 1960s, recalled:

Dao people, even though more backward,133 were the same as the Kinh. They

understood immediately and joined the cooperatives at the beginning in 1960.

Chinese did not join the cooperatives and in 1962-63, they established their own

cooperatives with their own villages and fields instead. (Field notes 2004)

Dang uyxa: a branch of the VCP at the commune, which controls VCP's cells (chi bo), the village
branches, and is guided by a district branch (huyen uy) and a provincial branch (tinh uy).
133
In another part of our conversation, he said that the lives of people in Thugng Yen Cong commune were
backward since concrete houses only appeared in the early 1980s. The term 'backward' is usually used by
ordinary people to indicate a low standard of living.
 146
According to a seventy-eight-year-old woman who settled in Nam Mau after 1954

from Ha Bac province, 'only 21 of 70 Kinh households in the village joined the

cooperative in 1960. Harvests were rather good as one work point was worth of four

kilograms of rice. All other families observed and joined the cooperative after two years.

Because of embezzlement, one work point reduced to 0.8 kilogram of rice and as a result

people almost starved.' Failures of collectivized models were described in a story related

by Mrs. Loan, the organizer of the association of laywomen in Nam MSu village who had

arrived in Yen Tu in 1978:

Not only most of the fields were terraced, the soil in this area was too sandy for

planting rice. Only the Chinese had good harvests because they worked very hard

and knew the land well as they were living here for a long time. My family was

usually short of food and had to borrow from our neighbors. (Field notes 2004)

This economic crisis did not bring a rise in religious practices. On the contrary,

the poor economic conditions created by the system of agricultural cooperatives

somehow discouraged local people from participating in religious activities. Even Mrs.

Loan, who had known and visited Yen Tu once when she lived in Thuy Nguyen district

of Hai Phong city, only occasionally visited pagodas after settling in this commune since

her family did not have enough food to eat. "Morality comes only after sufficient

food,"134 the proverb used by Mrs. Loan and others to explain why they could not go to

pagodas when they were deprived seems to contradict the assumption that a poor

economy is the condition of religious motivations (Hoang Thu Huong 2004). In contrast,

people tend to look for immediate solutions to work out their economic problems, rather

Co thuc moi vuc duac dgo, literally one should have enough to eat before surviving religious practice.
 147
than religious ones. Yen Tu, therefore, remained the destination of few pilgrims from

Quang Yen district and Hai Phong city.

Economic Change and the Resurgence of Religious Activities

When the government adopted the policy of Renovation in 1986, seeking to re-

situate Vietnam in the global economy, this not only led to major economic change in

Vietnam but also coincided with a flourishing of religious activities. The influence of

such economic factors on the religious sphere was criticized:

While Christianity uses money in building itself as a religion and in garnering

social influence, others, on the contrary, even closer to the popular religion, abuse

their role as religions to make money. What an irony!

Still more regrettable is that the instauration of temples and pagodas has

proceeded in disconformity (sic) with standards, giving them an alien and even

ridiculous look. Chambers and objects of worship have been designed with the

pursuance (sic) of 'improper personal states' in mind while the sponsorship of

these very temples and pagodas has been too wrongheaded and 'unclean' to exert

any influence over such wrongdoing. This has become a social evil with an anti-

cultural character that should be corrected. (Dang Nghiem Van 1998: 255-256)

Although the official position with its tendency to render religious activities

acceptable and confine them to "traditional" culture, is expressed in an interview with the

Vice Director of the Department of Grass Roots Culture and Information (Nguyln Minh

Ngoc 2004), the statement above shows a loosening of the state's control over religion,

partly due to a new acceptance of the process of privatization and the legal status of
 148
private ownership in the realm of market economy. It should be noted that except for the

cable car operated by a provincial company, most services in Yen Tu Mountain were

private sector investments. Since the early 1990s, Yen Tu has received increasing

numbers of pilgrims from more distant urban centers such as Hanoi, Hai Phong, and Ho

Chi Minh City rather than the nearby provinces.

Whereas the previous Marxist perspective seems inadequate to explain the

phenomenon of religious resurgence in the (post)modern world, some Western students

of religion and society still maintain that economic crises are a significant cause of the

revival of religious practices in the former communist countries after their socialist

systems collapsed in the late 1990s (Varga 1995: 237). Similarly, the resurgence of

religious activities in contemporary Vietnam has been interpreted as a reaction to the new

market economy, a condition that is chaotic and uncertain (see Taylor 2004). This

interpretation is evident in the criticism of practices of laypersons at some pagodas

around Hanoi city by the former Director of the Institute of Religious Studies:

This sort of belief is in full conformity with the pragmatism advocated by a group

of traders engaged in illegal business, belonging to circles of dealers, smugglers

and corruption. It is also suited to the unstable living conditions such as existed in

the early stage of the open-door period and the country's initial entry into the

market-oriented economy. (Dang Nghiem Van 1998: 250)

While tensions inherent in the newly accepted market economy turned people to

religion (Taylor 2004: 87), the idea that religion functions as a mechanism to confront the

unstable period of economic transition reflects Marxist theory of the determinative

 149
influence of economic factors over religious activities. Economic crises, however, are not

always the cause of religious resurgence as mention above. In fact, economic change

since the mid-1980s Renovation including the rise in disposable income for individuals

have provided them material supports for their pursuing religious practices.

In contrast to the socialist ideology that aimed to build an egalitarian wage

system, the policy of economic Renovation adopted since the mid-1980s has encouraged

people to get rich, a change underlined by the slogan "rich people, strong country" (Dan

giau, nuac manh). In other words, to be rich was legally acceptable and no longer an

object of administrative control. This openness not only stimulated a rise in per capita

income but also provided better conditions for pursuing religious practices. One of my

former classmates, who settled in Ho Chi Minh City after 1975, has made trips to Yen Tu

almost every year since 1999. Success in commerce afforded her the opportunity to

undertake these long journeys, out of reach when she was poor. At the same time,

pilgrims' donations, as a form of merit-making, increased so that pagodas and Buddhist

statues are frequently repaired and rebuilt and Buddhist monks and nuns no longer have

to do manual labor for their own needs. The change in city dwellers' lifestyles has also

transformed the pilgrimage site.

When I visited Yen Tu in 1993, pilgrims had to spend the night in thatched huts

on the mountainside near Hoa Yen pagoda, the main temple or at the foot of the

mountain. These huts were replaced in the mid-1990s by three-storey concrete

guesthouses with rooms for sleeping and a dining area. In addition to restaurants serving

wild game meat and other forest products, other entertainments such as karaoke or hair
 150
washing shops gradually appeared at Yen Tu Mountain. People no longer have to bring

their own food and cook rice at pagodas for their meals, an activity described in the

stories pilgrims tell about their journeys to Yen Tu in the 1960s-80s. Thus, pilgrims'

activities have been rapidly transformed during more than a decade of economic

renovation.

One aspect of economic renovation was a new style of management, the "contract

of productions."135 This economic management method made a remarkable change in

public services in general and in transportation in particular. Complaining about the

difficulties in transporting matters in pre-renovation period, Ms. Luang, a trader at Ngo

ST Lien market in Hanoi and the organizer of a pilgrimage group, said 'when I first

visited Yen Tu in 1964 with a group organized by a Buddhist monk at Kim Lien pagoda,

it had taken months before we completed all required papers for renting a bus.' Instead of

operating in a subsidy system, following state's plan and receiving average salaries,

transport companies have gradually applied the contract system since the late 1980s.

Drivers were given vehicles after depositing a sum of money as a mortgage and managed

the buses by themselves. While this new economic management allows workers to

unlimitedly increase their incomes, it also pushes them to work harder in order to pay

their monthly contracts. As a result, bus drivers have to look for passengers, especially

when they have to face another aspect of the newly accepted market economy,

competition, as a number of new established private companies have joined the market.

1
Khodn sdn phdm, literally one would receive a payment depending on total products he had made
instead of a fixed monthly salary.
 151
Waiting for a mechanic when the bus broke down on the mountain road just after leaving

Yen Tvr during one of our trips in 2003, our driver complained:

I knew the problem but did not have time to fix it up. After going back to Hanoi

tonight, I have only few hours to rest before taking another trip with other group

to a temple in Thanh Hoa province. We drivers have to work hard in the three

months of festival after the New Year because it is a good time to save for rainy

days. I could not put my bus in a garage to repair since I might lose some of my

contacts with pilgrims. Driving for pilgrims is in fact more relaxing than

competing with other drivers for passengers on the road. (Field notes 2003)

Organizers of pilgrimage groups always have such contacts with various drivers

for different occasions. Undoubtedly, this improvement in transportation was an

important element that contributed to the resurgence of pilgrimage in Vietnam and

particularly at Yen Tu. The adoption of the policy of renovation also marked an

ideological change that gave greater significance to the import-export and tourist

economies instead of heavy industry in the process of modernization in Vietnam. Quang

Ninh province, with its long border with China and Ha Long Bay, a world heritage site,

attracted a great number of businessmen to its border markets and a crowd of Chinese

tourists to the city of Ha Long and was considered one of the "opened doors" in Northern

Vietnam, with a rate of the gross domestic product (GDP) growth from 11.5% - 12%

(www.halong.com). The repair of national road No 5 that connects Hanoi and Hai Phong

city, an important seaport in Northern Vietnam, and the national road No 18A from a

suburb of Hai Duong city to Ha Long Bay, both rebuilt in the mid-1990s in order to
 152
create a pivotal economic development triangle of Hanoi, Hai Phong and Quang Ninh,

was in accordance with this shift in economic policies. The new roads shortened the

journey from Hanoi to Yen Tu to three and a half hours, from the half day required in

early 1990s. In addition, Uong Bi mining company's paving of the fourteen kilometer

mountain road from the Road No 18A to the foot of Mount Yen Tu, a project begun in

1992 to facilitate coal transportation, had the unintended consequence of increasing the

number of pilgrims at the site.

The development of transportation and road building did more than simply make

Yen Tu more accessible; it also changed the course of the pilgrimage. Describing her

journey to Yen Tu in the late 1980s, the mother of a friend of mine said:

The mountain road was muddy and slippery that made our walking so difficult,

especially under the drizzling rain after the New Year. We would stop at any

pagoda we met for praying and resting. It took a day to reach the foot of Mount

Yen Tu. (Field notes 2002)

Now her son rents a car for the whole family to visit Yen Tu in one day. The

pagodas along the way to the mountain are rarely visited by pilgrims, and the sufferings

along the road, once symbolic elements in pilgrims' stories, have also faded away.

Although some scholars criticized the plan to transform Yen Tvr into a tourist site,

arguing that this would destroy the meaning of pilgrimage, most pilgrims happily

accepted this comfortable change. While a few people insisted that pilgrims should walk

to the mountain top to show their heart to the Buddha, many others excitedly stayed in

line to take the cable car the first time.

 153
On the tenth day of Lunar New Year, February 21, 2002, the official ceremonial

day opening the Yen Tu festival, the cable car system was launched with the attendance

of many provincial high officials, central guests of honor, and the standing Vice President

of the Central Managing Committee of the Vietnamese Buddhist Association. While the

number of visitors to Yen Tu Mountain has been on the increase since early 1990s, it

leapt dramatically after the cable car system began to operate, as shown in the table

below. On the first day of operation, 8.000 visitors arrived at the site. Two days later, on

the weekend, Mount Yen Tu received about 35.000 visitors. This data is based on the

number of entry tickets sold by the Yen Tu Management Committee. An estimated 30%

of the visitors to Yen Tu did not buy the entry ticket (Thuy Huong 2002).

Table 1: Numbers of visitors to Yen Tu

Year 1992 1999 2001 2002 2003

Numbers 10,000 17,700 200,500 330,000 380,000
of visitor
Source: The Yen Tu Management Committee.

The economic scheme of Quang Ninh People's Committee in the period from the

2000-2010, which projects development of the tourist economy and service sector as 48%

of the total provincial GDP in 2000, compared with 38% in industry and 14% in

agriculture and fisheries (www.halong.com), is undoubtedly a vital factor in the increased

tourist presence at Yen Tu. This plan to increase tourism created a conflict with the

Ministry of Industry, which was interested in coal exploitation (Thuren 1997: 2). It

reflects the economic tension between local and central agencies. Behind the debate

between cultural preservation and exploitation of coal mines in Yen Tu area in 1998,

there was a deep-rooted motivation that, since 1997, the Hanoi based Vietnamese Coal
 154
General Company (Vinacoal), a direct affiliate of the Ministry of Industry, has handled

all coal-export deals, including the coal previously exported by mining companies

directed by Quang Ninh province (Kuo 1997: 2). Losing their control over local mineral,

Quang Ninh provincial officials turned to support Yen Tu Management Committee in its

struggle with Uong Bi and Vang Danh mining companies, two Vinacoal's new branches

which had been administratively directed by Quang Ninh People's Committee, to protect

the mountain. This economic contest between local and central agencies to control

provincial mineral, covered by a cultural cloak, resulted in the shut-down of some coal

pits close to Yen Tu Mountain and blocked the expansion of coal mines in the area.

The development of tourism (du lich), a word which rarely heard in pre-

renovation Vietnam, from providing cars for rent to organizing tours and including Yen

Tu as an attraction advertised in newspapers and on tourist websites has certainly

popularized the site and increased the number of visitors, including tourists, to Yen Tu. It

is difficult to draw a line between pilgrims and tourists since "a pilgrim is half a tourist"

(Turner 1978: 20). A pilgrimage shares a common feature with a tourist trip: an

adventuresome journey to palaces different from home. This feature could be observed in

pilgrims' eagerness to consume local products along their journey, similar to a

characteristic of Vietnamese tourists.

In our pilgrimage journey to Yen Tu in 2003, Mrs. Lan did changed her annual

itinerary by stopping at Tuan Chau, a new tourist site built at Ha Long Bay, instead of

going to Cua Ong temple in Cam Pha district at the end of our trip. The freedom of a

136
www.vietnamtourism.com; www.vietnamvovage.com; www.vietnamgreentravel.com;
www.traveltovietnam.com; www.vietnamopentour.com.vn; www.waytovietnam.com.
 155
period "getting away from home" (Graburn 1977: 18) was revealed in pilgrims'

conversations. A colleague reminded me of this characteristic of pilgrims when we sat at

the back of a bus listening some laywomen who were talking their dirty jokes, which they

could not talk in front of their children at home, in a pilgrimage journey in New

Caledonia in 2005. In other words, pilgrims no longer acted as their everyday statuses

(e.g., a mother or a grandmother), but as a friend among others, an aspect Turner (1973:

216) terms "antistructure."

However pilgrims are still distinct from tourists in their goals or motivations

(Cohen 1992: 58; Morinis 1992: 10-14). A tourist guide working for a company based in

Hanoi said that people usually ask her to organize a trip to Yen Tu for ritual (di le) and

then to Ha Long Bay for recreation (di chai). Tourist companies only operate tours to

Yen Tu during the pilgrimage season, (three months after Tit), since no one goes to Yen

Tu for a holiday. Regardless of the desire of Quang Ninh People's Committee to build

Yen Tu as a tourist attraction, pilgrims with religious motivations in their minds still

consider the mountain as a pilgrimage center and not a tourist place. While some groups

visit tourist sites along their journeys to Yen Tu, many others only go directly to the

mountain for participating in religious activities. However, the phenomenon of religious

resurgence at this pilgrimage site can not be fully understood without reference to the

economic changes mentioned above.

Religion is an Internal Power of Economic Development

Religious resurgence, in turn, creates economic changes, especially at remote

pilgrimage centers. No longer seen as the false beliefs of a backward feudal economic
 156
system, religion is considered one of the values of a traditional past worthy of being

preserved. As argued by the head of Classical Art Studies Department of the Institute of

Art, "Y6n Tu is unique... this holy sanctuary should be preserved precisely" (2001). That

trend was demonstrated by the official recognition of Yen Tu as a national cultural site

by the Ministry of Culture (official declaration 15/VH/QD in 3/13/1974); the

establishment of a "special forest" area with the total of 2,026 hectares in Yen Tu region,

verified and officially protected by Quang Ninh People's Committee (decision 783

QD/UB in 4/10/1996); and a project of general planning, which proposed to restore

material objects, such as pagodas, roads and the environment, and to study immaterial

objects, with a total funding of 65.4 billion VND from the government in 1997 (BVHTT

2002: 7). This approach, which treats this religious site as part of cultural heritage, is

problematic since it did not recognize the changes in many aspects of cultural life in

Vietnam. These include religious practices that have been transformed by decades of

revolutionary policies that aimed to build a new socialist culture (Malarney 1996). Many

"traditions" practiced today are, in fact, newly invented (Truong Huyen Chi 2004: 129)

or are the expression of clearly non-traditional urban and commercial interests (Taylor

2004: 89).

The motivation of cultural preservation, however, is not religious but economic,

and associated particularly with the new tourist economy (BVHTT 2002: 3). The words

of the former General Secretary of Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), "Culture is an

inner element of development," are popularly repeated to indicate the determinative role

of culture in the process of modernization (Tran Quoc Vuong 1998). The idea of cultural
 157
determination gains strength from the concern that Vietnam would lose its identities after

entering the global market and from an economic theory that considers Confucianism the

key to the miraculous economic leaps of East Asian countries (Weller 1998: 78),

developmental models that Vietnam should follow. In this sense, the cable car project

which intended to commodify culture and transform Yen Tu into a "destination of the

new millennium"137 did not conflict with the primary goal of cultural preservation.

Indeed, it received considerable support from the head of the Central Department of

Ideology and Culture (Thanh Thuy 2002: 4).

While not denying the influence of cultural tourism on religion, scholars and

bureaucrats did not wholeheartedly approve of the treatment religious practices as

commodities, seeing them as wasteful consequences of economic conditions and arguing

that they should be kept separate from economic relations:

Another noteworthy fact is the excessive number of churches and pagodas being

constructed with huge amounts spent on religious affairs, reflecting quite a

backward attitude to religion. 'Marketing gods and saints is on the increase. To

market people's most sacred beliefs is really a pitiful thing.' (Dang Nghiem Van

1998: 254)

But economic benefits are only part of pilgrims' multiple motivations, as shown

in a survey by the Institute of Religious Studies in 1992 (Dang Nghiem Van 1998:

137
Diem din cua Men nien ky men, a slogan of the Vietnam National Tourist Corporation (Vinatourist) has
been used in all tourist activities since 2000.
 158
268).138 Prosperity in business is not a religious end but a condition of a happy family or

a good health, for example. The phenomenon of religious resurgence in contemporary

Vietnam, therefore, cannot be solely interpreted as a reaction to the market economy (Le

Hong Ly 2003). A salvation from illness is the most common motivation expressed by

pilgrims in Yen Tvr, among them was a significant number of laywomen who have retired

from work or gradually withdrawn from the market competition. They are more or less

free from a responsibility for families' budget that enables them to donate more to

religious activities.

The resurgence of religious activities has spurred local economic growth. In 2002,

the Yen Tvr Management Committee received 5.1 billions VND (about 340,000 USD)

from donations and tickets (Bao cao 2002: 8). While pilgrims did not hesitate to

contribute donations, which totaled some 2.7 billion VND, many of them were reluctant

to buy tickets since, according to them, they visited the mountain for ritual purposes and

not as tourists. Entry tickets began to be sold at Yen Tvr in 1992 with the establishment of

the Management Committee. This tendency of "religious commercialization" also

happened at other religious sites in Vietnam in 1990s, especially when the place was

officially recognized as a historical or cultural site or became a tourist attraction, or when

the site was visited by a growing number of religious believers. This created a conflict

between religious and non-religious agencies for the control of sites. Economic benefits

brought by pilgrims sometimes resulted in an anti-religious consequence, as religious

Of the thirteen motivations, including religion, social justice, law, family, country/patriotism,
employment, education, democracy, friendship, love, money, market economy, and literature/art/sport,
market economy was ranked 11th by various groups of interviewees.
 159
authorities were replaced by local officials with "business" motivations at religious sites

(Dang Nghiem Van 2001: 277).

The increasing numbers of pilgrims to Yen Tu also influenced the economic and

social lives of local people, both to their advantage and disadvantage. A seventy-eight-

year-old man who had lived at Khe Su village for generations had never got to know the

pagodas on Yen Tu until the 1990s, when he and his fellow villagers found a source of

economic benefits from the festival:

We started to collect bamboo shoots for sale at the festival in 1983. In the early

1990s only people from Khe Su village participated in this activity. Income was

as high as two million VND in one season. The money was used to buy fertilizer

for rice fields. The festival is a good chance to gain some money. When cultural

cadres prohibited collecting bamboo shoots on the mountain, we had to go to

protest at the office of People's Committee in the town of Uong Bi. (Field notes

2004)

Not only brought about economic tension between central and local agencies, the

resurgence of pilgrimage also created conflicts between public and private sectors, local

people and outsiders. When Yen Tu area was certified as "special forest" in 1996 this

created a problem for local people whose lives depended on forest products. Even

though, according to a member of the brigade, the forestry brigade has never been able to

protect the whole region of more than two thousands hectares from hunting and other

exploitative activities, Dao people from Khe Su village were forced by the threat of forest
 160
brigade action to leave their homes in the middle of the night in order to go to the other

side of the mountain to collect bamboo.

The post-renovation period also observed steady involvement of local people in

services at the site. According to a seventy-five-year-old man living in Nam Mau village,

except for a stall organized by the commune cooperative selling noodle soup (pho) at

Hoa Yen pagoda for three years in the early 1980s, there were no services in Yen Tur at

all, partly due to the poverty of visitors. 'Pilgrims were as poor as we were. They brought

rice with them to cook in the mountain and did not buy anything from us,' he said. The

first local person to offer goods for sale was the man who sold cigarettes at the site in

1986. More villagers became involved in these activities in 1988 when the cooperative

system collapsed and farmers were privatized. Data from the Yen Tu Management

Committee shows that 112 households of Nam Mau village registered for business at the

site in 2004. The former secretary of the Commune's Communist Party recalled:

I used to have a shop at Hoa Yen pagoda from 1988 to 1990. In the hut, there

were six mats which I could lease each for 70.000 VND per night. Sometimes we

had no more mats and foodstuff to sell because the pilgrims who stayed over night

at the mountain might crowd from five to seven hundred. Then I moved my shop

to the foot hill until 1993. Since the festival was opened, our lives have taken off.

Agricultural economy is worse. (Field notes 2004)

He and some other local people had to abandon their shops in the mid-1990s

when the Yen Tu Management Committee carried out a plan designed to modernize the

site. Guesthouse owners, with fifteen year leases on plots of land, were required to build
 161
concrete houses instead of thatched huts. Land taxes rose from two million VND for one

hut per year to four million for one guesthouse. Business taxes also increased from

180.000 VND to five million per year. This policy gave officials and businessman in

town the opportunity to invest to the site. Only four of seven guesthouses at Hoa Yen

pagoda, and a few in the foot hills, are owned by Nam Mau residents. Others were

financed by people from the towns of Uong Bf and Vang Danh. However, many of them

have recently sold their guesthouses to local people since Yen Tu is not a year-round

tourist destination. Beyond the pilgrimage season, three months after the New Year, there

are few people visiting the mountain. If the guesthouse owners could not afford to find

someone guarding their properties during the rest of nine months when they returned to

their home in town, they had to give up this business anyway.

While the development of transportation brings more visitors to the mountain, it

also shortens the length of visits. Many pilgrims today plan to visit Yen Tu in one day

and return home or leave for other temples or Ha Long Bay instead of staying overnight

on the mountain. This was the subject of most of local people's complaints, especially

after the cable car system went into operation in the spring of 2002. According to an

owner of a guesthouse at Hoa Yen pagoda, since visitors use the cable car and do not stay

overnight anymore, she lost many customers in comparison with previous years. The

cable car also had a negative effect on several villagers who took part in services such as

working as porters, a job for which they might earn about 30.000 VND carrying one load

from the foot hill to Hoa Yen pagoda, as well as children who sold bamboo walking

sticks to pilgrims. However, from the official point of view, the cable car is a good
 162
investment as it realized five billion VND profit in the first two months of operation

(BVHTT 2002: 7).

The sale of traditional medicines and souvenirs has expanded at the site. This

service began in the early 19902 when two or three women from Bac Giang province, on

the other side of the mountain started selling medicines collected in Yen Tu forest at Hoa

Yen pagoda. It has become a market with more than twenty vendors in the foothills.

Despite the Management Committee's efforts to restrict this practice and to warn pilgrims

against fake medicines, merchandise in this market has become increasingly abundant,

and ranges from special local products to imported items. Souvenirs, ranging from

wooden or plastic charms such as bracelets, necklaces, and emblems to stone Buddhist

statues, are sold in several stalls at the foothill market, near Hoa Yen pagoda, and beside

the road to the top of the mountain. This business involves local people, the cable car

company, and soldiers. Given that there is no local craft in Thuong Yen Cong commune,

all of these mementos were imported from Hanoi and Da Nang city. There are also a

number of teashops located along pilgrims' road from the foothills to mountaintop,

mostly run by people from Nam Mau village during the time of festival, selling tea, soft

drinks, mineral water, beer, fruit, green-bean cakes, instant noodles, boiled eggs, and

cigarettes together with ritual offerings such as incense, candles, and flowers.

The growth of economic services in Yen Tu also attracted laborers from nearby

provinces who work as seasonal employees at guesthouses and restaurants. A fifteen-

year-old boy working for a guesthouse near Hoa Yen pagoda, said:
 163
I live in Thuy Nguyen district of Hai Phong city. There is no work in my village. I

have worked here for three years. I come to Yen Tu after the New Year and work

for anyone who hires me. I usually stay at the mountain for three months until

there are few visitors coming. Besides the meals, I receive monthly pay which is

as good as a year working in the field. (Field notes 2002)

This story illustrates the limited amount of development which has occurred in the

realm of agriculture. With 1,989 people who are non-agricultural labors in the total

population of 6,294 in 2004, Thuong Yen Cong is still categorized as a poor commune

that requires supports from central government. The motorbike driver with whom I

traveled for a week in Thuong Yen Cong commune also used to live in Thuy Nguyen

before coming to Yen Tu to work as a carpenter more than ten years ago, he thus

described his condition:

Every year, my friend and I went to Yen Tu to make or repair wooden objects for

pagodas and local people. There was a lot of work when more pilgrims were

visiting the pagodas and giving donations. When the local economic conditions

took off, people also needed new wooden beds and wardrobes. I had to find a

permanent job after marrying a local school teacher and staying here permanently.

The field provided by the village is too small to feed four people in my family.

(Field notes 2004)

In addition to the policy of economic renovation, the resurgence of pilgrimage

had undoubtedly contributed to the growth of a market economy in both state and private

sectors in the vicinity of Yen Tu Mountain and the surrounding provinces. The common
 164
opinion of local people, "our lives have been improved since the festival was organized,"

runs contrary to the assumption that religious activities are non-material and wasteful.

Religion, therefore, can not be studied as a mere reflection of economic underpinning.

Chapter Summary

Economic crises are not always the cause of religious resurgence as Marxist

assumption on the relationship between religion and economy. Economic change since

the mid-1980s Renovation in Vietnam has provided material supports for pursuing

religious activities. The rice in disposable income, the development of transportation, the

expansion of tourist companies all take parts in supporting the resurgence of pilgrimage.

Economic change has also altered religious practices such as the duration of

pilgrimage journey and the sites visited, pilgrims' patterns of consumption and offerings,

their interactions with local people, and the integration of pilgrims with a new category of

visitor: tourists. The development of a tourist economy, while attracting more visitors to

pilgrimage centers, has also commercialized the sites and, to some extent, changed

religious activities.

On the other hand, the resurgence of religious activities contributes significantly

to the change of local economic and social lives. It creates tensions between local and

central agencies, public and private sectors. Since economic factors are both a condition

for pursuing religious activities and an element of pilgrims' motivations, religion should

be studied as an interdependent factor and not merely as a reflection or precondition of

economic conditions.
 165

Conclusion

Buddhist pilgrimage in Vietnam today, as in the past, is carried out primarily by

laywomen. They gather in religious groups called associations of laywomen, one of the

traditional types of village organization in the northern delta of Vietnam. While urban

associations are no longer constructed traditionally, religious knowledge and traditional

institutions still play an important role in defining their structure. Pagodas provide a field

where women interact and where they gain a sense of empowerment to assert the right of

their practices. The domination of laywomen in pilgrimage groups is the result of

gendered differences in Buddhist tradition where women approach Buddhism differently

from men, similar to what Keyes (1984) found in the Theravada society of Thailand.

Unlike men who seek moral values or traditional ideology in Buddhist texts and usually

disprove practices of laywomen who do not understand the meaning of the sutras they

chant, women are interested in how to use these texts properly in ritual performances and

in the meaning derived from these rituals. Male scholars, both Confucian and Socialist,

have not only studied Buddhism differently but also actively criticized women's

devotional activities as superstition; pilgrimage is considered as more superstitious than

religious (Phan Ke Bfnh 2003 [1913]; Dang Nghiem Van 2001: 301). The motivation of

women in religious participation, therefore, is not a reflection of a "dynamic of mothers

building moral debts to exert control within the family," as Soucy (2000: 194) suggests,

since their husbands and children often do not care about their religious activities; not to

mention they sometimes criticize the religious involvements of their wives/mothers

(Norton 2006: 70). Although women often make merit not only for themselves but also
 166
for other family member, both male and female, they actively participate in Buddhist

pilgrimage and other ritual performances because these practices offer meanings whereby

they can confront irresolvable problems such as incurable illness or death. The increased

number of male pilgrims in Vietnam today underscores the successful of laywomen in

asserting their liturgical knowledge of Buddhism as well as their authority in defining

Buddhist practices.

Gendered differences are also present in Buddhist structure where nuns are

theologically inferior to monks according to the eight rules (bat kinh phdp - s.

garudharmas) and women are considered as being on a lower level than men in the ladder

toward salvation (Thich Minh Thong 2002). According to a Zen Master, pilgrimage is

meaningless when pilgrims only pay attention to ritual performances and know nothing

about Buddhist teachings (Thich Thanh Tir 2002: 15). Most religious reject the notion

that one can reach the Buddha at a holy pilgrimage centre and maintain that "Buddha is in

the mind," introduced by the argument that the abbot of Yen Tu pagoda made to Tran

Thai Tong in 1237, and one can only achieves salvation through studying Buddhist

doctrines. However, the existence of Buddhist Sangha is highly dependent on

laywomen's merit making activities, similar to what Ngaosyvathn (1995: 145) found in

other Buddhist societies. Pilgrims' material support nurtures Buddhist religious in remote

areas. The religious activities of associations of laywomen (e.g. protecting pagodas,

chanting sutras, performing rituals) keep the continuity of Buddhism in areas where

religious is absent. Laywomen's donation is an important factor that supports the

resurgence of Buddhism in contemporary Vietnam.

 167
Although the Buddhist Sangha is one of the three gems that laywomen should

return to and depend on, the relationship between women and Buddhist religious is not a

one-way affiliation. Buddhist monks and nuns have to provide religious services to attract

followers. They have to perform requested rituals, sometimes non-Buddhist ones, in order

to gain believers' donations. They also have to accept unwanted donations to get other

kinds of supports. The resurgence of Buddhist pilgrimage in the post-Renovation period

illustrates laywomen's authority in asserting the right of their practices focusing more on

performing rituals than on studying Buddhist texts, the approach favored by religious.

Buddhist pilgrimage in northern Vietnam entails a variety of syncretic practices

derived from different religious traditions. Syncretism is not merely a result of Socialist

policies as some scholars suggested (Malarney 1996; Pham Quynh Phuong 2006) but

syncretic Buddhism is a long tradition. Buddhism merged with Confucianism and Taoism

to form a triple religion (Condominas 1987). The practices of Zen, Tantric and Pure-land

schools were all recorded in early time of Buddhism (Nguyen Lang 1994: 127-30; Cuong

Tu Nguyen 1997: 19). Worship of Mother Goddesses in popular Buddhism was observed

by Adriano di St. Thecla in the 18th century (Dror 2002). Buddhist religious often

criticize women's religious activities, especially their syncretic practices. Efforts to

remove non-Buddhist elements from pagodas and to prevent superstitious activities in

believers' practices were undertaken in the movements of Buddhist Revitalization in the

1930s. These movements were more significant in central and southern Vietnam,

although they gained some following in the north as well. The division of the country and

the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1954 led to a marked decline of
 168
reformist Buddhism in the north. Without the leadership of respected Buddhist leaders,

religious practice among northern Buddhist believers continues to be highly syncretic.

Since 1954, the Socialist government in northern Vietnam has actively controlled

religious activities through the 'scientific' classification of religions and propaganda

against superstitions. Laywomen's syncretic practices are usually labeled as

'superstitious' activities and officially prohibited. State's policy, to some extent, is a

prolongation of gendered differences in Buddhism. The tendency to prohibit superstitious

activities is similar to the practice of some Buddhist professionals who try to monopolize

their believers. Additionally, Buddhist pilgrimage was considered as a waste of time and

money and therefore, was discouraged. Laywomen could continue to go on pilgrimage

and participate in other religious activities not because they were "outside of the power

structure," as suggested Malarney (2002: 102). Buddhism was classified as a religion and

therefore, officially protected according to the law of religious freedom. Some Buddhist

ethics, together with the cults of national heroes, were selected and preserved as

'traditional culture' of the new nation-state. Buddhist believers were officially recognized

as an important force during the Vietnamese-American war. Their activities at Buddhist

pagodas, therefore, were not strongly suppressed as at other shrines. Above all,

laywomen have actively and secretly continued to go on pilgrimage and to perform

rituals because the meaning of existence derived from these rituals was what new

scientific socialism failed to provide. This brought about the government's failure in

preventing the participation of women in religious activities.

 169
Some scholars maintain that economic crises are a significant cause of the revival

of religious practices in the former communist countries after their socialist systems

collapsed in the 1990s (Varga 1995: 237). The resurgence of religious activities in

contemporary Vietnam is interpreted as a reaction to the new market economy, a

condition that is chaotic and uncertain (Endres 1999; Le Hong Ly 2003; Taylor 2004).

The decline of religious practices in pre-Renovation period, however, disapproves

Marxist assumption about the determinative influence of economic factors over religious

activities. In fact, economic change since the mid-1980s has provided believers with

material resources to pursue their religious practices. The rise in disposable income, the

development of transportation, the expansion of tourist companies all contribute to the

resurgence of pilgrimage. Economic change has also altered religious practices such as

the duration of pilgrimage journeys and the sites visited, pilgrims' patterns of

consumption and offerings, their interactions with local people, and the integration of

pilgrimage with a new form of journey: tourism. The development of the tourist

economy, while attracting more visitors to pilgrimage centers, has also commercialized

the sites and, to some extent, changed religious activities. At the same time, the

resurgence of pilgrimage contributes significantly to the change of local economic and

social lives. This creates tensions between local and central agencies, and between the

public and private sectors. Since economic factors are both a condition for pursuing

religious activities and an element of pilgrims' motivations, religion should be studied as

an interdependent factor and not merely as a reflection or precondition of economic

conditions.
 170
The loosening of state control over religion after adopting the policy of

renovation in the mid-1980s has also influenced the resurgence of religious activities. A

fear of losing national identity in the process of globalization also creates a positive view

toward religion. Pilgrimage sites are officially recognized as national or historical

heritage sites and controlled by state management committees. While state control

protects these sites from secular exploitation, the projects of restoration and preservation

have somehow interfered with the attempts of pilgrims to repair pagodas and donate

statues as the best ways of making merit. The establishment of management committees

also creates tensions between state officials and Buddhist religious.

On the one hand, the Vietnamese Buddhist Association, established in 1981, is the

agency that supports Buddhist religious, the abbot and the abbess of different pagodas in

a pilgrimage centre, in competition with state officials to control the site. On the other

hand, the association, through its provincial branches, actively exercises its power to

control these Buddhist monks and nuns. In addition, the abbot and the abbess of different

pagodas at a pilgrimage site are also competing with each other to gain followers. This is

not to mention other secular companies and local people who also find interest in these

sites. The phenomenon of pilgrimage resurgence since the mid-1980s thus provides a

challenge of laywomen to male authority as vested in Buddhist monks and in the state.

Each pilgrimage group has to develop connections with different agencies in order to

continue their practices and assert the meaning invested in their religious activities. A

pilgrimage center, therefore, is not merely a place where "communitas" generates as

Turner (1973) suggests or "an arena for competing religious and secular discourses"
 171
(Eade and Sallnow 1991) but a place where different interests and meanings are

negotiated with each other to shape the "magnetism" (Preston 1992: 33) of the site.
 172

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 VITA

Due The Dao was born in Hanoi, Vietnam. Since 1994, he has worked for Xira & Nay
magazine of the Association of Vietnamese Historians. At the Hanoi National University
he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Ethnology and a Master of Arts in Anthropology
from University of Washington. In 2008, he earned a Doctor of Philosophy at the
University of Washington in Anthropology.