By Matt Pointon
Roll back almost twenty years ago. I was newly married to Thảo – my now ex-wife, the mother of my future son and a lifelong friend and family member.
We’d met in Japan a year or so before. I was teaching English as a foreign language and Thảo was on a work programme.
We quickly bonded, tied the knot and started a new stage of our lives together.
And for myself in particular, I was about to experience not just marital life but a change of scenery, culture and faith.
We’d decided to move to Thảo’s home country of Vietnam. This was going to be a life-changing experience that has since shaped my life and my view of faith.
Buddhism diversified: welcome to Vietnam
I knew from the very first day when I arrived in Vietnam that religion was going to play a major part in my life there.
I’m not saying that I saw the light as I stepped off the plane at Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport, that the Vietnamese are especially “religious”, or that the folk that I hung around with were particularly seemingly “pious”.
But well, whilst living in Vietnam, religion just kept on cropping up. And often in ways that I least expected…
Take for example, my very first day there.
Following my arrival, the family announced that we were heading to a temple to give thanks for my safe arrival.
So, onto the motorbikes we popped and to the temple we went. But not to the local neighbourhood shrine.
We instead travelled all the way into the centre of the city, a good thirty-minute drive, where we then parked our bikes outside a huge temple: Mariamman Hindu Temple.
It was full of worshippers.
We made our way inside and Huệ and everyone hastened to give thanks and offer monetary gifts.
I started to wander around the temple at my leisure. And it certainly was an intriguing place to explore.
A large square complex with a myriad of deities were dotted around its exterior wall. Just to the left of the door, there was a large statue of a lion.
Huệ had enthusiastically climbed under it and encouraged me do the same.
“You do this, you very lucky!” she’d repeat, before rubbing its eyes with her fingers and then rubbing my eyes with the same fingers (“Very lucky for eye!”).
Fascinating though all this was, I was starting to feel rather confused: Huệ, Thảo and the others were all Buddhists.
And, while there were plenty of gods in this temple: not one of them was recognisable as Buddha.
So, when I saw a few Indian men in a small, square shrine cordoned off from the main shrine, I asked the question:
“Excuse me sir, but where’s Buddha?”
“Oh no sir” he replied. “There is no Buddha here.”
“But isn’t this a Buddhist temple?”
“No, no, no sir, you are not understanding! This sir, is a Hindu temple, not Buddhist. We are Brahmins!”
“A Hindu temple! But…? Then why have this Vietnamese family come here to pray? They are Buddhist.”
“Sir, look in here; all these people are Buddhist!” I looked. The place was crammed and they were all praying devotedly.
“There are no Hindus in Vietnam sir, only Buddhists, but all of them, they are coming here. Hindu, Buddhist, believing is believing!”
Outside the temple, I then put the question to Huệ:
“You know this is a Hindu temple, not a Buddhist one?”
“Yes, this temple India, no Buddha.”
“Don’t you have any Buddhist temples near to your house then?”
“Yes, temple Buddha, have many! I take you go tomorrow if you like!”
“Yes, that would be lovely, thanks, but please tell me because I don’t understand: you’re Buddhist, right?”
“Yes.”
“So why do you travel a long way to pray at a Hindu temple when you are a Buddhist and there are lots of Buddhist temples much closer by?”
And at this question, her face grew serious:
“Here you must understand. Before I go too many Buddha temple to ask things, but what I ask, I not always get. But ask gods here at temple India and I always get. This temple very power!
“You ask money, you get money! You ask job, you get job! You ask pass exam, you pass exam! This temple gods always give you what you ask!”
“But you are Buddhist; a whole different religion!”
“Different religion, no problem. I am Buddha, yes, but every Christmas, go to church ask Maria help me. Maria in church very power sometimes as well!”
And thus, was my introduction to religion in Vietnam!
Remembering ancestors: fortune and hope
If one aspect of Vietnamese religious devotion is that it is flexible, another is that it seems to permeate into multiple aspects of daily life.
The flip side of this openness to moving freely from temple to temple (whatever the source), is an intolerance of anyone who does not do the same.
As a practising Christian, I am not supposed to bow down before any supposed false idols or eat any food offered to said idols.
However, both of these tenets of my faith flew out of the window within hours of arrival.
I quickly learnt that Vietnamese Buddhists largely practise their religion at home, through shrines in the front room.
Upon these shrines there are a number of figures of deities, lights, decorations and photographs of deceased relatives who, along with the gods, are offered fruit and incense sticks daily.
Out of the items at a typical household shrine, photos of deceased ancestors are by far the most important items for the Vietnamese.
I remember once, years after leaving the country, asking a Vietnamese student of mine in England which religion he followed – Catholic or Buddhist.
He replied:
“No sir, you don’t understand. In Vietnam there is only one religion and that is ancestor worship.
“Maybe Catholic ancestor worship, maybe Buddhist, but deep down, same-same.“
“Vietnamese worship our ancestors before anything else.”
And in many respects, he was telling the truth.
Vietnamese Buddhists celebrate Buddhist holy days and the Catholics party at Christmas.
However, nothing comes close to the sanctity which they reserve for the anniversaries of the deaths of their closest relatives.
Remembering the dead is a firm tradition. One of Thảo’s favourite stories to tell is, in fact, none other than the day when her cousin was possessed by the spirit of a dead person.
Thảo was called to the house to witness this because the deceased individual in question was none other than her father. And he’d been asking specifically for her.
When she arrived, he gave several messages to family members, telling them that everything was fine on the other side and then asking if there was anything which he could do for them.
One cousin requested the next set of lottery numbers.
With a great degree of reluctance, he gave them, but with a warning that the said cousin should not be greedy. The numbers he gave would only work once.
The cousin did win the lottery that week but, it seems, ignored the warning.
He bought more tickets for the following week, praying for Thảo’s father’s intercessions.
He never won the lottery again after that…
As I said, religion – including seeking fortune – permeates everything in Vietnamese life.
You wake to the smell of incense, marriages, births and deaths are calculated by calendars to decide how auspicious they might be, and people consult fortune tellers regularly.
Buddhism meets Catholicism: a family pilgrimage
Speaking of luck, any discussion of my experiences of religion in Vietnam can never be complete without mentioning a pilgrimage that I took one weekend to Cà Mau, in the far south-western corner of the country.
Like so many things in Vietnam, particularly when temples are involved, this was a communal affair.
The local neighbourhood of Thảo’s cousin Dan had hired a coach and they were doing a tour of the holy places of the Mekong Delta.
To make up the numbers we – along with several visiting Western friends of mine – tagged along.
After an overnight stop, at around six in the morning, in a flat, uninhabited wilderness of rice paddies some distance short of our destination, we pulled up and everyone trooped off the bus.
There was nothing there, except for a roadside café serving phở and a tiny Catholic mission church (Tắc Sậy Church), where mass was in progress.
Immediately, I assumed that this was simply a stop to refuel ourselves for the day ahead.
But instead, everyone wandered across the road to the church.
What was going on? Why was a coachload of devout Buddhists on a pilgrimage heading to a Roman Catholic mass?
Confused, I followed them. But, instead of entering the church, they passed by the entrance and wandered up the side of the building, entering round the back.
There stood a corrugated iron shack with a a life-size statue of a Catholic priest inside.
To my amazement, everyone was bowing down before him, offering him gifts (pineapple and incense sticks).
They were rubbing his eyes and then their own, just as I had seen with the lion in the Hindu temple.
It was surreal and I wondered: why?
In the café after Mass, I later found out the answer.
The statue was of one Fr. Francisco Trương Bửu Diệp and it stood on the site of his grave.
Born in 1897, Fr. Diệp had been the local parish priest until war broke out in 1945, when he was advised by a superior to leave for a safer location.
He refused, declaring:
“I will live with the flock and if necessary, I will die with them.”
A year later, on the 12th March, 1946, he was captured by the Viet Cong, along with seventy of his parishioners.
Local legends say that he was offered his freedom, but he refused and instead died in place of his flock, thus becoming a martyr.
Why he is so venerated by the Buddhists however (as well as the Catholics of course), is because he was a great healer in his lifetime who made no distinction between the creeds of his patients.
After his death, miraculous healings have been associated with his relics which were located after Fr. Diệp appeared to a local Catholic in a dream and, when discovered, were uncorrupted.
Another lesson for me!
Lessons in faith: from East to West
Living in Vietnam for two years, my perceptions of faith definitely changed.
Often described as Buddhist – but including very little of the Buddhism recognisable to Western readers of the sutras – I learnt a lot about how we often view faith in Western traditions.
Traditional religion in Vietnam cannot be defined by dogma or creed. It’s instead a complex patchwork of beliefs drawn from many sources.
From Khmer Hindu idols found in the river, to the ancient Chinese celestial emperor, a myriad of Indian deities, a martyred Catholic priest and your own deceased family, the Vietnamese experience is diverse.
In Vietnam, people worship wherever and whoever provides them with meaning and the answers to their prayers. Simple.
To a European brought up in a country torn apart for centuries by minor doctrinal differences of two similar branches of the same faith (Anglicanism and Catholicism), it was something that took me a while to understand – and appreciate.
Now, I’m grateful to have had the chance to experience this. I can see that we can all learn a lot from the way the Vietnamese practice their faith.
And that’s why I love to travel – to learn to appreciate different ways of life. And, to enrich my own.
This post was originally published on Voice of Salam.