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ОглавлениеThe Four Facets of Vietnamese Culture
To understand Việt Nam, you must first understand the country’s name. Since the Vietnamese language is monosyllabic, Vietnamese write and pronounce “Việt Nam” as two words, even though foreigners sometimes write our country’s name as well as “Hà Nội,” “Sài Gòn,” and other names as one word. “Việt” refers to the Việt (or Kinh), the largest of our fifty-four ethnic groups with 85 percent of the population. Thus, Việt Nam is the land of the Việt, just as, etymologically speaking, France is the country of the Francs and England is the land of the Angles. Since “Nam” means “South,” “Việt Nam” means “the country of the Việt of the South.”
Yet if we modern-day Vietnamese are descendants of the Việt of the South, where are the Việt of the North?
They became Chinese.
And so, I define modern-day Vietnamese as members of the Việt ethnic community who did not want to become Chinese, who do not want to become Chinese, and who will never want to become Chinese, even though Chinese culture has imbued Vietnamese culture. Ill-informed foreigners sometimes regard Vietnamese culture as an appendage to Chinese culture, with a tinge of Hindu culture. Chinese and Vietnamese cultures were and are two different cultures. China has Chinese culture, while Việt Nam has Vietnamese culture.
The cradle of Chinese culture is the Hoang Ho (Yellow River) Basin, which is north of the Yangtze (Blue) River. In contrast, modern-day southern China south of the Yangtze belonged to former Southeast Asia. Việt Nam is still farther south. Việt Nam’s first identity emerged three thousand years ago (around 1000 BCE) not in China but in the Red River Delta, or present-day northern Việt Nam, as a typical wet-rice-growing Southeast Asian culture. Many attributes from that ancient Southeast Asian civilization remain in present-day Vietnamese culture, for example, rice-growing traditions, myths, popular beliefs, language usage, and the Vietnamese lifestyle.
We can represent the two cultures—Vietnamese and Chinese—with two archeological artifacts. A bronze drum typifies Việt Nam, whereas a bronze incense burner typifies ancient China north of the Yangtze.
The Việt grew wet rice, which requires a long rainy season. Whenever the Việt lacked rain, it is said that they beat their bronze drums to summon the dragon—a positive presence in Eastern cultures—to bring rain. The Việt bronze drums with their finely wrought engravings date back three thousand years, when the engravers faced wild beasts, inclement weather, and hunger. Archeologists have found similar bronze drums in all Southeast Asian wet-rice-growing countries—Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Việt Nam. In contrast, the Chinese north of the Yangtze lacked the hot, wet, tropical climate needed to grow wet rice. Instead, they grew dryland crops, which require less water.
Over the centuries, the Vietnamese people have preserved the substratum of their own Southeast Asian culture while enriching it with the foreign contributions—mainly Chinese (Vietnamese Middle Ages) and French (modern times)—that Vietnamese have grafted onto their own culture.
Việt Nam’s geographical position and configuration determined its vocation and destiny. Situated in the heart of Southeast Asia, Việt Nam is also part of East Asia. The Pacific Ocean brought the first Western contacts. Those three geographical factors—Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific—engendered the four cultural facets making up traditional Vietnamese culture and Việt Nam’s unique identity. Throughout centuries, Vietnamese have preserved their Southeast Asian substratum—the first facet—as the essential characteristic of Vietnamese culture and then added enriching foreign elements.
The second facet of Vietnamese culture is its East Asian side. Beginning before the Common Era, Chinese empires dominated Việt Nam for more than a thousand years. The Vietnamese waged persistent struggles to preserve their identity and avoid Sinicization. In 938 CE, the Việt won national independence, which they maintained for nine hundred years, until the 1800s. During the two thousand years before French colonization, Chinese influence translated into a double movement of repulsion from and attraction toward Chinese culture, which was richer and more varied than the Việts’ Southeast Asian culture. Together with Japan and Korea, Việt Nam integrated into the cultural system of eastern Asia under strong Chinese influence. This included direct influence (e.g., ideographs, Chinese Buddhism), but we should not forget other indirect Asian influences (e.g., Indian Buddhism and Hinduism).
The third facet of Vietnamese culture is Western influence, which first arrived by way of the Pacific Ocean and the East Sea (sometimes called the South China Sea) in the 1600s and 1700s through trade and religious evangelization. Colonization followed in the 1880s. The dynamic of acculturation to foreign rule translated into repulsion from and attraction toward the French rulers’ culture. The contributions of Western culture changed the old Vietnamese culture with regard to science, technology, the arts, religion, and even everyday life, such as the consumption of bread, coffee, cabbage, and carrots. Thus, at the historic moment of the 1945 Revolution, Việt Nam’s traditional culture consisted of three facets: Southeast Asian, East Asian, and Western.
The fourth facet of Vietnamese culture—internationalization and integration into the world community—began with the August 1945 Revolution and the re-conquest of national independence. Since then, the country has survived great upheavals, which have been both national (social revolution, thirty years of war, and policy renovation) and international (regional and global integration). The turning point in Việt Nam’s recent history was adoption of world integration a decade after the end of the war in 1975 in the framework of globalization. This change was inspired by Đổi Mới (Renovation or Renewal, late 1986), which had two main points: adoption of the market economy (thence creation of a private sector and promotion of competition) and an open-door policy (when possible, relationships with all countries irrespective of ideology).
Over the last decades, Đổi Mới has testified to its effectiveness in Việt Nam’s economic development but has demonstrated its weakness in cultural development. Accelerated economic development has enhanced Western cultural influence, including increased individualism, which may erode our Vietnamese cultural identity based on community spirit. Thus, there arises a conflict between economic and cultural development. To solve this dilemma, we have adopted the following national motto: A country with a prosperous people strong enough to defend ourselves and with a democratic and humanistic culture.
Back to the Source in Southeast Asia
In 1973, the Việt Nam Social Sciences Committee established the Southeast Asian Institute. One cannot overstate this institute’s growing and multi-faceted importance, since the Asia-Pacific Region will surely play a prominent role during the twenty-first century. However, for us Vietnamese—and no doubt for all peoples in Southeast Asia—the interest in the region goes far beyond politico-economic questions of the day to include rediscovering our cultural identity, which has been obscured by several historical factors, particularly the glowing aura of Chinese and Indian cultures and the impact of Western colonization.
The word “Indochina” (referring to Việt Nam, Laos, and Cambodia) was probably coined in the late 1800s to designate the peninsular part of Southeast Asia (itself comprised of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Việt Nam). “Indochina” highlights acculturation from the two major Asian cultural centers (India and China). However, it obscures the fact that Southeast Asia peoples had built their own specific cultures on common ground well before they came under Indian and Chinese influence.
Over time, many independent states, which had been Indianized or Sinicized, came into being, breaking the region’s geographical and socio-cultural unity. Through the vicissitudes of history, some of these states forgot the brilliant epochs of their past, for example, the Angkor civilization. Under the colonial regimes, which lasted from the second half of the 1800s to the end of World War II in 1945, French, Dutch, and British scholars—prominent Indianists and Sinologists often with an Eurocentric prism tinged with Indianism or Sino-centrism—devoted more time and effort to the study of Indian and Chinese influence in Southeast Asian countries than to the exploration of the substratum of indigenous cultures. Japanese historian Yoshiharu Tsuboi’s The Vietnamese Empire Facing France and China: 1847–1885 (L’Empire Vietnamien: Face à la France et à la Chine, 1847–1885, Paris, 1987) rightly chose Việt Nam itself as the study’s starting point and avoided a base on views oriented toward France and China.
After World War II, the idea of Southeast Asia as a geo-cultural-political entity took shape following formation of the great powers’ spheres of influence, the process of decolonization, and the awareness of newly independent states with a common past yet each in search of national identity. The lifting of ideological barriers between the countries of ASEAN (Association of South-east Asian Nations, which grew out of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization—SEATO) and the countries of what once was French Indochina has created an irresistible rapprochement and unification among Southeast Asians. Việt Nam has followed the same impulse on the cultural plane. Having faced two major foreign influences—the Chinese in our Middle Ages and Western (mostly French) in modern times—Việt Nam is returning to sources in Southeast Asia as its primary identity.
In Việt Nam, Rice is the Source of Life
It was proper that the United Nations declared 2004 the International Year of Rice, for rice is a staple for more than half the world’s population and the principle source of income for more than one billion people, most of whom are farmers. During 2004, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) hoped to encourage greater access to rice, increased production, a reduction in hunger and poverty, and greater environmental protection in rice-producing countries. Việt Nam took great interest in the promotional year because 80 percent of our population lives in rural areas and essentially survives on rice farming. Then, too, many of us still remember the double yoke of Japanese and French occupation at the end of World War II, when famine took two million lives. The Đổi Mới (Renovation or Renewal) policy, which began in late 1986, ended our perennial food shortage. In recent years, Việt Nam has consistently ranked as the world’s second largest exporter of rice.
Rice was a weed until man began to cultivate it six thousand years ago. As of 2012, 85 percent of rice was grown in Asia and fed 40 percent of the world’s population. In Việt Nam, rice dates to the Mesolithic Culture of Hòa Bình and Bắc Sơn Provinces. By the dawn of the Vietnamese identity in the Red River Valley in the first millennium of the Bronze Age, rice-growing had become culturally ingrained in Việt Nam as well as in neighboring Southeast Asian countries.
Rice is the source of life in Việt Nam. It’s fitting that the English word “rice” has many different words in Vietnamese. To name a few, “lúa” is the rice plant; “thóc” is raw, unhusked rice; “gạo” is raw, polished rice; and “cơm” is ordinary, steamed rice. In the old days, a woman unable to breast feed would feed her child rice porridge (“cháo”), and when the child was old enough, the mother would chew “cơm” to feed the baby. When a person dies, he or she is said to have taken “xôi” (glutinous or “sticky” rice), probably because sticky rice is usually among the votive offerings for the deceased.
Việt Nam practices dry-rice agriculture in mountainous areas and wet-rice agriculture in irrigated fields on the plains. Following the August 1945 Revolution, farmers assisted each other through mutual-aid groups. When the War of Resistance Against France ended in 1954, the Land Reform Campaign returned land to the tillers in liberated North Việt Nam. The country benefited from the 1960s Green Revolution, which brought greater productivity through high-yield seeds, mineral fertilizers, pest control, improvement in irrigation, and various short-stemmed varieties developed by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. These varieties concentrated the energy generated from photosynthesis onto the rice plant’s ear instead of in its stem.
In the 1960s, household rice plots were regrouped into village co-operatives. During the War of Resistance Against the United States, these agricultural co-operatives filled the void left by the young men who had become soldiers by providing rice, food, and other labor to the soldiers’ families and other villagers. All villagers shared the work collectively, with women taking a great role in food production. After the war, unfortunately, many co-operatives became ineffective because of bureaucratic mismanagement and ineffective distribution of produce. Gradually, the co-operative became moribund; in the early 1980s, many farmers refused to harvest co-operative fields.
The new policy of Đổi Mới instituted in late 1986 curbed a prolonged economic crisis and revived agriculture by giving farmers control of the full scope of rice production. The success was spectacular. Previously, everyone had been hungry. Then, in 1989, Việt Nam exported two million tons of rice and quickly reached third place as the largest world rice exporter, after Thailand and the United States and then moved to second place after Thailand.
Myths Die Hard in Việt Nam
Emerging from a subway in New York’s Time Square, American author Joseph Campbell was immersed in the crowd waiting at a crosswalk and thought he saw more than one ancient myth coming to life right before his eyes. According to this eminent mythologist, in our presumably de-mythicized world, myths are still essential to understanding history as well as a society’s modern aspirations:
“It [mythology] is where all the inventions of the common people’s imagination meet up with archeology and history.”
Let us begin with the Vietnamese myth of origin from the period of the Hùng Kings before 2000 BCE, during the Bronze Age:
The Vietnamese people were born from the union of a dragon and a fairy. Throughout the course of history, many Confucians and more than one modern patriot (for example, Hồ Chí Minh in writing our Declaration of Independence) have invoked this mythic origin to mobilize the masses in national struggle against Chinese feudalism and French colonization.
Triệu Quang Phục (a.k.a. Triệu Việt Vương, life: ?–571 CE; reign: 548–571), hero of resistance to Chinese domination, is one. He established his guerrilla base in the swamps of the Lake of One Night (Đầm Nhất Dạ Trạch), which is associated with Chử Đồng Tử, a mythic god from the time of the Hùng kings. Chử Đồng Tử descended from Heaven on a dragon to give Triệu Quang Phục, the country’s new savior, the fabled animal claw that assured invincibility and legitimacy. Such, at least, was the claim of Triệu Quang Phục, who knew the myth’s power.
Other myths have survived for millennia, entering popular practices. For example, the betel quid expresses love and consecrates marriage; Tết cakes (bánh giầy and bánh chưng) represent the round sky and the square earth; ceremonies honor the Mountain Spirit, whose struggle against the Water Spirit protects the Vietnamese against the Red River’s floods; Boy Genie Gióng, who conquered the Ân invaders from the North (China) and flew away on his iron horse into the sky, symbolizes the Việts’ patriotism.
Hà Nội’s founding intertwines with Việt Nam’s history, illustrating the ties between myths, archeology, and history. We have many examples, including the Dragon King as forefather of the Vietnamese people, the Mountain Spirit as conqueror of the annual Red River floods, the child (Gióng) with Herculean strength beating back the An hordes from the North (China), the Soaring Dragon in all its glory presiding over the birth of the capital, and the Dark Guardian of the North. All these myths of great national significance remain alive in our capital’s streets, resurfacing in the city’s landscape and in our everyday activities.
Hà Nội has artifacts dating from the Neolithic Period and the Bronze Age, including the period when the first two Việt states, together with the core Việt cultural identity, were born (c. 1000 BCE). After over a thousand years of Chinese domination (c. 200 BCE – 938 CE), the Việts defeated the Chinese and regained their independence. In the beginning of the eleventh century, the Việts established their capital at Thăng Long (City of the Soaring Dragon), which has since become Hà Nội.
The deepest aspirations and dilemmas of the Vietnamese people can be understood through our culture’s myths. Joseph Campbell, is correct to say, “Myths allow the spiritual potential of human life to be realized.”
The Lord of the Sacred Drum Finally Regains His Artefact
Vietnamese are proud of the famous Đông Sơn bronze drums that are vestiges of the culture of the same name, which defined the Việt from the millennium preceding the Christian era. I can never stop wondering how—3,000 years ago—our ancestors could craft such marvels, such objects with sensuous shapes and decorated with precise geometric lines and perfect human and animal figures reflecting a clear cosmology.
My admiration prompted me one fine spring day to make a pilgrimage to Đan Nê Hamlet in Yên Thọ Commune (Yên Định District, Thanh Hóa Province), which is two hundred kilometers south of Hà Nội. Đan Nê has a temple dedicated to the spirit, Đồng Cổ, (“đồng” = “bronze,” and “cổ” = “drum”). Legend has it that King Hùng, founder of the Việt nation, was on Mount Đan Nê during a military campaign and dreamed about a spirit, who promised him miraculous assistance. During the following day’s battle, thunderous rhythms resounded all around, filling the king’s army with irresistible strength. After the victory, the grateful king awarded his mysterious supporter the title, “Đồng Cổ Đại Vương”—“Great Lord of the Bronze Drum,” and made him guardian spirit of that locality.
Another Đồng Cổ Temple is in Bưởi, a community on the southwestern side of Hà Nội’s West Lake. According to legend, Prince Phật Mã from the eleventh-century Lý Dynasty prayed for assistance while billeting his troops at Bưởi during their southern advance to drive back a Chăm Pa invasion. The local spirit brought Prince Phật Mã victory and helped him foil a court plot. After his coronation as King Lý Thái Tông (life: 1000–1054; reign: 1028–1054), Phật Mã built a temple outside the royal citadel to honor his benefactor and ordered court officials to make annual pilgrimages to the temple and pledge loyalty to him as their monarch.
Village elders in Đan Nê confirm the existence in their village of an ancient bronze drum and say that the drum could have been donated by a cousin of Emperor Quang Trung (life: 1753–1792; reign: 1788–1792). French Governor-General Pierre Pasquier (governor-general: October 4, 1926 – May 16, 1927 and December 26, 1928 – January 15, 1934) visited the temple and contributed twenty-five piasters for its maintenance. The event was engraved in French on a marker. Unfortunately, the valuable drum disappeared around 1932. One person has reported seeing in a Paris museum a bronze drum with a placard citing Đan Nê as its origin.
To replace their irreparable loss, the villagers made do with a huge wood-and-buffalo-hide drum. Sensing their frustration, the Vietnam-Sweden Cultural Fund made a generous donation for a replica of an authentic Đông Sơn drum displayed at Việt Nam’s History Museum. Nguyễn Trọng Hạnh, a gifted artisan from a long line of bronze casters, crafted the substitution.
Perhaps Đồng Cổ, the Great Lord of the Bronze Drum, is pleased to have a replica of his drum return to his home village.
The Worship of Mother Goddesses
Việt Nam’s truly indigenous religious foundation is the worship of spirits, including mother goddesses (thờ mẫu). This belief based on animist religious practices dates back to prehistoric times. Mother goddesses deserve our attention as an example of religious syncretism involving the popular Vietnamese religious credo that survives despite numerous borrowings from other faiths. Among the religious borrowings, we can include the Buddhists’ merciful Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Quan Âm) as supreme sovereign as well as Taoist saints and spirits, particularly the Jade Emperor of the Sky (Ngọc Hoàng). We can also point to loans from Confucianism, with its teachings about good and evil and some of its sacrificial rites.
The worship of mother goddesses falls within traditional worship of female spirits in Việt Nam. Women have always dominated thánh mẫu, the original belief devoted to the mother goddesses. However, a later branch sanctified General Trần Hưng Đạo (1228–1300), the heroic victor over the Mongols.
Generally speaking, three factors contributed to the worship of mother goddesses: animism, respect for women, and rice cultivation. Later, Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism (which despised women) influenced the worship of mother goddesses. However, Vietnamese society is, at its base, a matriarchal system honoring women. The innate Vietnamese worship of mother goddesses is traditionally more important than imported beliefs because women’s work sowing, transplanting, and harvesting rice played a key role in Việt Nam’s wet-rice civilization. For this reason, ancient Vietnamese deified land, water, and sky—important factors in wet-rice cultivation—by referring to them as Mother Earth, Mother Water, and Mother Sky. Animist believers also raised women to goddesses because of women’s role in procreation.
Over the millennia, sporadic and local forms of worship became generalized and revealed a common denominator. A national belief was born—the worship of mother goddesses—which is also known as the worship of the Three Palaces (Tam Phủ) or the worship of the Four Palaces (Tứ Phủ). Divinities—all benevolent—among the mother goddesses in hierarchal order include:
• Mother Goddesses of the Three or Four Palaces (Tam Tòa Thánh Mẫu-Tam Phủ or Tứ Phủ)
• Mother Goddess of the Sky (Mẫu Thượng Thiên), whose sacred color is red. Her avatar, Liễu Hạnh, who is of human origin, is very popular.
• Mother Goddess of the Mountains and Forests, of the Dead and the Faithful (Mẫu Thượng Ngàn), whose sacred color is green
• Mother Goddess of Water (Mẫu Thoải), whose sacred color is white
• Mother Goddess of Earth (Mẫu Địa), whose sacred color is also white
• Five Royal Mandarins (Ngũ Vị Vương Quan), sons of the Spirit Dragon of the Eight Seas (Bát Hải Đại Vương). Their number may reach ten.
• Four Lady Saints (Chầu Bà or Thánh Bà), avatars of the Four Mother Goddesses. Their number may reach twelve.
• Ten Princes (Thập Ông Hoàng), sons of the Spirit of the Dragon of the Eight Seas (Bát Hải Đại Vương). They live in the Water Palace.
• Twelve Royal Maids (Thập Nhị Vương Cô), servants of the mother goddesses and the ladies
• Twelve Page Boys (Thập Nhị Cậu), avatars of children who died before age nine, retainers of the Princes
• Five Tiger Mandarins (Quan Ngũ Hổ)
• Sir Lốt, the Snake Spirit (Ông Lốt)
The worship of mother goddesses includes male divinities with their sacred color, indigo. They are integrated into the worship of the Three or Four Palaces under the Palace of the Trần Dynasty (Phủ Trần Triều). This belief is devoted to General Trần Hưng Đạo, his son (Trần Quốc Tảng, 1252–1313), his two daughters, and his first lieutenant (Phạm Ngũ Lão, 1255–1320).
Divinities and spirits of secondary or marginal importance in the pantheon, which are rarely incarnated, include:
• Buddhist divinities, particularly the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Quan Âm) and the Buddha Amitabha (A Di Đà)
• Taoist divinities, such as the Jade Emperor of the Sky (Ngọc Hoàng), who governs the Realm of the Immortal
• many spirits, which cannot be classified, for instance, Guan Yu (Kuan Yu, Quan Vũ, or Quan Công, 162–219, a great Chinese warrior during the Three Kingdoms) as well as the souls of the ancestors
An essential characteristic of these beliefs is the divinities’ mediums.
One might ask: How does someone become a medium?
Each mortal is presumed to have an individual destiny governed by one or several spirits from the Three or Four Palaces. People with a heavy destiny (căn số nặng) are often sick and prone to misfortune because they are persecuted (hành) by an invisible master, who wants to use these individuals as servant soldiers (lính hầu). Those wishing to submit to this recruitment must undergo an initiation ceremony, tôn nhang, in which they carry on their heads a tray with a vase of joss sticks. If the spirit does not immediately agree to a recruit’s petitions, the applicant must hold a ceremony for entry into service of the concerned spirit or spirits (lễ trình đồng). This very costly ceremony lasts from two to three days. The recruit must present himself or herself to the spirits (trình đồng) and be accepted by them as a medium (đồng) through the shadow rite (hầu bóng), during which the spirits become incarnated in a professional medium.
The shadow rite is the key ceremony in the worship of mother goddesses. A female medium (bà đồng) seats herself in front of the altar, her head and upper body draped in a large red veil, which sets her apart from the World of Mortals. During a session, which usually lasts from two to seven hours, the divinities descend (giáng đồng) on the soul of the medium to incarnate themselves. Not all divinities descend, and each medium has his or her preferred divinities. For each successive incarnation (giá đồng), the medium possessed by the divinity must wear the proper costume, use the correct attributes (color, objects), and behave according to the particular divinity’s temperament (sweet or violent, young or old).
As the rite unfolds, the medium’s head begins to nod more and more quickly, which sets her upper body in motion. She enters a trance, dancing and speaking while the incarnation takes place. As a spirit, she distributes favors to the faithful in fulfilment of their wishes. A liturgical singer (cung văn) plays a very important role as animator for each session. A novice who has completed the shadow rite may become a professional medium.
Ancestor Worship
Yesterday was the death anniversary of my mother, who died several decades ago. I placed on our ancestral altar a tray of flowers, a cup of plain water, and a few dishes of food. Then, with my hands clasped in prayer, I bowed three times to her photograph. All the while, my four-year-old grandson looked on, intrigued.
“Is your mother home with us today, Grandpa?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
In general, my generation, which experienced the Revolution and the two wars of resistance (1945–1975), does not believe in the Other World. Still, we are attached to old memories. For this reason, despite limited living conditions, each family will reserve the best place in the house for the family’s ancestral altar. This altar may be only a shelf fixed to the wall at a sufficiently high level to be apparent but not obstructive. On it are photographs of the deceased, a joss-stick holder, two candlesticks, and, sometimes, an incense-burner. Wealthier families can afford a room especially for the altar, while rural people worship the deceased in the central section of their house.
Many Vietnamese believe that the departed are not separated from the living, that their souls hover about the ancestral altar, and that their spirits will return to stay with the living on festive occasions, especially at Tết (the Lunar New Year) and on death anniversaries. Traditionally, Vietnamese honor only death anniversaries, not birthdays, the latter being a recent Western importation and a luxury for the rich. The deceased are believed to share the joys and pains of the living. Thus, the living make offerings to the departed whenever memorable family events occur, for example, the birth of a child, a child’s first day at school, a successful exam, construction of a new house, engagements, weddings, deaths, voyages, and even bankruptcies. The living invoke the deceased to help, and they offer to the departed votive paper objects, including paper hats, suits of paper clothes, cardboard beds, and even paper maché horses, motorcycles, and cars.
Since Đổi Mới (Renovation or Renewal, which began in late 1986), we have witnessed a return to spirituality, particularly the revival of ancestor worship. This practice, which is rooted in the Vietnamese collective subconscious, was abandoned to oblivion during the wars’ hardships and a vague notion of atheist materialism. More stable living conditions and relative well-being brought about by current economic renovation and, coupled with the desire to heal the bitter seasons’ wounds, have encouraged our people’s return to traditional ancestral spirituality. Vietnamese have restored their family altars. They visit and tend family graves and expand their gatherings for ancestral worship. Family members come together, particularly on death anniversaries, to join in ritual worship and to share a meal.
Could ancestor worship be an anchor preserving national identity at the family level during modern-day family disintegration and a decline in traditional moral values?
The Study Center on Child Psychology founded by Nguyễn Khắc Viện says, “Yes.” The Center undertook a research project on ancestor worship in an urban environment. The survey involved thirty-five Hà Nội families, who answered questions, including the following: Will ancestor worship disappear with urbanization and industrialization? Is ancestor worship causally linked to the extended family? Can ancestor worship play a stabilizing role? Does ancestor worship influence child psychology?
Ancestor worship is not actually a religion but a body of animistic beliefs accepted by almost the entire society, including followers of every religion (in many instances, even by Catholics and other Christians). Through rites, each individual is tied not only to the family’s living members but also to the ancestors. Members of the same lineage can still be found in fairly large numbers in major urban areas. The ties linking them are symbolic, contributing to the education and emotional health of children and adults.
A child acquainted with the rites of ancestor worship receives distinct socio-cultural values. A woman widowed late in life might feel less lonely if, during the first hundred days after her husband’s burial, she places a tray of food on the family altar at lunch time and dinner time and then lights a few joss sticks. The presence of the ancestral altar in each Vietnamese house and the periodic acts of worship support the spirits of the deceased to remain present in the lives of the living and to encourage the living to preserve and honor the family.
Village Alliances
In traditional Việt Nam, the village was like an islet encircled by a bamboo hedge and seeming to float amidst rice paddies. Indeed, the village was an autonomous administrative, economic, and cultural unit. An old saying held, “Royal decrees yield to village customs.” Each village has its own tutelary spirit, communal rules, and customs. However, this isolation was tempered by a quite widespread practice, giao hiếu or giao hảo, an agreement between two or more neighboring villages and sometimes between several distant villages. These allied villages never brought legal proceedings against each other; rather, they provided mutual aid during floods, typhoons, fires, and epidemics, and they fought in coordination against pirates. The people of one village often sent a delegation and gifts to the festivals of an allied village. Every five or ten years, they would organize a joint festival.
Văn Xá and Văn Lâm Villages are twenty kilometers apart in two different districts of former Hà Nam Ninh Province in the Red River Delta. Despite this distance, spiritual links unite the two, for their tutelary spirits are said to be husband and wife. Legend has it that during the Lý Dynasty (1009–1225), a fisherman named Cao Văn Phúc lived in Văn Xá Village. A woman, Từ Thị Lang, lived in Văn Lâm Village, where she caught field crabs and snails. Fate led them to meet at the market and become a happy couple. Poor as they were, their hearts were benevolent.
One day, while hoeing their field, the couple found two eggs, which could not be broken or boiled. The eggs hatched into two snakes, one marked “elder” on the belly and the other marked “younger.” Since husband and wife had no children, they surrounded the snakes with love. Cao Văn Phúc’s medicinal recipes stopped a horrible epidemic in Văn Xá. After his death, grateful villagers honored him with a temple. Before long, the two snakes went to live near the temple. Văn Lâm villagers built a temple to Từ Thị Lang. That same year, a flood breached the dike protecting the two villages. The snakes slithered out to the dike, inflated their bodies, and formed a giant dam, which checked the rising waters.
The worship of the divine spouses led to the alliance between Văn Xá and Văn Lâm, with customs handed down for generations. Villagers commemorate the two spirits’ death anniversaries together. Although twenty kilometers separate the two villages, they now share the same name, Văn Xá. To show mutual respect, the residents greet one another, calling out “Uncle!” or “Aunt!” whenever they meet.
These two villages engage in mutual aid, including reinforcement of local dikes, relief during flooding, assistance in fish rearing and river fishing, and participation in festivals. They hold their large joint festival every ten years; both villages make voluntary donations, with residents contributing as they can. Funds from selling fish raised in ponds at the two communal houses help cover the joint festival and other common expenses. The village honoring the female spouse has a deep well with, according to legend, its water connecting to the Red River. Từ Thị Lang is said to send a message to the village of her husband’s spirit in the pomelos that villagers drop into the well. (Pomelos are rather like large, sweet grapefruits with thick, green rinds.)
Vietnamese Cultural Identity
Obviously, eighty years of French colonization influenced Việt Nam’s cultural identity. During colonization, some people from the upper social strata prided themselves on speaking French fluently and despised their mother tongue, which they considered fit only for peasants. A Molière-type Vietnamese comedy, The Annamite French Man (Ông Tây An Nam, by Nam Xương, 1931), aimed its cutting comments at the key character—a Vietnamese national returning from France. This lead character acts as if he has forgotten how to speak Vietnamese and must hire an interpreter! In fact, at that time, pro-French snobbishness gnawed into traditional Vietnamese culture. After the 1945 Revolution returned independence to Việt Nam, we stressed our cultural identity to enhance the confidence of our people, who once again faced foreign aggression. During colonialism, French was the language of instruction in tertiary education. After the Revolution, we used the Vietnamese language in all educational levels, including higher education, because language is crucial to cultural identity.
For several decades, globalization has forced Việt Nam to redefine its cultural identity after defending it for thirty years (1945–1975) during two wars of national liberation. Now, Việt Nam must preserve and enrich its national culture while opening to world culture. Cultural identity is not permanent, for “All tradition is change.” I like this title of a Swedish treatise on Sweden’s traditional arts and crafts. A closed culture will wither and die. Cultural identity evolves with time and space. A new tradition may be refashioned in the national mold from a foreign source. The same tradition may take different forms according to time periods.
Let me cite some examples.
Most foreigners agree that modem Vietnamese lacquer painting has a markedly Vietnamese stamp setting it apart from Chinese and Japanese lacquer. Indeed, modern Vietnamese lacquer is a marriage between our traditional handicraft and Western pictorial technique. Another example from art is paintings by Phạm Tăng (1924–), a Vietnamese famous in Europe, especially in Italy. He breathed the Vietnamese soul into an abstract Western style. A further example is the famous Vietnamese long tunic (áo dài), which emphasizes the fine silhouette of Vietnamese women. This garment appeared in the 1930s through Westernization of the traditional Vietnamese four-piece, multi-colored women’s tunic. More than one Western dictionary mentions “nem” (spring rolls) and “phở” (soup made with flat rice noodles) as typically Vietnamese dishes. These foods appeared in Việt Nam during the early 1900s. However, they are only indigenous adaptations of foreign dishes of little renown.
A Hyphen between Two Worlds: Indian and Chinese Influences
Việt Nam’s location in the center of Southeast Asia makes our country like a hyphen between two worlds, India and China. Southeast Asia has a common heritage marked by these features: matriarchal traditions, predominance of agriculture, and cultivation of rice, betel, areca, and mulberries. Villages were characterized by houses-on-stilts, spinning, bronze drums, bronze gongs, tattoos, loincloths, and kite flying. Spiritual life revolved around special funeral rites and the worship of spirits and fecundity.
Within this common background, Southeast Asians modeled their cultures according to their own geo-political conditions. Since ancient times, Vietnamese have faced two huge challenges: first, the struggle against natural calamities, particularly the Red River’s floods; and second, the unbalanced struggle against foreign aggressors. These ordeals gave the Vietnamese certain characteristics: strong communities fighting for survival, a hard-working nature, sobriety, care for real issues rather than metaphysical abstractions, dexterity, facility with imitations, resistance to physical and moral suffering, and a great ability to adapt. Animism as a pantheist framework characterized the country’s spiritual life. The worship of spirits and genies flourishes today, although sometimes diluted by imported religions. Such is the substratum of Vietnamese culture—a Southeast Asian substratum on which Indian and Chinese cultures were grafted during the Christian era.
The first contact with India came early in the Christian era through the Indian traders who ventured into Southeast Asia, seeking gold and spices. While waiting for the northeast monsoon, these traders propagated their culture, in particular their Hindu and Buddhist faiths. The Hindu states of Funan, Chenla, and Chăm Pa emerged. Later, the Khmer and Chăm peoples integrated with the Vietnamese as ethnic minorities.
Vinitaruci (Tỳ Ni Đa Lưu Chi, ?–594 CE), an Indian monk, came to Việt Nam from China and established Việt Nam’s first school of Zen (Thiền) Buddhism around 580 CE at Luy Lâu in Hà Bắc Province. This cradle of Vietnamese Buddhism is located at Dâu Pagoda in Thuận Thành District, Bắc Ninh Province, which is about twenty kilometers east of Hà Nội. Later, political upheavals interrupted direct Indo-Vietnamese acculturation. Chinese monks traveling overland replaced Indian preachers and traders. Contact with India resumed only in the 1900s, during our two countries’ shared struggle against colonization.
Indian influence is still apparent in southern Việt Nam. There, about a million ethnic minority people (Chăm, Ra Glai, Ê Đê, Gia Rai, and Chu Ru) speak the Chăm language. From 10 to 20 percent of the words in Chăm, which belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian language group, come from Pali, a dead language found in many extant Buddhist manuscripts. Words also coming from Sanskrit, Khmer, and Chăm scripts sprang from the ancient Brahmin writings of India. Many geographical terms in southern Việt Nam, where these two ethnic minorities live today, have Indian origins but were Sinicized (in pronunciation or meaning) before they were Vietnamized in pronunciation. Thus, “Phan Rang” (the name of a coastal city and bay in Ninh Thuận Province) is a phonetic rendition of “Panduranga,” a name for the Chăm state. The Vietnamese language includes words brought by the early Indian missionaries and traders, with most of those words migrating from Sanskrit or Pali into Chinese (Hán) and then into Vietnamese. One example is “Buddha,” which appears in Vietnamese as “Bụt” (a direct phonetic transcription from Sanskrit) and “Phật” (through a Sino-Vietnamese word).
Indian influences are visible in Chăm temples and Khmer pagodas, where Brahmin and Buddhist designs stand side by side. Indian cultural influences were deeper and more direct on the culture of the Khmer and Chăm ethnic minorities than on the Kinh (Việt) majority. The effect on the Việt came largely through osmosis from exchanges between Chăm, Khmer, and Vietnamese compatriots. Whereas Indian dance and literature—especially the Ramayana—certainly affected Vietnamese culture, India’s influence on Việt Nam through Buddhism was profound and durable.
The Chinese introduced Confucianism to Việt Nam after their conquest in the second century BCE, but Confucianism tightened its social grip only after the 1500s. As opposed to Buddhism, Confucianism supports a philosophy of social ethics and the improvement of life on earth but leaves untouched the question of individual salvation. The doctrine of Confucius (551–479 BCE) is based on rules for social relations (e.g., king – subject, father – child, husband – wife, master – disciple, and brother – sister). Relations are hierarchized for social harmony as an element of universal harmony. The Confucian edifice rests on strong, moralizing rules, with “the virtue of humanity” as its foundation.
Pre-Chinese Vietnamese culture caused these strict rules to lose their rigor in Việt Nam compared with China. Nevertheless, Confucianism brought to Việt Nam a political philosophy, trung, based on allegiance to the monarch, thereby supporting Vietnamese cohesion and the country’s unity. As paradoxical as it may seem, Vietnamese Confucian scholars animated by the ideals they had borrowed from China struggled relentlessly against the Chinese for Việt Nam’s independence. “The Proclamation of Victory over the Ngô [Ming Chinese]” (Bình Ngô Đại Cáo) written by Nguyễn Trãi (1380–1442) and promulgated by King Lê Lợi (life: 1385–1433; reign: 1428–1433) illustrates this paradox.
Traditional Confucian order flourished in ethical, social, political, and cultural domains. Vietnamese adoption of the Chinese model for education (the role of the master, ideograms, triennial examinations) and administration (a mandarin bureaucracy) fostered Confucian ethics. The Vietnamese emphasized moral virtues and literacy but scorned material wealth, economics, and technology. Empiricism replaced science, while patriarchy edged out matriarchy, and men dominated women. An unwritten code of conduct reigned in the village and in the family.
However, many pre-Chinese Southeast Asian cultural values survived in Việt Nam because the Chinese colonial administration never fully penetrated the villages. There, Vietnamese maintained and developed their own popular culture alongside scholarly Confucian culture; thus, the prime Vietnamese cultural identity continued to blossom. Today, Confucianism continues in Việt Nam as a philosophy of social duty, order, and hierarchic discipline. In a word, Confucianism represents “reason.” On the other hand, Buddhism searches for individual happiness, relaxation, and compassion. In one word, Buddhism represents “feelings.” These two apparent opposites are complementary and contribute to equilibrium in villages, where pagodas for worshipping Buddha co-exist with communal houses and other temples for Confucian rituals.
Analyzing the influence of Buddhism on Vietnamese culture is complex, because Indian traders and monks first introduced Buddhism. Later, Chinese Buddhism reigned. Nevertheless, Buddhism in Việt Nam, even in its most Sinicized form, remains fundamentally a product of Indian spiritualism, as, for example, in the Zen (Dhyana, Thiền) sect. As a religion, Vietnamese Buddhism does not advance the existence of divinities, although priests later introduced statues and images for ordinary people. According to Buddhism, suffering is the human condition because humans believe in the existence of a self and are motivated by desire. Human illusions subject us to the cycle of births and rebirths. Yet, through spiritual enlightenment, individuals can end their ignorance and achieve Nirvana (Enlightenment).
However, enlightenment is accessible only to scholars and monks of the Chinese Zen (Dhyanist, Thiền) School, which is an amalgamation of Buddhism and Taoism. The Vietnamese Zen Buddhist School advocates transcendence through the intellect, communion between master and disciple without speech and scriptures as intermediaries, and meditation until enlightenment. We can see here the syncretism of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. For ordinary Vietnamese, Buddhism brought not only consolation during feudal exploitation and oppression but also provided the hope of achieving earthly wishes. For this reason, Vietnamese worshipers often invoke Buddha Amitabha (A Di Đà) and Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Quan Âm), who are thought to rescue the deprived.
Vietnamese Culture: Southeast Asian Roots Facing Chinese Confucianism
Two French scholars, Pierre Huard and Maurice Durand, have aptly remarked on the nature and evolution of Vietnamese culture:
“Vietnamese culture over the centuries has never absorbed any foreign element (Hindu, Chinese, or Western) without trying to imprint on it a Vietnamese cultural stamp. That trait guarantees that Vietnamese culture has sufficient cohesion to resist external pressure.”
Over time, Vietnamese culture has always preserved its Southeast Asian roots while enriching itself with different grafts. During the 2,000 years before French colonization in the 1870s and 1880s, Việt Nam evolved in the cultural orbit of East Asia and, like Korea and Japan, was imbued with Confucianism. Chinese cultural influence came during two different periods—the Chinese occupation (179 BCE – 938 CE) and then Vietnamese emulation during the first era of independence (939–1884). The relations between Vietnamese and Chinese followed a particular dynamic. On one hand, the Việts rejected the aggressor’s culture and aspired to preserve their Southeast Asian roots. On the other, they were attracted to Chinese culture, which seemed richer. The Vietnamese borrowed from Chinese culture the elements that could enrich their own culture. Rejection and attraction characterized this ambiguous relationship, just as it does today.
In general, what have these Confucian and Chinese grafts brought to Việt Nam’s Southeast Asian roots?
In terms of lifestyle in ancient times, Chinese influence brought extensive use of iron, domestication of the horse, intensive cultivation of rice (iron plows, buffaloes, oxen, irrigation, fertilizers), enameled ceramics, the development of weaving and wicker ware, the manufacture of paper and glass, great progress in river and sea navigation, the Spice Road between China and Southeast Asia, and trade with Java, Burma, and India.
In terms of intellectual and spiritual development, adoption of Chinese ideograms made possible the propagation of Confucianism, the official doctrine that radiated throughout all domains but particularly in general ideology and education. Confucianism endured because it suited Asian feudal societies, which were agricultural, autarchic, stationary, and subject to a monarchic regime, which decreed that all land was the king’s private property. Confucianism was the moral and political creed of the learned man, the intellectual, the “superior man” (quân tử), who followed the principle: “Perfect oneself morally, manage one’s family, govern the country, and establish order in the world.” Confucianism had very strict rules about social behavior in order to maintain order and harmony in a strongly hierarchical society.
Confucianism took root easily in Việt Nam because the Vietnamese community spirit that Confucianism enshrined was highly compatible with the spirit prevailing at the Vietnamese nation’s birth, when peasants faced the permanent threat of aggression from the north and the Red River’s floods. However, after penetrating Việt Nam, Confucianism lost many of its original concepts, including the strictures of filial piety, absolute fidelity to the monarch, and many of the complicated rites.
Thus, two parallel and complementary cultures took shape on Vietnamese soil—the popular culture anchored in the villages and more faithful to the roots of the Việt and the scholarly culture marked by Confucian-Chinese grafting. The Confucianized Vietnamese intelligentsia had several strata: orthodox scholars (the Court and the mandarinate); those faithful to the king but also concerned with the well-being of the people (e.g., Nguyễn Trãi, 1380–1442); those resolutely siding with the people against the king (e.g., rebel Cao Bá Quát, 1809–1853); and those integrated into the life of the people (e.g., village school teachers).
The brutal intervention of French colonizers in the late 1800s compelled enlightened scholars to make a painful revision of their Confucian values.
French Culture in Việt Nam Today
When the BBC interviewed me by phone about the role of French culture in today’s Việt Nam, I was reluctant to answer because, with a subject so large, one can say nothing about this third facet of Vietnamese culture in three minutes. Still, I couldn’t refuse the invitation made so graciously by the interviewer, an ethnic-Vietnamese woman who seemed very young, judging by the sound of her voice.
I had the impression that she was raising the question more on the level of French language than of French culture. Of course, language is an important element of culture, but it isn’t everything. Such a misunderstanding is not surprising. The world “Francophonie,” with its root “phone,” makes one think more of the language than of the culture. Given the decline of French-language teaching in Việt Nam, some might think French culture no longer has the least importance to Vietnamese culture. It’s true that in Việt Nam, as in other Asian countries, young people are going crazy for English, although not to master Shakespeare or Hemingway but, above all, to secure a job, particularly one involving foreigners.
French (which is to say, Western) culture has made important contributions to Vietnamese culture. Naturally, this leaves aside the crimes of colonialism. The BBC interviewer was astonished that I would compare the one-hundred-year influence of French culture to the impact of Chinese culture covering two millennia. But I think we shouldn’t measure cultural influence by duration. The truth is that each of those two cultures had its own impact on our Vietnamese culture. The introduction of French culture in the mid-1800s brought Việt Nam its first stage of modernization (or Westernization). The second stage came after the August 1945 Revolution and especially since Đổi Mới (Renovation or Renewal) in late 1986.
Many cultural triumphs illustrate Franco-Vietnamese cultural integration: the adoption of Romanized script to replace Chinese Hán and Vietnamese Nôm characters in social, political, and literary activities; the Revolution’s successful literacy campaign, which was built on that foundation; the creation of a scientific vocabulary in Vietnamese to enable higher education in our national language; integration of the ideal of liberty from the 1789 French Revolution in our Vietnamese struggle against feudalism and for our own national liberation; creation of new genres in painting (lacquer, silk), architecture (the Indochinese style), theater (kịch or spoken theater, cải lương or reformed theater), music (pop songs), the humanities (new disciplines, including historical science, archeology, sociology, ethnography, and literature).
This brief review shows that French (or Western) culture is an integral part of Vietnamese culture. It is our responsibility, along with the people of France, to preserve and develop this heritage in the interest of our two peoples. Our researchers should guard against two extremes—considering the French (Western) contribution as the only culture of value on one side and, on the other, completely rejecting the French contribution in favor of a traditional, Confucian culture. Moreover, in this era of globalization, we should open ourselves to all the world’s cultures and absorb the best qualities from each one.
Franco-Vietnamese Karma
A French stamp sealed our forced marriage with the West at the beginning of Việt Nam’s modern history. Then, after nine years of war (1945–1954), reconciliation led step-by-step to a remarriage based on free consent. This included Việt Nam’s Francophone participation heightened by the Seventh Summit of French-Speaking Countries held in Hà Nội in 1997. French colonization had brought Việt Nam face to face with modernity. That conflict between our traditional culture and modern French culture enabled us to reap fruits, which at times upset the colonizers’ calculations. Vietnamese culture, while modernizing (Westernizing), also preserved itself.
Our political culture modernized from contact with the French. At the end of the 1800s, ideas from Montesquieu (1689–1755), Rousseau (1712–1778), Voltaire (1694–1778), and others captivated many Confucian scholars, who had read the French authors’ works in Chinese translations. Phan Châu (Chu) Trinh (1872–1926), a famous patriotic scholar, espoused ideas from the French 1789 Revolution, advocated abolition of the monarchy, and encouraged pursuit of national independence through education.
Many Vietnamese arts reflect Western (French) cultural grafts onto Vietnamese cultural stock. For example, French dramatic arts impacted traditional Vietnamese musical theater in the creation of two new genres: spoken theater (kịch nói) and renovated musical theater (cải lương). Stage directors Bửu Tiến (1918–1992) and Tào Mạt (1930–1993) analyzed French dramaturgical and scenographic influences on popular opera (chèo) and classical opera (tuồng). French music influenced modern songs, including revolutionary songs. Musician Nguyễn Xuân Khoát (1910–1993) combined Western and Eastern music. Georges Sadoul (1904–1967) exerted a profound influence on newly emerging Vietnamese cinema. Students at the Indochina Fine Arts College assimilated Western painting techniques, transformed lacquer art, and renovated painting on silk. French architecture produced the Indochinese style pioneered by Ernest Hébrard (1875–1933). The French Institute for Far-East Studies (École française d’Extrême-Orient)—with eminent researchers Georges Ceodès (1886–1969), Léopold Cadière (1869–1955), Louis Bezacier (1906–1966), Henri Maspéro (1883–1945), Madeleine Colani (1866–1943), Louis Finot (1864–1935), and Léonard Aurousseau (1888–1929)—began modern Vietnamese Studies.
