Buddhism, Under Vietnam's Thumb

After nearly forty years in exile, the world’s second-most-famous Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hanh, returned to Vietnam in early 2005. The international excitement generated by his homecoming—the thousands of Vietnamese who flocked to see him speak, the extensive headlines—overshadowed the criticism that also accompanied his return: strong, unequivocal criticism by the Buddhist church that was Thich Nhat Hanh’s spiritual home decades ago. The leaders of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV), the traditional independent Vietnamese Buddhist organization that has been under a decades-long ban in Vietnam, attacked the renowned monk, whose books and teachings have influenced generations of western Buddhists. Since the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the subsequent installation of a totalitarian communist government, Vietnam has been one of the world’s most egregious violators of basic human rights—including the freedom to practice one’s religion. The UBCV argued that the Vietnamese government would sell Thich Nhat Hanh’s visit to the international community as a tacit endorsement of the piecemeal reforms undertaken to show improvement in religious freedoms and human rights. Many saw the reforms as unsubstantial, including the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated leaders of the UBCV: Thich Huyen Quang, who passed away in July 2008, and human rights-advocate Thich Quang Do, who has been under house arrest for over twenty years.

Thich Nhat Hanh saw his visit as a chance to help heal divisions in his homeland, decrease tensions between the communist government and Buddhism, and encourage the practice of Buddhism among the youth of Vietnam. “This meets the needs of Vietnamese people. It’s time for reconciliation, for the real unification of the country,” said Phap An, a monk and top aide to Thich Nhat Hanh. The UBCV, on the other hand, understood Thich Nhat Hanh’s visit as politically naïve and even “un-Buddhist.” The UBCV’s international spokesman, Vo Van Ai, declares that collaboration with the Vietnamese government has the effect of “helping Hanoi to bury Buddhism alive… reducing a 2,000-year tradition of independent Vietnamese Buddhism to a mere political tool of the Communist Party, and reducing Buddhism’s great philosophy of salvation to a litany of quasi-superstitious rites.”

Tibet. The word summons thoughts of a Buddhist homeland, the recent and persistent repression by the Chinese government, and the perpetual exile of the Dalai Lama. And with the recent violence and political unrest in Burma, with the powerful images of the peaceful defiance of Buddhist monks, Burma has become a synonym for the repression of Buddhists, too. But Vietnam? For many Westerners, the associations surrounding Vietnam still revolve around domino theory, communism, and the Vietnam War. Some can still recall the stirring images of self-immolation undertaken by Buddhist monks during the Vietnam War.

Absent from Vietnam today are the wide-scale protests of Burma and Tibet. There are no powerful images of robed monks marching through the streets of Saigon because the government has limited the number of monks allowed to practice. The oppression in Vietnam is subtler, yet just as real. Since its inception a decade ago, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (UCIRF), the bipartisan governmental agency charged with monitoring religious freedom around the world, has consistently placed Vietnam in the ranks of familiar human rights-violators such as Burma, China, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia.

The history of Buddhism in Vietnam is inextricably tied to its political history as a territory under Chinese control for many centuries. This occupation, and contact with the Khmer in the southwest, led to a remarkably diverse religious tradition in Vietnam, one in which Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism have coexisted and mixed for centuries. One of Vietnam’s unique homegrown religious traditions, Cao Dai, is a syncretic blend of many of the world’s major religions and indigenous practices. (Independent sects of Cao Dai’s also face harassment and discrimination from the Vietnamese government.) At many times in the history of Vietnam, religion has played an important role in politics. During Vietnam’s golden era in the tenth through fifteenth centuries, Buddhism flourished and many top political advisers were widely respected Buddhists. In the early fifteenth century, however, the Ly dynasty pushed Buddhism aside, forcing those Buddhists who failed competitive civil service exams into lay life. Emperor Le Thai To submitted monks to surveillance and prohibited the construction of Buddhist temples without his authorization. Then, during the civil war of the sixteenth century, the Nguyen dynasty used Buddhism to consolidate Vietnam through popular measures such as the construction of new Buddhist temples.

Buddhism continues to be intimately linked to social and political life. A close associate of Thich Nhat Hanh accused UBCV of hiding “flags of the old regime” of South Vietnam, implying that the UBCV’s mission is political and not spiritual. Yet it seems impossible to separate the political from the spiritual when it comes to daily practice. Vo Van Ai responds, “Practicing Buddhism means implementing Buddhist teachings in one’s daily life. This involves (a) developing one’s ultimate knowledge to combat ignorance and (b) taking action to save sentient beings from suffering. If one lives these two principles to the full, there is no frontier between faith and politics.”

Indeed, one concept for which Thich Nhat Hanh is particularly well known is “engaged Buddhism,” which is the application of wisdom gleaned from meditation and Buddhist teachings to help alleviate suffering in the world, whether political, economic, or social. “Mahayana Buddhism encourages engagement at every level,” explains Vo Van Ai. “This is not a modern interpretation. Early Vietnamese Buddhist sutras such as the Luc Dô Tâp Kinh (Book of Six Ways of Liberation) dating back to the second century A.D., taught these principles of individual engagement: ‘When the Boddhisattva hears the cries of his people, he must set aside his own troubles and throw himself into the combat against tyranny, whereby saving the people from suffering.’” We also must keep in mind the bodhisattva, who having attained a level of enlightenment, postpones nirvana with the commitment to help all other sentient beings. Vo Van Ai describes the example of Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha, “who descended into Hell to save all those in torment and pledged to stay there and renounce becoming a Buddha until the very last person had been saved.”

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