Le bouddhisme dans la pensée politique du Viêt-Nam traditionnel

Abstract

Nguyên Thê Anh Buddhism in traditional Vietnamese political thought Vietnam under the Lý and Trân was essentially a Buddhist country. The piety of the dynasties was their source of legitimacy, and, while Buddhism was affirmed as the measure of civilized behaviour for both sovereigns and subjects, it provided means for royal authority to penetrate and incorporate the local political structure. The Trân rulers in particular strove to impose ideological unity on the country under the umbrella of the True Lâm school, their own creation. In the face of the development of social unrest in the fourteenth century, however, Confucian literati started to voice their concern for the maintenance of order and eventually emerged in the fifteenth century as spokesmen for royal authority, definers of public morality and guardians of the court. As a result, institutional Buddhism lost the court patronage it had previously enjoyed, and its political influence declined steadily to its lowest ebb, in the nineteenth century, with the adoption of the Chinese bureaucratic model on a large scale by the Confucian Nguyen court. Restrictions and prohibitions were thus imposed on Buddhist temples, in order to prevent religious deviations (under the form of millenarian movements for example) from becoming too great.