The Political-Religious Sects of Viet-Nam

Abstract

THE VICTORY of the Vietnamese troops who under Colonel Duong Van Duc planted the red and gold flag of the nationalist regime atop the rugged That Son Mountains on June 29, i955, marked the end of a curious chapter in the history of postwar Viet-Nam.' While recent newspaper accounts have, according to their viewpoint, described the sects either as an element of instability that threatened to disintegrate the already menaced nationalist regime in Saigon or as a solid barrier against Viet-Minh infiltration, very little has been said about the men and the beliefs which, along with more mundane interests, bound the sects into quasi-autonomous religious, economic, political and military kingdoms. The Vietnamese have retained what one French observer aptly called le gou't du merveilleux, a certain proclivity for the supernatural, which has tended to express itself in the rising of new prophets and new religious interpretations of what had become a rather weak and extremely tolerant Buddhism. However, it was only in the chaos that followed the disappearance of the French colonial administration during the last days of World War II that the religious groups began to organize on a territorial basis so as to be able to protect their adherents. As in the European Middle Ages, such semireligious fiefs became centers of relative calm and stability in the midst of a wartorn country where the farmer, though heavily taxed by the various chieftains, could at least find some meager assurance of physical survival as well as spiritual guidance. Three major groups emerged from the postwar chaos and attained positions of political strength and military importance: the Cao-Dai, the Hoa-Hao and the Binh-Xuyen.2 Cao-Daism has retained much of Buddhism's external pomp and allied it with similar features from Catholicism. Called in Vietnamese Doai Dao Tam Ky Pho Do (third amnesty of God) but better known as Cao-Dai