Caodai in Cambodia

Updated 2012-05-14 13:40:20

CAO DAI IN CAMBODIA

(published in The Cambodia Daily, edition June-July 2005)

 
On 17 September last year, the mid-morning monotony of the Mao Tse Tsung Boulevard was interrupted by an unusual spectacle. Amid the petrol fumes and incessant growl of engines, twelve people in long white robes marched towards the Intercontinental Hotel. There the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) was holding its Inter Parliamentary Organisational Summit (AIPOS). Adherents of ‘Cao Dai’, a syncretic religion indigenous to southern Vietnam, the six men and six women had sailed by boat up the Mekong to highlight a lack of religious freedom in Vietnam, a one party communist state since 1975.

 

“They did come here to pray and then left,” says, Vo Quang Minh, director of the Cao Dai temple on the boulevard. “But we had nothing to do with them and knew nothing about the protest. This temple had no connection with the march.”

 

The Cambodian authorities had already displayed their mettle earlier that year, pushing members of the ethnic Montagnard minority across the eastern frontier.

 

The twelve Cao Daists, although theoretically eligible to join the Montagnards as wards of the UNHCR, were quickly arrested and deported.

 

Despite its auspicious history, the Cao Dai temple on Mao Tse Tsung Boulevard is easily missed. Cement mixers rotate and hammers clatter as another bank of apartments goes up. The sanctuary appears modest compared to any Vietnamese temple. Certainly, there is nothing on the scale of the huge ‘Holy See,’ located in Long Hoa village, just outside Tay Ninh. But the Phnom Penh mission is an important centre and not just to the estimated 3-4,000 Cao Daists in Cambodia.

Nevertheless, the tribulations faced by Vietnamese marchers are matched by an ongoing dispute over the ownership of the land around the temple. Like every other place of worship in Phnom Penh, the temple was abandoned in April 1975. Vo Quang Minh, who moved to Cambodia in 1980, indicates the framed photo of a cleric named Thai Cua Thanh hanging above his office desk. “At the time we had a bishop in charge of this building,” he says. “We wanted him to leave but he stayed and was killed by the Khmer Rouge.” As ethnic Vietnamese, the Cao Daists were assured particularly harsh persecution. Most did not survive the Pol Pot years. A few may have escaped when the Khmer Rouge forcibly repatriated 150,000 people to Vietnam between April and December 1975. But when the Cao Daists returned to Phnom Penh after 1982, they were forbidden to worship here. It was only in 1993 that full control of the sanctuary was returned, although most of the adjacent land has new occupants. For Cambodia’s Cao Daists it is not simply a matter of relocating to another building. Within the forecourt an octagonal glasshouse contains the tomb of the last Cao Dai ‘pope,’ Pham Cong Tac. He lived in Phnom Penh between 1956 and 1959 and was made welcome by Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The South Vietnamese premier Ngo Dinh Diem distrusted the Cao Dai religion. So do his communist successors and most Cao Daists acknowledge that it may be quite a while before the pope’s remains return to Tay Ninh.

 

When you climb the stairwell in the main building, the paraphernalia of Cao Daism is waiting. Above the altar the ‘divine eye’ watches you. Resembling nothing so much as the eye on a US dollar bill, this is the religion’s official symbol. The eye was seen in a vision by the religion’s founder, Ngo Minh Chieu, a civil servant who served as district chief on the Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc in the 1920s. But perhaps even more intriguing is a mural showing the three ‘signatories’ to the ‘third alliance’ of God and Man. They are none other than the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Binh Khiem, Chinese leader Dr Sun Yat Sen and Victor Hugo. The French author of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame is said to have made frequent appearances in this very temple. For that reason he was posthumously made the patron of foreign missions.

The earthly tasks associated with that role are nowadays undertaken by Tran Canh. In early May he visited Phnom Penh from America with his wife Mrs Kim Vo, both of whom were among the last South Vietnamese to leave Saigon by helicopter airlift in April 1975. Canh is also the son of Tran Quang Vinh, an archbishop and commander-in-chief of the old Cao Dai army.

 

On 17 May a delegation of Buddhist monks arrived to confer blessings and be presented with gifts from the Cao Daists. An official from the Vietnamese embassy also paid a visit and in the afternoon, offerings were made at the tomb of the late pope, whose position has been vacant since 1959. Guests at the ceremony included Pham Thi Lien and Than Thi Nga, surviving nieces of the murdered bishop.

 

Today’s ‘third alliance’ follows two previous periods of revelation that spawned the other world faiths. Cao Daism anticipates their eventual mystical union. Seen from one perspective, Cao Dai philosophy seems to chime in with the peace and love vibe of the Sixties, when the war raging around the Holy See gripped the world. The rejection of established dogmas, the mystical self-exploration and the union of world faiths correspond to the vision the hippies hoped would soon prevail. But on another level, it is quite a conservative and traditional faith. Like Mahayana Buddhists, Cao Daists seek escape from the great cycle of death and rebirth. Like Christians, they must adhere to a strict ethical and behavioral code that prohibits lying, stealing, fornication and usury. Vegetarianism is encouraged as a form of self purification for all but is compulsory for priests. The terminology of its ‘clergy’ draws inevitable parallels with the Church of Rome, although CaoDaism has been a little more liberal on the issue of women priests.

Says Tran Canh: “To help westerners understand easily the Vietnamese terms for our Cao Dai dignitaries, we use the Catholic hierarchy terms, because if we translated them literally, nobody would understand.”

 

Thus, the Cao Dai have 3,000 priests, 72 bishops, 36 archbishops and three cardinals but their responsibilities differ from those of Catholic clerics. Nevertheless, they recognize the new Catholic pope, Benedict XVI :

 

“Cao Dai embraces all faiths so we certainly recognized that the late Pope John Paul II was the ‘Vicar of Christ’” says Canh, “Cao Dai respects all religions; a Cao Daist can enter a church, temple or mosque with a clear mind and without any recrimination whatsoever.”

 

Some practices, however, are wholly unique to the religion. Fundamental to the ‘third alliance’ is ‘spiritism’ and the need to conduct séances to receive guidance from departed Asian and western figures of note. This is where Victor Hugo comes in. Hugo, along with Joan of Arc, Rene Descartes, Louis Pasteur, Vladimir Lenin and a host of figures from Chinese and Vietnamese antiquity have been in touch. Mediums traditionally held a pen or Chinese calligraphy brush over a sheet of paper. On other occasions, a blank slip of paper was put into an envelope and hug above the altar: when it was taken down a message from the spirits would be there.

The large Holy See temple is around three hours drive from Ho Chi Minh City. Distinctive in every sense, its architecture either appears as charmingly dippy, a cross-pollination between Catholic and Confucian, or gaudily kitsch, a riot of unsubtle symbols and colours. You enter a temple built on nine levels representing the nine levels of heaven. At the end of the great hall, eight snake-enwrapped columns support the dome that represents the universe. Beneath that is the turquoise, star speckled globe with its divine ‘Eye.’ Having imported styles from the Middle Kingdom and baroque-era Christendom, the temple then makes concessions to the House of Islam. Two pulpits between the columns resemble the minbars found in mosques; these are used by Cao Dai officials to address the faithful.

 

All temples observe ceremonies four times daily and noon prayers are usually joined by buses of tourists from Ho Chi Minh City. The Vietnamese authorities have no problem marketing the ‘exoticism’ of this offbeat religion for tourist cash. And the foreigners holding up camcorders and snapping photos in the balconies as the rituals commence see a community that on the surface, seems to be worshipping unmolested. The reality is somewhat different and has been since their early history.

 

The Cao Dai feature as the ‘third force’ in The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s 1956 novel set amid the intrigue and bloodshed of the French retreat from Indo-China. Greene describes the Holy See as “a Walt Disney fantasia of the East, snakes and dragons in technicolour” and had considered converting before growing disenchanted with the religion. The character of Pyle, loosely based on real-life CIA operative Colonel Edward Lansdale is channeling funds to the Cao Dai Army. Pyle hopes they will prove more reliable allies than the corrupt politicians in Saigon, while stealing popular support from the communists. The CIA patronage was invented by Greene. But certainly, during that transitory period of the 1950s, when the last French were leaving and the first Americans arriving, the Cao Dai were a powerful force. Within a few years of the faith’s inception in 1926, 13 per cent of the South Vietnamese population was attending Cao Dai temples. By the 1950s, the clergy virtually ran Tay Ninh as a semi-autonomous zone. Their army numbered 25,000 and showed a remarkable ingenuity for improvising weapons:

Greene’s novel mentions the mortar tubes made from car exhausts.

 

Tran Canh doesn’t see the religions past militarism as conflicting with its aspiration towards future world peace. “If we did not organize ourselves, the French then the communists would exterminate us,” he says. “My late father could not organize this army without instructions and guidance from the Divine, step by step.” Those instructions have not won them many fans in the Politburo of Vietnam’s Communist Party. When the country was reunified after 30 April 1975, the government in Hanoi did not forget the Cao Dai alliance with the French against the Viet Minh and later, their refusal to support the Viet Cong. For the first ten years of communist rule, the authorities commandeered over 400 temples including the Holy See. Four members of the clergy were executed. Article 70 of the 1992 Vietnamese Constitution permit religious worship but adds the proviso that it may not be used to promote ‘disharmony.’

 

“The policy in Vietnam is better than it was 30 years ago,” says Tran Canh. “But they don’t want us to spread the religion.”

 

As for the twelve sent back to Vietnam in September: “We heard that the Vietnamese released all the women and kept the men. We heard rumours. Nobody knows,” says Canh.

 

Cao Dai worship spread beyond the borders of Vietnam and Cambodia, taken to the West by the thousands of people who left both countries after 1975. Over half the roughly two million Vietnamese in the United States live in California, the two largest populations located in LA-Orange County and Oakland-San Jose.

 

Accordingly, there are several dozen Cao Dai temples in the Westminster Garden Grove area (little Saigon) and Silicon Valley (littler Saigon). There are also temples in Australia and France. Many of the first generation of immigrants now have children and even grandchildren who have never lived outside the West. “Their children speak fluent English, often have to help their parents and older relatives to adjust to a new setting and perform many practical tasks, while in Vietnam it would be the older generation who would help the younger ones to settle down” says Dr Janet Hoskins, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California and an authority of Cao Daism.

 

“Most Cao Dai temples offer some instruction in reading and writing Vietnamese and classes in Vietnamese for American-born students and are extremely popular at universities like UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Riverside and in the California State system,” says Hoskins. “The temples have youth groups which are active in mobilizing younger people to be involved in their religion. Also, many young people have now traveled back to Vietnam to see the sacred centres of the religion and visit relatives.” Although Tran Canh received a message of goodwill from the Cambodian Ministry of Religion, the issue of the disputed land seems to be a dead end for the Cao Daists.

 

Vo Quang Minh says that after a court case was rejected in 2003, plans to appeal were abandoned through lack of funds. Moreover, the buildings around the temple are too expensive to buy back: “Another thing, they know we want to buy so they will give us a bad price,” says Mrs Kim Vo.

 

Meanwhile, the Cao Dai continue to aspire to the mystical union.

 

“It will take time for all faiths to recognize that we all come from One Holy Father, One God and that we are all brothers and sisters of the same family,” says Tran Canh.

“At the end the union of all faiths will come, but how long? It may be centuries and centuries. But we will keep working on it as Cao Dai will guide us to the right direction.”

 

 

Tom Farrell

March 18, 2005