Vietnamese folk religion
Vietnamese folk religion is not an organized religious system, but a set of local worship traditions devoted to the "thần", a term which can be translated as "spirits", "gods" or with the more exhaustive locution "generative powers".
[4]In the project of nation-building, the public discourse encourages the worship of ancient heroes of the Vietnamese identity, and gods and spirits with a long-standing presence in folk religion.
[6] In Vietnamese folk religion, linh (chữ Hán: 靈) has a meaning equivalent to holy and numen, that is the power of a deity to affect the world of the living.
[7] Compound Sino-Vietnamese words containing the term linh indicate a large semantic field: linh-thiêng 靈聖 "sacred", linh-hiển 靈顯 "prodigious manifestation" (see xian ling), linh-ứng "responsive 靈應 (to prayers, etc.)"
[7] Thiêng 聖 is itself a variation of thánh, meaning "constitutive principle of a being", "essence of a thing", "daemon", "intelligence" or "perspicacity".
[9] More specifically, the linh power of an entity resides in mediation between the two levels of order and disorder which govern social transformation.
[9] This attribute is often associated with goddesses, animal motifs such as the snake (an amphibious animal), the owl which forgoes day in favour of night, the bat which bears aspects associated with both birds and mammals, the rooster who crows at the crack between night and morning, but also rivers dividing landmasses, and other "liminal" entities.
[13] In this way, the etho-political (ethnic) dimension is nurtured, regenerated by re-enactment, and constructed at first place, imagined and motivated in the process of forging a model of reality.
[18] As a distinct movement with its own priesthood (made of shamans capable of merging the material and the spiritual world), temples, and rituals, Đạo Mẫu was revived since the 1970s in North Vietnam and then in the newly unified country.
[19] In the pantheon of Đạo Mẫu the Ngọc Hoàng is viewed as the supreme, originating god,[20] but he is regarded as abstract and rarely worshipped.
[24][2]The full name of the religion is Đại Đạo Tam Kỳ Phổ Độ ("Great Way [of the] Third Time [of] Redemption").
[2][24] Đạo Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương ("Way of the Strange Fragrance from the Precious Mountain") is a religious tradition with Buddhist, Taoist, Confusianism, Zen, Yiguandao elements, originally practiced by the mystic Đoàn Minh Huyên (1807–1856) and continued by Huỳnh Phú Sổ, founder of the Hòa Hảo sect.
During a cholera epidemic in 1849, which killed over a million people, Huyên was reputed to have supernatural abilities to cure the sick and the insane.
His followers wore amulets bearing the Chinese characters for Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương, a phrase that became identified, retrospectively, with the religion practiced by Huyên, and the millenarian movement associated with the latter.
[29] After the 17th century, when the Ming dynasty saw its power decline, a large number of Minh sects started to emerge in Cochinchina, especially around Saigon.
[30] The primary deities of the pantheon of the sects are the Jade Emperor (Ngọc Hoàng Thượng Đế) and the Queen Mother of the West (Tây Vương Mẫu).
[32] The Minh Đường Trung Tân ("School of Teaching Goodness") emerged in the 1990s in the Vĩnh Bảo District, a rural area of the city of Hải Phòng.
A local carpenter known simply as "Master Thu" claimed to have been visited at night by the spirit of 16th-century sage Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm, who ordered him to build a shrine in his honor.
[33] The Ông Trần Cult is a unique and distinctive faith practiced by 20,000 residents of the Long Son Island in Bà Rịa-Vũng Tàu province.
