On her trip to Vietnam last summer, Hoskins met with Nguyen Van Tho, head priest of the Caodai temple in Saigon.
Photo credit: Vy-Uyen Judy Cao
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Finding a New Religion
A College professor and student trace the roots of a global religion from suburban Pomona to the outskirts of Saigon
By Eva Emerson
January 2005
In many ways, the little known religion of Caodai seems the ultimate
product of California’s New Age movement: In a painting of the official
pantheon, Buddha hovers over Lao Tse, Jesus Christ, Confucius, with the
Chinese goddess of mercy, Quan Am, sitting to the left. Caodai espouses
vegetarianism, meditation, gender equality and tolerance of all the
world’s religions. Its teachings come from divine messages, often
written in verse, received in séances by spiritual mediums.
But this inclusive religion is actually a product of a completely
different cultural and historical milieu—that of 1920s French
Indochina. And while Caodai wasn’t born in California, like the
Vietnamese immigrants who first brought its teachings to the U.S., it
is starting to prosper.
USC College’s Janet Hoskins, a professor of anthropology and South East
Asian scholar, and her former student Vy-Uyen “Judy” Cao (’04) have
studied Caodai, its growth in California and the contrasts in how it’s
practiced here and in Vietnam. The research project has literally has
taken them around the world, from suburban Pomona and the Silicon
Valley to southern Vietnam.
From its inception, Caodai has envisioned itself as a global religion,
says Hoskins. Created in 1926, Caodai seeks to unite East and West in a
universal faith. Its tenets blend the Asian philosophies and religious
traditions of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism with Roman Catholicism,
humanism and other European ideals. Among the best-known saints are
Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen, Vietnamese poet and prophet Trang Trinh and
French author and humanist Victor Hugo.
“In some ways it was a concept ahead of its time,” says Hoskins. “Now
the leaders believe the world may be more receptive to their message of
unity.”
Caodai in California
There are now 26 Caodai temples in California, with the largest
congregations in Orange County and near San Jose. The community has
started building a replica of Caodai’s most important temple in
Riverside, and has hopes to build meditation and study centers to
attract more interest from the English-speaking community.
Hoskins discovered the resurgence of the Caodai movement in California
by chance. She saw what looked like a small temple in a converted
suburban house in Pomona, about “five minutes from the house I grew up
in,” she says.
Hoskins approached Cao, then a senior psychology major, to take part in
her new study because she needed someone who could speak and translate
Vietnamese to help with her interviews of Caodaists.
Through interviews, Hoskins and Cao began to gather a better view of
the religion from its own followers, including temple elders, younger
members and a few American converts, most notably a Vietnam War Veteran.
“We’re trying to come up with a personal view of a religion that has
been in America for more than 20 years now, but that few know about
outside of the Vietnamese community,” says Cao.
Journey to Vietnam
In July of last year, Hoskins and Cao flew to Saigon, now called Ho Chi
Minh City, to visit the major temples of Caodai. Despite repression by
the Vietnamese socialist government, Caodai is the third largest
religion in the country, with an estimated 5 million followers and some
1,300 temples in south Vietnam alone.
From Saigon, they traveled to Tay Ninh, the town where Caodai was
founded and home of the largest and most important Caodai temple.
Brightly painted—called “the kind of temple Walt Disney might have
built for Fantasyland” by The Lonely Planet Guide to Vietnam and “a
congregation of kitsch” by journalist Ron Gluckman—and a growing
tourist attraction, the Tay Ninh temple is comparable to the Vatican in
its importance to followers.
On the trip, they interviewed 20 Caodaists. Hoskins says that many
people told them that Caodai had survived a difficult time since the
fall of Saigon in 1975, but that now new temples are being built and
the older ones renovated. “Interest in religion is increasing all over
Vietnam, and tourism has helped Caodai because the Tay Ninh temple is
the second largest tourist attraction in South Vietnam,” she says.
“One of the most interesting things was to see the different sects of
Caodai, which had branched off from the original over the last 80
years,” says Hoskins. “The California community is so much smaller,
that they tend to emphasize the similarities between the branches. In
Vietnam, the differences are much clearer.”
On the negative side, in Vietnam spiritism and séances are illegal and
new regulations that took effect last November make it illegal for
people to discuss religion on the Internet, Hoskins says.
Hoskins, Cao and USC sophomore Bao-Viet Nguyen, who is now working with
Hoskins, are preparing a paper on their work for a February conference
on Religion, Immigration and Social Justice organized by USC’s Center
for Civic and Religious Culture. In April, they will present at a UC
Riverside conference marking 30 years since the fall of Saigon.
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