MIMESIS
INTERNATIONAL
ASIAN PHILOSOPHICAL TEXTS
n. 1
Book series edited by Roman Pașca (Kyoto University, Japan) and Takeshi Morisato
(Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
Editorial Board
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Raquel Bouso (University of Pompeu Fabra, Spain), Margret Chu (The Royal Commonwealth Society in
Hong Kong, Hong Kong), Maitreyee Datta (Jadavpur University, India), Yasuo Deguchi (Kyoto University,
Japan), Jonardon Ganeri (New York University, USA), Marcello Ghilardi (University of Padova, Italy),
Leigh Jenco (London School of Economics and Political Science), Kevin Lam (Dokkyo University, Japan),
Ethan Mills (University of Tennessee Chattanooga, USA), Eric Nelson (Hong Kong University of Science
and Technology, Hong Kong), Kenn Nakata-Steffensen (University College Dublin, Ireland), Jin Y. Park
(American University, USA), Jana Rošker (University in Ljubljana, Slovenia), Shalini Sinha (University
of Reading, UK), Andrew Whitehead (Kennesaw State University, USA; KU Leuven, Université libre de
Bruxelles, Belgium)
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ASIAN PHILOSOPHICAL
TEXTS
Exploring the Hidden Sources
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Edited by
Takeshi Morisato and Roman Pașca
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© 2020 – MiMesis international – Milan
www.mimesisinternational.com
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Isbn: 9788869772245
Book series: Asian Philosophical Texts, n. 1
© MIM Edizioni Srl
P.I. C.F. 02419370305
CONTENTS
introduction
Takeshi Morisato and Roman Pașca
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ESSAYS
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PhilosoPhy for children: Globalization and
the translation of a neo-confucian text
Margaret Chu
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“White horse is not [a] horse”:
hoW the translation creates the Paradox
Yijing Zhang
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the holisM of Guanxue in the sonG dynasty
Na Song
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concerninG aesthetic attitudes: Kant and
confucius on eMulation and evaluation
Cody Staton
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contradiction and recursion in buddhist PhilosoPhy:
froM Catuṣkoṭi to kōan
Adrian Kreutz
xx
classical indian dialectics: refutinG the reality of teMPoral
PassaGe in MūlaMadhyaMakakārikā and khandanakhandakhādya
Maitreyee Datta
xx
TRANSLATIONS
“ESOTERIC TRADITION OF VENERABLE MASTER BUDDHA
OF WESTERN PEACE”
by đức Phật thầy tây An đoàn minh huyên
德佛柴西安段明暄
translated by Thích Quảng Huyền 釋廣玄
IS
“Looking for one’S SeLf in the oPPoSite Sex,” by
kurAtA hyAkuzō 倉田百三
translated by Richard Stone
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notes on contributors
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“requestinG the Guidance of Professor nishida”
by tanabe hajiMe 田辺元
translated by Richard Stone with Takeshi Morisato
xx
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xx
Quảng huyền (corneLL univerSity)
ESOTERIC TRADITION OF VENERABLE
MASTER BUDDHA OF WESTERN PEACE
A Shallowed World
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Hổ Cứ Islet no longer exists. There, towards the right bank
of the Tiền River, the northern branch of the Mekong River in
southern Vietnam, was the location where Master Buddha
said he “stepped over” (1)1 to deliver his Esoteric Tradition in
circa 1842. But Hổ Cứ Islet has since eroded away into the
Mekong. The nearby islet where the teacher’s home village of
Tòng Sơn lay has also been largely lost to the river.2
According to local legends, a geomancer was instrumental in
this transformation. On behalf of villagers on the left bank of
the Tiền River, he captured a gander and his mate. At night, in
the cover of darkness, the geomancer tethered the female
goose to a pole on the Tiền River’s left bank. He then rowed to
the other side of the river and, after attaching talismans to
the gander, released the bird to seek out his mate. For three
consecutive nights the geomancer plied his trade so that the
gander bearing his talismans would spirit away the geomantic
properties of the Hổ Cứ–Tòng Sơn islets to the left riverbank.
Sure enough, come the dry season, the islets near the right bank
had been devastated
1
2
Parenthetical numbers indicate corresponding line numbers in the translation
and transliteration. See translation note below.
Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An (Tòng Sơn: Ban Quản
tự Tòng Sơn cổ tự, Ban Chẩn tế Giáo hội Phật giáo Hòa Hảo, 1973, 1990),
15–16. The former Hổ Cứ Islet was commemorated by renaming a riverside
downstream on the left bank of the Tiền River the Hổ Cứ Area (miệt Hổ Cứ),
which is in Cao Lãnh District’s Mỹ Xương Hamlet in Đồng Tháp Province.
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by the river’s corrosion, and its rich alluvial soils emerged as
islets towards the left bank that nearby villages eagerly claimed.3
It is amidst such an unsettled riverscape that Đoàn Minh
Huyên’s (段明暄, 1807–1856) Esoteric Tradition must be
understood. Huyên, who is known to the Vietnamese and his
followers as Phật Thầy or “Master Buddha,” lived in a fluid,
changeable, and uncertain “water frontier” along the Tiền and
Bassac Rivers, the northern and southern distributaries of the
Mekong River in southern Vietnam.4 To people of the delta
like Huyên, the world seemed to be coming apart before their
eyes. Observing scenes such as the seemingly imminent erasure
of his native Hổ Cứ–Tòng Sơn islets, Huyên spoke in Esoteric
Tradition of a world “teetering on the vast sea, falling away on
the banks of a pond” (46) as “mountains split and land crumbles,
drifting into the offing” (12). Đoàn Minh Huyên associated the
transforming landscape of the delta and its attendant calamities
with Buddhist prophecies about the fading dharma, the Buddhist
teachings. In Huyên’s waterborne vision, the tide of dharma was
receding, leaving in its wake a “shallowed world” (cạn đời). But
eventually the tides would shift, for Buddhist lore also spoke
of Maitreya Buddha (Phật Di Lặc), who would descend from
the Tuṣita strata of the heavens to inaugurate a new dharma
dispensation.
According to several sūtra dedicated to this prophecy, Maitreya
would achieve enlightenment beneath a “dragon flower tree,”
and so his coming congregation was known as hội Long Hoa
or Dragon Flower Assembly.5 This congregation would consist
of those who had culled “karma of goodness” (thiện duyên, 善
緣). In prophecies endemic to the Mekong Delta, the gathering
of Maitreya’s congregation would be foretold by the appearance
3
4
5
Ibid., 17–18.
Li Tana, “The Water Frontier: An Introduction,” in Water Frontier: Commerce
and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750–1880, ed. Nola Cooke
and Li Tana (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 1–17.
Sūtra Spoken by Buddha about Maitreya’s Descent to Be Born and Achieve
Buddhahood 佛說彌勒下生成佛經 (T.454.14.424b23–26). C.f., 大乘本
生心地觀經 (T.159.3.306a5–7), 彌勒來時經 (T.457.14.434c16–19), and
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of highly advanced dharma practitioners, so-called bodhisattva,
such as like the Jade Buddha (Ngọc Phật, 玉佛), who would task
themselves with finding those with “karma of goodness” and
sequestering them from the dangers and evils of an imploding
world.6 Đoàn Minh Huyên dedicated his life to this mission. But
rescuing the good was a precarious affair before what Huyên
described as “reeling sights” (45) of “scenes of natural disaster”
(36). People’s native landscape—indeed, the entire perceived
world—was turning against itself. Not only did the land and
waters seem bent on annihilation, but as the geomancer in the
legend about the erosion of Huyên’s native land suggests, spiritual
leaders, religious clergy, thaumaturges, and all sorts of adepts with
extraordinary abilities participated in internecine struggle, thereby
interweaving their practices into the earth’s self-destruction. Even
ghosts and spirits appeared set on total ruination.
A look at a vernacular Vietnamese apocryphal sūtra about
the Dragon Flower prophecy offers insight into Đoàn Minh
Huyên’s dystopian vision. The extant text, a xylographic reprint
from 1944, reveals not only how the vision that Huyên helped
spread continued to impact later generations during the Second
World War, but it also intimates how believers in the prophecy
may have beheld the nuclear tragedies that would soon ensue
in the Pacific and the decades-long mutilation of the earth by
war machines and defoliants in Vietnam as well as how such
believers may envision future disasters associated with dramatic
environmental and climatic transformations7:
6
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三彌勒經疏 (T.1774.38.316a17–18). The dragon flower tree is said to be
40–50 li tall (roughly 15km high). For comparison with the Pāli tradition,
in which Mettayya (Maitreya) inaugurates his dharma dispensation at “a
blossoming nāga (dragon) grove,” see Upatissa, The Stream of Deathless
Nectar: The Short Recension of the Amatarasadhārā of the Elder Upatissa:
A Commentary on the Chronicle of the Future Buddha Metteyya, with a
Historical Introduction, translated by Daniel M. Stuart (Bangkok, Thailand:
Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation, 2017), 213.
Di Lặc chơn kinh diễn am 彌勒真經演音 (Vernacular Exposition of the True
Sūtra about Maitreya), xylographic text, Hanoi, National Library of Vietnam,
accession no. R.1800.
With eerie semblance to the Dragon Flower prophecy, recent studies of rising
tidal waters in the Mekong Delta project that virtually all of the Vietnamese
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You will see species of numinous ghosts and monsters, who occupy
large and small shrines and temples, obstruct the wind and rain, causing
calamities of great drought that ruin rice crops and inflict pain and
suffering on ten-thousands of people. Moreover, species of demons and
monsters beneath the water like dragons, snakes, turtles, otters, whales,
water serpents, frogs, crabs, eels, and fish along with oyster, eel fry, clam,
snail, mussel, and arca demons will constantly transform their powers to
draw in the water to make great rain clouds and flood rains that will cause
the rivers and streams to inundate with flood water, destroying dykes and
flooding rice crops and fruits of the earth.8
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What message did Đoàn Minh Huyên derive from this
imagining of the world’s transformation? Huyên’s teachings
about the prophecy reveal a conceptual double movement at
once outward and inward. Towards the former, the centrifugal
thrust of Huyên’s teachings called for people with “karma of
goodness” to abscond to the remote periphery. He exhorted his
followers to “towards the west, trek straight out in search” (50).
There, in the Seven Mountains of the frontier west, an unsettled
no-man’s-land between the Khmer and Vietnamese polities,
Huyên sought to cloister his followers from nature’s precipitous
destruction and weather her storms of restitution.9
Đoàn Minh Huyên described the travails of this journey:
Heaven renders a hundred beings to waste,
Such that ferrying across is arduous with unspeakable toil.
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south will be submerged at high tide by 2050. S.A. Kulp and B.H. Strauss,
“New Elevation Data Triple Estimates of Global Vulnerability to Sea-level
Rise and Coastal Flooding,” Nature Communications 10, no. 4844 (2019);
Dennis Lu and Christopher Flavelle, “Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by
2050, New Research Shows” New York Times, October 29, 2019, https://www.
nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/29/climate/coastal-cities-underwater.html.
Di Lặc chơn kinh diễn am, 40a–b. For a synopsis of the sūtra, which bears the
alternative titles Di Lặc độ thế chơn kinh, Kinh Đức Phật Di Lặc xuống đời,
and Kinh quý trọng của Đức Di Lặc, see Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism
and Peasant Politics in Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1983), 31; “Perfect World and Perfect Time: Maitreya in Vietnam,”
in Maitreya, the Future Buddha, ed. Alan Sponberg and Helen Hardacre
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 164–6.
For the locations and identities of the Seven Mountains, see Recluse (Trần
Văn Nhựt) and Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Thất Sơn mầu nhiệm (s.l.: NXB Từ Tâm,
1955, 1972), 15–21.
8
9
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Mountaintops float on water, and earth builds up,
Dragons lurk at the bottom of the sea as rivers constantly catch the
dew. (69–70)
At the same time, Huyên saw the physical trek to the Seven Mountains
as a spiritual flight:
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As this moment comes, divine dragons descend;
We are as if on a little boat buffeted by the wind on the rivers and
lakes.
“Amitābha,” with the six words “Nam Mô,”
One transmigrates to be born in the Pure Land, coming and going at
ease.
Once you escape the sea of suffering, you cross over,
To take shelter from the cycle of mundane dust and avoid the realm of
life and death. (93–95)
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In the hearts of many from the delta, the Seven Mountains
conjured the horizons of the imagination; for teachers like Huyên,
they posed “the ultimate environment for self-cultivation.”10
The very earth of the Seven Mountains like the adepts who
alighted there were potent with numen. The geomancy of the
Seven Mountains was primed for the Dragon Flower Assembly.
Whereas thượng ngươn or “Fountainhead” (literally “Upper
Spring”) of Śākyamuni Buddha’s dispensation began in the
heights of the Himalayas11 at the Mekong River’s source, hạ
ngươn or “Receding Spring” (lit. “Lower Spring”) at the time
of the dharma’s fading would transpire in the Mekong Delta,
where the river’s waters, its geomantic energies, and the potency
of dharma vanished as they flowed out towards the offing.12
10
11
12
Đỗ Thiện, Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern Region
(London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 177–178.
That Śākyamuni has been associated with the Himalayan Mountains in
Vietnamese Buddhist imagination since at least the seventeenth century is
evidenced by devotional statues from that time that depict Buddha in the
Himalayas. Nguyễn Bá Thanh Long, Cổ Vật Hải Phòng (Hải Phòng: Hội cổ
vật Hải Phòng, 2009), 109.
Recluse (Trần Văn Nhựt) and Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Thất Sơn mầu nhiệm, 43–
49. For analysis of the temporality of the Upper, Intermediate, and Lower
Springs, see Vương Kim (Phạm Bá Cẩm), Đời hạ ngươn (Sài Gòn: NXB
Long Hoa, 1960), 11–56; c.f., Jan Nattier, Once upon a Future Time: Studies
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At the same time, the salvific journey that Đoàn Minh Huyên
envisioned during the “Receding Spring” was directed inward.
In contrast to apocalyptic visions of an astrological, celestial,
nuclear, or extraterrestrial nature, the exigencies of the Dragon
Flower prophecy were not initiated from without but rather
accelerated from within.13 The inward movement of the Dragon
Flower prophecy, in which delta inhabitants’ native landscape
turned on itself, implied introspection and thus drew beholders’
vision toward their interior karmic landscapes. Huyên led his
followers to see in their inner moral configuration the mirror
image of the land’s physical chaos and, conversely, in the
deterioration of the land, their own moral degeneration. Because
people’s inner and outer worlds were intrinsically intertwined,
Huyên saw in his world’s devolution the concomitant retribution
of human misdeeds.14
But Đoàn Minh Huyên’s message ultimately inspired
hope. By the same karmic logic of the world’s decline, moral
reparation could restore. Alluding to the depletion of the dharma
that paralleled the Mekong River’s descent from its Himalayan
wellspring to the delta during the “Receding Spring,” Huyên
taught, “Today’s world has already shallowed, to open, transform,
and establish the Fountainhead era” (62). Huyên believed that if
people with “karma of goodness” would tu (修)—a term that
applies both to moral cultivation and material reconstruction—
then the world would be restored to peace. Thus, even amidst
the misery of traversing through the “Receding Spring,” Huyên
inspired hope, “Amidst calamity, with luck a fish from a spring
may come across a lotus lake” (42).
Therefore, imbedded in the inward and outward journey
inherent in Đoàn Minh Huyên’s teaching about the Dragon
13
14
in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press,
1991), 27–64.
For scriptural sources, variations, and comparison of Buddhist apocalypses,
see Jan Nattier, Once upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of
Decline, 119–32.
Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, “Perfect World and Perfect Time: Maitreya in Vietnam,”
in Maitreya, the Future Buddha, ed. Alan Sponberg and Helen Hardacre
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 164.
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Flower prophecy was a promise. Just as Śākyamuni’s story over
incalculable lifetimes is also our story,15 Maitreya’s anticipated
achievement of Buddhahood beneath the dragon flower tree
would be the collective fruit of individuals’ participation in
cultivation as well as the realization of salvation for ourselves
and our world.
Master Buddha
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Sitting ruefully, I recall the teacher’s words;
In the year of the Earthen Cock, east and west were in throngs.
As an epidemic seized thousands upon thousands,
All beneath the skies panicked, villages frightened out of their wits.
The skies halted the waters suddenly;
Teacher, seeing this, was moved and resolved to deliver us to peace.
To rescue the hundred clans who faced calamity,
At that time, teacher descended to Tòng Sơn village... 16
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Thus begins a vernacular hagiography of Master Buddha of
unknown authorship(s). This opening passage offers us a moment
to consider the challenges of narrating the teacher’s life story.
The narrator begins by speaking in plaintive nostalgic verse. He
summons Master Buddha by memory, and so his telling of the
teacher’s story is an act of recollection. However, as the storyteller
progresses, he draws our remembrance of Master Buddha to the
present by exhorting us to uphold his teachings. The narrator
reiterates the former master’s teachings for immediate practice.
Then, by avowing the veracity of Master Buddha’s message
15
16
John S. Strong, “A Family Quest: The Buddha, Yaśodhara, and Rāhula in the
Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya,” in Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions
of South and Southeast Asia, ed. Juliane Schober (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1997), 113–28; The Buddha: A Short Biography (Oxford:
Oneworld Publications, 2001), 14; Jonathan S. Walters, “Story, Stūpa, and
Empire: Construction of the Buddha Biography in Early Post-Aśokan India,”
in Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia,
ed. Juliane Schober (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 160–92.
“Giảng xưa về Phật Thầy,” in Vương Kim (Phạm Bá Cẩm) and Đào Hưng,
Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, second edition (Sài Gòn: NXB Long Hoa, 1954),
158.
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The likening of the body of Buddhist teachings (V. pháp thân 法身, S.
dharmakāya) to the pervasive rhythms of a sonic dharma calls to mind the
“three bodies” (V. tam thân, S. trikāya) theory of Mantrayāna (Esoteric
Incantation) Buddhism.
Ibid., 166.
Today, a village by the name of Tòng Sơn is located in Mỹ An Hưng Hamlet,
Lấp Vò Discrict, Đồng Tháp Province, Vietnam. Tòng Sơn Pagoda and other
structures commemorative of Đoàn Minh Huyên are found there.
「四面波濤, 望之如水上浮萍,日閃江豚,風翻水鶴」。Trịnh Hoài
Đức 鄭懷德 (1765–1825), Gia Định thành thông chí 嘉定城通志 (c.1820),
Sinographic text in Gia Định thành thống chí, ed. Đào Duy Anh, trans. Đỗ
Mộng Khương and Nguyễn Ngọc Tỉnh (Tp. Hồ Chí Minh: NXB Giáo dục,
1999), 75b/162. The river dolphin was probably a species of finless porpoise.
Đại Nam nhất thống chí, another contemporary gazetteer, likened the islet to
a raft drifting in the river. Quốc sử quán triều Nguyễn, Đại Nam nhất thống
chí, ed. Đào Duy Anh, trans. Phạm Trọng Điềm (Viện Sử học, NXB Thuận
Hóa–Huế, 2006), vol. 5, 214.
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about the world’s immanent restitution beneath the dragon flower
tree, the narrator speaks to the future. Thus, the temporality of
“Master Buddha,” reverberated through past, present, and future
and redounded cyclically. As the storyteller concludes, “Master
Buddha” and his embodiment in memory, teachings, practice,
and, perhaps, unknowable mystery17 echoes throughout “affairs
of the world like rhythms of a wooden fish.”18 Therefore,
“Master Buddha” is at once an individual, a body of teachings,
and a figure of worship. We must remain mindful of this in the
discussion to follow.
In 1807, the historical Đoàn Minh Huyên was born in Tòng
Sơn Village on an eponymous islet near the right bank of the
Tiền River.19 A contemporary gazetteer described his native
islet, “All four sides are lapped by undulating waves. Gazing
upon it [from a distance], the islet seems like drifting duckweed.
The sunlight shimmers on river dolphins, and the wind stirs the
water’s cranes.”20 Huyên became accustomed to the unmoored
life of his riverine homeland early in his youth. Stories that
mention Huyên’s childhood tell us that once his father died, he
and his mother coursed the rivers and canals by boat, selling betel
and areca. The extent of their travels is unknown, but Huyên’s
18
19
20
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21
Vương Kim (Phạm Bá Cẩm) and Đào Hưng, Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, second
edition (Sài Gòn: NXB Long Hoa, 1954), 16–17.
His travels at this time are said to have included Mõ Cày, Bến Tre, Cần Chông,
Sốc Trăng, Bạc Liêu, Cà Mau, Rạch Giá, and the Seven Mountains. Nguyễn
Văn Hầu, Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 30. Swimming through the
delta’s waterways was quite hazardous considering the crocodiles, snakes,
and pirates who populated them. Nevertheless, accounts from twentieth
century memoirs reveal that some did succeed in coursing the waters by
clinging to bamboo. Nguyễn Văn Quảng and Marjorie Pivar, Fourth Uncle
in the Mountain: A Memoir of a Barefoot Doctor in Vietnam (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2004), 43–46.
These are my provisional translation for khí công (breath work), khinh
công (swift traveling), võ (martial yoga), phù thủy/thuốc nước (healing),
phong thủy (geomancy), bùa (talismans), tiên tri (prognostication), điễn
(thunderbolt-cultivation, vajra), and tàng hình (vanishing). Some of these
practices are described in Thích Quảng Huyền, Dharma Mountain Buddhism
and Martial Yoga, temple publication (Frederick, MD: Chùa Xá Lợi, 2007).
Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, 4, 11.
Nguyễn Văn Quảng and Marjorie Pivar, Fourth Uncle in the Mountain: A
Memoir of a Barefoot Doctor in Vietnam.
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mother was buried along the Cái Tàu Thương waterway about
three kilometers by boat from Tòng Sơn.21
When Đoàn Minh Huyên’s mother died is unclear, but after
her passing, Huyên continued to wander. According to oral
tradition, he drifted throughout the waterways of the Mekong
Delta, clinging to just a culm of bamboo.22 By his thirties, Huyên
seems to have mastered an array of cultivation arts, including
embodied practices such as breath work, swift traveling, and
martial yoga as well as uncanny abilities in healing, geomancy,
talismans, presaging, thunderbolt-cultivation, and vanishing.23
He also achieved fluency in Sinographic writing and Buddhist
sūtra literature.24 Huyên never attributed his training to any
particular lineage(s) or teacher(s). However, present day accounts
of adepts’ training the sundry assortment of skills and practices
associated with a spiritual teacher like Huyên suggest that he
studied sporadically with multiple masters of various affiliations
(and lack thereof) during the course of this travels.25
By 1842, Đoàn Minh Huyên felt compelled to preach. Internal
clues in Esoteric Tradition reveal that Huyên alighted at Hổ
Cứ Islet that year, warning of the calamities soon to befall a
23
24
25
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Esoteric Tradition of Master Buddha of Western Peace, 1. In Esoteric
Tradition, Đoàn Minh Huyên begins with the words “upon [the year] Nhâm.”
Nhâm (壬), one of the ten heavenly stems of the 60-year calendrical cycle,
most likely referred to the year 1842. A decade earlier in 1832 seems too
early, and by a decade later in 1852, Đoàn Minh Huyên was restricted to
the Seven Mountains area well-west of Hổ Cứ. References to the zodiac in
Esoteric Tradition also point to the year 1842 as the beginning of a chain of
events (39). Moreover, oral tradition tells us that, after leaving Tòng Sơn in
1849, Huyên was averse to returning to his native islets. Even though he is
said to have visited his cloister in Kiến Thạnh–Xẻo Môn for three months, he
appears never to have ventured further east and largely remained in the Seven
Mountains area after 1850.
The monk was known in Vietnamese as Sãi Kế and Lâm Sâm. Ho-Tai HueTam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, 7.
Gò Công (“Peacock Hill”), which was formerly its own province, is now part
of Tiền Giang Province. Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây
An, 30.
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“shallowed world.”26 The previous year, a Khmer monk had led
his followers to arms, disrupting life throughout the delta from
the coastal east to the Seven Mountains.27 Amidst such chaos,
Huyên alluded to the Vietnamese zodiac to project the miseries to
come during the three years to follow (1843–1845) and implore
the delta’s people to seek shelter in the mountains of the west,
“The cat’s cry resounds! The cat’s cry resounds! Scaring snake
and dragon to flee into the mountains and hide” (39). He appears
to have drifted up and down the Mekong River spreading his
message, and, by 1844, he preached another esoteric litany at Gò
Công in the eastern delta.28
During these years early in his career, few seem to have heeded
Đoàn Minh Huyên’s exhortations. In the Esoteric Tradition, he
lamented, “Pity the world of dust! —I keep teaching, but none
listen” (26). Still, moved by the precipitating sufferings that he
perceived, he felt compelled to speak out, “Seeing this, I feel
sorry for myself. To speak of it is terrible, but to stay silent
only compounds my sadness” (103). Huyên’s activities for the
next four years after Gò Công are unknown, but by 1849, he
felt consigned to return to his home village on Tòng Sơn Islet,
where he lived in relative obscurity behind the village đình or
community hall. He drew notice only for his habit of speaking
in undiscernible (esoteric?) whispers, trancelike comportment,
27
28
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and burning foliage for a lantern at night, which caused some
alarm as a fire hazard.29 However, Huyên would soon garner
attention. The episode through which Huyên began to be taken
seriously not only reveals the circumstances of his emergence
as a religious leader, but it also reveals early indications of his
inward-directed reflection on people’s sufferings—that they
were the baleful fruits of human waywardness.
Later in 1849, the “year of the Earthen Cock” mentioned in
the above poem about recollecting Master Buddha, a cholera
epidemic broke out in the delta, which, due to the creation of
new, more urban settlements in the frontier waterscape as well
as its frequent movement of peoples and products, was prone
to such outbreaks.30 In response, Đoàn Minh Huyên’s villagers
devised to perform a ritual that would “cast off the wind” (tống
gió), since they believed that pestilence was caused by external
demonic winds. Huyên, whom none of the villagers recognized
as a village native and instead regarded as an eccentric vagabond,
stood up to object, saying “If you yourself dislike the wind,
then to whom will you send it off?”31 With these words, Huyên
entreated his fellow villagers to look within to see the roots of
the terrible disease in their own karmic demerits rather than treat
the epidemic as a bane that had befallen them from outside.
Moreover, Huyên implored, passing the baleful winds off to
others would only compound their misdeeds and, ultimately,
their suffering. Nevertheless, the village elders would not be
swayed, and they banished the vagabond. As he departed, Huyên
29
30
31
Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 31.
From the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, typhoons, trade, state rice
transportation, migration, pilgrimage, mining, prostitution, war, and piracy
contributed to the outbreak and spread of disease. Li Tana, “Epidemics in
Late Pre-modern Vietnam and Their Links with Her Neighbours,” conference
paper presented at Imperial China and Its Southern Neighbours, Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 28–29 June, 2012.
Nguyễn Long Thành Nam, Phật giáo Hòa Hảo trong dòng lịch sử dân tộc
(Sante Fe Springs, CA: Tập san Đuốc Từ Bi, 1991), 112; Nguyễn Văn Hầu,
Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 32.
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revealed himself to his surviving kin, who had not recognized
him before.32 Huyên would never return.
Thereupon, Đoàn Minh Huyên again clutched his bamboo
culm and swam along the Cái Tàu Thượng waterway around to
Xẻo Môn Canal.33 As he coursed the waterways, he encountered
numerous “ghost rafts” from all the villages that performed
“casting off the wind” sacrifices. The scene of drifting rafts,
coffins, and corpses as well as the ghostly moans of afflicted
people and cries of startled animals must have felt exceedingly
eerie.34 To Huyên, it must have seemed like he presaged seven
years earlier, “The scene is severe! The scene is severe…! I now
watch as suddenly in the world, endless ghosts lead themselves
along—who could shelter us? Here in the morning, lost by night
in a life of hardships, like a flash of lightning whose brilliance
cannot endure” (37, 52–53). Huyên stayed for a time at Trà
Bư Village, where he unveiled his uncanny healing powers.
Although he made no such claims, rumors spread that he was a
living Buddha.35 Eventually, as his reputation grew, he traveled
up Xẻo Môn Canal to where it met Tiền River. There, at the
waterways’ intersection at Kiến Thạnh, Huyên treated the sick,
who came by boat in throngs.36 At this river crossway, Huyên’s
followers would establish their first cloister.37
Within a year, the commotion that accompanied Đoàn Minh
Huyên’s healing activities (and the resulting overburdened
32
33
34
35
36
37
Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 32.
Vương Kim (Phạm Bá Cẩm) and Đào Hưng, Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 17.
Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 34.
Nguyễn Long Thành Nam, Phật giáo Hòa Hảo trong dòng lịch sử dân tộc,
112; Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 42. By contrast,
in Hòa Hảo hagiography, Master Buddha, called “Venerable Buddha,” is
the first in a series of Buddha incarnations leading up to Huỳnh Phú Sổ or
“Venerable Teacher.”
Trà Bư is now in Hội An Hamlet, and Kiến Thạnh (Long Kiến) is in Long
Giang Hamlet; both are part of Chợ Mới District, An Giang Province. Nguyễn
Văn Hầu, Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 34–36.
After Đoàn Minh Huyên’s death, the cloister was named “Old Pagoda
of Western Peace” to distinguish it from Western Peace Pagoda at Sam
Mountain. It was originally the makeshift hermitage of a certain Adept (Đạo)
Kiến.
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195
38
Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, 11.
Ostensibly, Đoàn Minh Huyên thus became a “disciple” of the temple’s
abbot, Nguyễn Nhứt Thừa. Nguyễn Long Thành Nam, Phật giáo Hòa Hảo
trong dòng lịch sử dân tộc, 115.
In its Buddhist context, Tây An (西安) or “Western Peace” is an abbreviation
of Tây Phương An Lạc Tịnh Thổ (西方安樂淨土) or “Western Blissful
Pure Land” of Amitābha Buddha. An lạc (安樂) was one of the Sinographic
translations of sukha or “bliss” in Sukhāvatī, the Sanskrit name of Amitābha’s
Pure Land.
Quốc sử quán triều Nguyễn, Đại Nam nhất thống chí, vol. 5, 226. Although
employed (and often conscripted) by the Vietnamese Nguyễn state, these
settlers included peoples of Chinese, Khmer, Cham, and Malay ethnicities
in addition to Vietnamese. Vũ Đức Liêm, “Rama III, Minh Mạng and
Power Paradigm in Early Nineteenth Century Mekong Valley,” Rian Thai :
International Journal of Thai Studies 5 (2012) 308–309; ________, “Vietnam
at the Khmer Frontier: Boundary Politics, 1802–1847,” Cross-Currents:
East Asian History and Culture Review 5, no. 2 (2016): 550; Nicolas Weber,
“Securing and Developing the Southwestern Region: The Role of the Cham
and Malay Colonies in Vietnam (18th–19th Centuries),” Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 54, no. 5 (2011): 739–772.
Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, 12.
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waterways) drew the attention of Nguyễn Dynasty authorities
as well. A provincial governor, who suspected the teacher’s
intentions, detained him in 1850. After determining the selfavowed layman was an essentially harmless, albeit eccentric
“monk,” the governor sent Huyên to be formerly ordained in
the Lâm Tế Buddhist order at Western Peace Pagoda (Chùa Tây
An).38 Aside from evoking the blissful western realm of Amitābha
Buddha,39 The name of the temple, “Western Peace” (Tây An,
西安), conveyed settlers’ recent pacification of a multiethnic
frontier as the pagoda, which was built just three years earlier in
1847, lay at the foot of Sam Mountain in the Seven Mountains
region at the western fringe of Vietnamese dynastic authority.40
Once relocated in the loosely controlled periphery, Đoàn Minh
Huyên was left relatively free to heal, teach, and even leave
the pagoda as he wished.41 In keeping with the faintest echoes
of dharma that Huyên believed the “shallowed world” could
still recall of Buddhism’s receding teachings, Huyên taught a
minimalist practice, the so-called Intangible Way or đạo vô vi
(道無為). He instructed his followers to perform observances
before a blank red cloth (trần điều) in lieu of votive images and
40
41
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43
The flags or banners were called thẻ năm ông. The creation of mandala with
five Buddhas for each direction (cardinal directions and center) suggests
Tantric Vajrayāna influence, but the color scheme shows that they were
influenced by Sinographic convention (and, perhaps, “Daoism”) as well.
Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, 37;
Nguyễn Long Thành Nam, Phật giáo Hòa Hảo trong dòng lịch sử dân tộc,
112–113; Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 49; Vương
Kim (Phạm Bá Cẩm) and Đào Hưng, Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 23.
Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, 24;
Vương Kim (Phạm Bá Cẩm) and Đào Hưng, Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 19.
Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 79.
Ibid., 43–46; Recluse (Trần Văn Nhựt) and Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Thất Sơn mầu
nhiệm, 113–164. Although much is said of Master Buddha’s twelve disciples
in oral literature and Hòa Hảo hagiography, there is no uniform list of their
identities. Nguyễn Long Thành Nam suggests: Trần Văn Thành (d. 1873),
“Monk Bùi” (d. 1907), Bùi Văn Tây (1802–1890), Nguyễn Văn Xuyến
(1834–1914), Đặng Văn Ngoạn (1820–1890), Phạm Thái Chung (d. 1877),
“Adept (Đạo) Lãnh” (?–1856?), Trần Văn Nhu (1847–1914), Nguyễn Văn
Thới (1866–1927), “Adept (Đạo) Sang,” “Adept (Đạo) Thạch,” and “Adept
(Đạo) Lãnh of Gò Sát.” Nguyễn Long Thành Nam, Phật giáo Hòa Hảo trong
dòng lịch sử dân tộc, 123–124. That some of these adepts postdate Master
Buddha shows that “disciple” (đệ tử) in the hagiographies was used quite
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make offerings of water, incense, and flowers. To demarcate
votive spaces, he practiced geomancy by merely having his
followers plant five solid-colored tantric flags for the Buddhas
of the five directions.42 His healing art, too, was remarkably
simple. He prescribed talismanic rainwater—sometimes mixed
with the ash of paper or cloth prayers— and moral rectification.43
Finally, for the transmission of the dharma, he vernacularized
his teachings into sấm or orally transmitted esoteric verses, thus
doing away with physical sūtra.44
Within a year, the “layman of Western Peace” as Đoàn Minh
Huyên referred to himself,45 had conveyed his message to
numerous followers, twelve of whom he seems to have chosen to
establish “fields” (trại ruộng) as religious farming communities.
These lay and clerical adepts, who called themselves “people of
the way” (đạo), set up agrarian camps throughout the delta. Most
reclaimed land in the frontier jungles of the Seven Mountains
area, but others spread as far east as Biên Hòa and west as the
lands of present-day Cambodia.46
Since Đoàn Minh Huyên’s practices were so artless and bare,
44
45
46
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and his prophetic message was so diffuse, the array of “fields”
that sprouted up throughout the delta was fragmentary and
decentralized.47 In addition, the challenges of communication
and travel in the delta isolated the “fields,” which were already
by conception meant to be cloistered from the outside world.
Hence, adepts’ ideas and teachings varied greatly from place to
place. In fact, most adepts met Huyên only briefly and received
little training from him. For the most part, they just adopted his
prophetic message and, perhaps, took refuge in him as a “living
Buddha.” Meanwhile, others could associate themselves with
Huyên simply to yoke his charisma and perceived powers.
Therefore, Đoàn Minh Huyên’s contribution to the
movement(s) that he set in motion was to inspire religiously
inclined adepts at a moment of crisis, particularly the cholera
epidemic, rather than to train or indoctrinate them. Indeed, there
was nothing new about Huyên’s teachings. He did not so much
invent, explain, or systematize the Dragon Flower prophecy
as much as he gave it voice through the magic of his uncanny
personality and spiritual prowess. As a result, each cloister that
extended from his influence tended to reinvent Master Buddha’s
message with divergent thoughts and practices.
Initially, Đoàn Minh Huyên’s message was peaceful, evasive,
and inclusive, attracting a wide range of delta peoples, including
Vietnamese, Khmer, Chinese, and, perhaps, even Cham and
Malays. However, after the French seized control of the delta
from 1859 to 1867, some of Master Buddha’s “disciples” turned
towards militancy and ethnic tribalism. For example, Trần Văn
Thành (?–1873) claimed to succeed Master Buddha by producing
a seal that was used to print talismans bearing the Sinographs
“Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương” (寶山奇香).48 These talismans were
probably borrowed from secret societies’ initiation rituals and
47
48
loosely to connect an otherwise fragmentary and decentralized layout of
“fields.”
Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, 18, 33.
Several esoteric litanies are dedicated to elevating Trần Văn Thành as Đoàn
Minh Huyên’s successor. Nguyễn Hữu Hiệp, Nhứt sư nhứt đệ tử (Hà Nội:
NXB Văn hóa Dân tọc, 2010), 191–210.
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50
On the links between the Sinographs “Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương” and the secret
societies, see Đỗ Thiện, Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern
Region, 196. For ideological similarities with the secret societies, see Ho-Tai
Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, 31–33.
It is clear from the Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương poem that Đoàn Minh Huyên was
not its author. The poem speaks of the rebirth of Emperor Minh Mạng (1791–
1841), the military leadership of (a reincarnated?) Trạng Trình (Nguyễn Binh
Khiêm 1491–1586), and the restoration of “Việt Nam.” However, Huyên
died in 1856, before the French seized control of the delta. The cabalistic
poem is described in Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Nhận thức Phật giáo Hòa Hảo (Hà
Nội, NXB Tôn Giáo, 1968, 2017), 15–16.
Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, 15.
Phật Trùm (?–1875) or “Chief Buddha,” whose real name is unknown, hailed
from Bokor (Tà Lơn) Mountain in modern Cambodia. He was known during
his lifetime as Candle Adept (Đạo Đèn), because his thaumaturgical practices
involved candles. He was later arrested and exiled by the French. Recluse
(Trần Văn Nhựt) and Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Thất Sơn mầu nhiệm, 89–95.
“Patriarch Master” or bổn sư 本師 is a title of Śākyamuni Buddha and implies
that Ngô Lợi was Maitreya, the initiator of a new dharma dispensation. He
is said to have achieved enlightenment in 1870. The son of a carpenter, Ngô
Lợi’s ethnic origins are uncertain. However, his prolific writing in literary
Sinitic suggests that he may have been Hoa or at least drew a congregation of
Hoa followers. Đinh Văn Hạnh, Đạo Tứ Ân Hiếu Nghĩa của người Việt Nam
bộ, 1867–1975 (Tp. Hồ Chí Minh: NXB Trẻ, 1999), 58–68; Trần Văn Quế,
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facilitated the organization of Thành’s anti-colonial forces until
his death in 1873.49 Because of Thành’s activities, the French
associated the phrase “Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương” and its eponymous
anti-colonial poem with Master Buddha, thereby providing the
nomenclature by which Huyên’s “sect” is known today.50
While some adepts adopted Đoàn Minh Huyên’s prophetic
message in opposition to colonial power, their movements
remained ethnically inclusive and diverse throughout the
nineteenth century. For example, Trần Văn Thành studied
embodied talismanic techniques (V. bùa gông) from the Khmer,
enlisted them in his army, and made a Khmer his highestranking subordinate.51 Later on, another Khmer known as “Chief
Buddha,” after apparently reviving from death, was said to
become a living Buddha akin to Master Buddha.52 Aside from
these Khmer adepts, Ngô Lợi (1831–1890), who also gained
notoriety as an anti-colonial “living Buddha” with the title
“Patriarch Master,” was probably ethnically Hoa (“Chinese”).53
51
52
53
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Although evidence about the degree to which Cham and Malays
may have participated in such movements is scarce, cultural
borrowings of Islamic forms of practice by traditions associated
with Master Buddha suggest that Cham and Malays interacted
with these traditions significantly, perhaps even as participants.54
However, early in the twentieth century, some adepts who
associated themselves with Master Buddha’s teachings began
to assume more nationalistic attitudes. In circa 1901–1902, a
transvestite monk-nun and self-described madman/madwoman,
who boated along the Vĩnh Tế Canal between Cambodia and
southern Vietnam, linked the grievances that anticipate the
Dragon Flower Assembly with the deposition of Emperor
Hàm Nghi (r. 1884–1885) and the conversion of delta peoples
to the ways of the “heretical west” (tà tây).55 Although he/she
advocated absconding to the Seven Mountains like Đoàn Minh
Huyên and never turned to violence, his/her rhetoric wed the
Dragon Flower prophecy to the degraded Vietnamese monarchy
and framed the destruction of the Buddhist religion as an
affront by outside invaders. In other words, his/her exhortations
could be skewed to rationalize a “just war” that would rescue
Buddhism and the Vietnamese state from annihilation. Indeed, in
1913, a youth, who claimed to be a descendent of Emperor Hàm
Nghi and a living Buddha, was caught in Saigon, the capital of
French Cochinchina, plotting an attack armed with bombs and
“Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương” amulets after having trained in the Seven
Mountains.56
Another adept who took after the mad monk-nun was Venerable
Huỳnh Phú Sổ (1919–1947?), founder of the profoundly
consequential Sect of Hòa Hảo Village.57 Ven. Huỳnh’s major
54
55
56
57
Tứ Ân Hiếu Nghĩa (Sài Gòn: Tủ sách sưu khảo sử liệu Phật giáo Bửu Sơn Kỳ
Hương, 1971), 15–18.
These cultural forms include worship spaces constructed like minarets, Hòa
Hảo “reading and lecture halls” (tòa đọc giảng), and votive vermillion cloth
(trần điều). Đỗ Thiện, Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern
Region, 196.
Sư vãi bán khoai, Sấm giảng người đời (Sài Gòn: Sen Vàng, 1949), 6, 36, 70.
Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, 69–70.
Ibid., 119.
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58
For the role of Zen traditions in Imperial Japan see Brian (Daizen) A. Victoria,
Zen at War (New York: Weatherhill, 1997).
Đức Huỳnh giáo chủ (Huỳnh Phú Sổ), Sấm giảng thi văn toàn bộ (S.l.: Giáo
hội Phật giáo Hòa Hảo, Ban Phổ thông giáo lý trung ương, 1966), 61, 99.
The idea that the Six Patriarch Huineng was “Vietnamese” is a fringe theory
based on the amorphous meaning of the Sinograph 粵, which can have
widely divergent meanings depending on temporal and spatial context. See
Thích Mãn Giác, Was Hui-Neng Vietnamese? (Los Angeles: CA: Vietnamese
Buddhist Temple, L.A., 1990). For the meanings of “Viet” (粵/越) through
history see Erica Brindley, Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and
Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BCE–50 CE (Cambridge, United
Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Although Ven. Huỳnh Phú Sổ accepted Japanese entreaties, he was not
necessarily pro-Japanese. He was primarily concerned with his sect’s role
in fostering a budding sense of anti-colonial nationalism. In fact, from early
on he prophesized Japan’s ultimate defeat. Francis R. Hill, “Millenarian
Machines in South Vietnam,” Comparative Studies in Society and History,
13, no. 3 (July 1971), 336.
Jessica M. Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United
States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013),
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philosophical contribution to the body of thought that accrued
around remembrances of Master Buddha and his teachings was to
render the endemic tradition more cosmopolitan and conversant
with intellectual circles, mainstream Buddhism, and secular
politics. Moreover, in stark contrast to Đoàn Minh Huyên, he
countenanced violence and wove a doctrine of social activism
into the prophetic teachings of his predecessors.
Most striking was Ven. Huỳnh’s reinterpretation of the
teachings associated with Master Buddha and the Dragon
Flower prophecy to ally with Imperial Japan’s wartime ideology
of “Zen at War.”58 Namely, Ven. Huỳnh incorporated the Sixth
Patriarch of the Meditation (Zen) Sect into his esoteric litanies,
thereby highlighting the purportedly peasant and “Viet” origins
of the Six Patriarch while situating his sect within the sphere
of an internationalized Zen tradition.59 Under Japanese aegis in
the 1940s,60 Huỳnh’s (and especially his epigones’) sectarian
teachings not only became consonant with Zen’s fascist iterations,
they also found tangible expression as his sect developed its own
militias, which, even after the Japanese surrender, retained their
arms for the next decade.61 Moreover, the epigones of Ven. Huỳnh
60
61
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crafted hagiographies of former adepts and “living Buddhas”
that promoted distinctly “Vietnamese” nationalistic sentiments. 62
But Đoàn Minh Huyên did not live to see any of this, as he
passed away nearly a century before. According to a stele at his
burial site, he died at noon on September 10, 1856.63 In keeping
with his “Intangible Way,” before his death he forbade his
followers to form a burial mound for his remains, although they
did demarcate the place of his inhumation by erecting a low wall
around it.64 Because Western Peace Pagoda was the place where
he was formally ordained, lived the later part of his life, and
entrusted his remains, Huyên thereafter became known as the
“Master Buddha of Western Peace,” a name that both reflected
the impact of his life for peoples at the Vietnamese frontier and
evoked his bearing as a living Buddha akin to Amitābha, the
Buddha in the west. Today, well over a million people in
Vietnam and around the world follow Buddhist teachings that
they trace back to Master Buddha. Many of them affiliate
themselves with the large sects that enjoy official sanction under
Vietnam’s communist regime, namely Hòa Hảo, Tứ Ân Hiếu
Nghĩa, and Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương, while many
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13–39; Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam,
124–136, 165.
62 Aside from legends about numerous anti-colonial freedom fighters, perhaps
the most striking example of Hòa Hảo hagiographies’ nationalistic character
is the claim that Phật Trùm, the Khmer “Chief Buddha,” essentially became
Vietnamese after his resurrection and enlightenment. See Recluse (Trần Văn
Nhựt) and Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Thất Sơn mầu nhiệm, 89.
63 That is, in the language of the stele, the ngọ hour on the 12th day of the 8th
month of the Fire-Dragon (Bính Thìn) year.
64 Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 85–86.
65 According to Vietnam’s 2019 census, followers of
Hòa Hảo account for about one percent of Vietnam's population or
96,200,000 people. The numbers of people who identify with Tứ Ân Hiếu
Nghĩa (Four Debts of Gratitude, Filial Piety, and Righteousness) and Bửu
Sơn Kỳ Hương (Marvelous Incense on the Mountain of the Jewels) were
not revealed by the census, but they appear to be less than those for Hòa
Hảo. General Statistics Office of Vietnam, Tổng điều tra dân số
01/04/2019, online document, http://tongdieutradanso.vn/ket-qua-tong-dieutra-dan-so-va-nha-o-thoi-diem-0-gio-ngay-01-thang-4-nam-2019.html. The
official religions Tịnh Độ Cư Sỹ (Pure Land Laypeople), Phật Đường Nam
Tông Minh Sư Đạo (Way of the Southern Sect's Enlightened Masters of the
Buddha Hall ), and Hiếu Nghĩa Tà Lơn (Bokor Mt. Filial Piety and
Righteousness) may arguably
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others participate in unregistered smaller lineages that also claim
descent from Master Buddha. Overwhelmingly, these adepts’
practices agree with Huyên’s peaceful message, cultivating
goodness according to the “Intangible Way” as the shallowed
dharma fades into the offing of time.66
A Teaching
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Đoàn Minh Huyên did not discuss his teachings discursively
or embellish them with commentary, but rather dissipated them
in “shallowed” form. The dharma sediment that filtered through
Huyên’s decanting hermeneutic were ill-defined, provisional, and
fluid.67 Nevertheless, some characteristics of Huyên’s teachings
can be described. Three of these that found expression in lived
practice are presented below: The Intangible Way, Four Debts of
Gratitude, and Recollection of Buddha.
The Intangible Way—Đạo Vô Vi (道無為)
M
IM
Đoàn Minh Huyên expounded the Dragon Flower prophecy as
the overarching conceptual canopy that sheltered a wide spectrum
of divergent self-cultivation practices as well as their attendant
this-worldly and supernatural abilities, thus accommodating an
amorphous body of teachings that could follow along the fluid
66
67
be counted among sects associated with Master Buddha’s teachings, but I
exclude them since these connections are rather tenuous and, moreover, the
sects themselves do not attribute their origins to Master Buddha.
Phạm Bích Hợp performed sociological surveys in 2007 that demonstrated
ongoing belief in Master Buddha’s core tenets like the Dragon Flower
prophecy, aniconic worship, lay-orientation, and philanthropy well into the
twenty-first century. Phạm Bích Hợp, Người Nam bộ và tôn giáo bản địa
(Hanoi: NXB Tôn giáo, 2007), 315–361.
By contrast, Ngô Lợi (a.k.a. Đức Bổn Sử or “Venerable Patriarch Master”)
composed an astonishing twenty-four “sūtra” (kinh) in literary Sinitic that
arranged the Dragon Flower prophecy and various aspects of Buddhist,
Daoist, and Tantric thought into an elaborate synthesis. His epigones rendered
many of these “sūtra” into vernacular forms. Đinh Văn Hạnh, Đạo Tứ Ân
Hiếu Nghĩa của người Việt Nam bộ, 1867–1975, 78–85.
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ethnic, geographic, and religious contours of the delta. But his
was no doctrine of synthesis or hybridity, for the substance of
Huyên’s conceptual canopy was too diaphanous and airy. By
embracing the prophecy, Huyên articulated a rarefication of
dharma so extreme as to be virtually indistinct. During dharma’s
twilight, all that remained of Buddhism, Huyên taught, was đạo
vô vi—the Intangible Way.
In this sense, Đoàn Minh Huyên’s teachings agreed with
preexisting, widely held Buddhist eschatological thought.
According to sūtra and Buddhist tradition about dharma’s
cyclical degeneration and renewal, a Buddha’s dispensation
declines over three conceptual periods—true dharma, semblance
dharma, and ending dharma—after which the next Buddha
achieves enlightenment and begins a new dispensation.68 As
time passes and successive generations become further removed
from the Buddha, dharma fades until it ultimately vanishes.
Humankind’s memory is tenuous, and, eventually, come the
time of the “ending dharma” (V. mạt pháp, 末法), even the
name of “Buddha” is forgotten. At that time, whatever specious
recollection of Buddha, his teachings, and his body of devotees
still lingers is obscure and confused. Concomitantly, distinctions
between Buddha and demon, piety and sacrilege, enlightenment
and insanity, devotee and heretic all disappear. The world spins
vertiginously, drifting unmoored. This, Huyên described, saying,
“Revolutions of time spin the mundane world of dust… Turning
people, turning things, turning years, turning days…” (11, 161).
Thus, in the twilight of Buddha’s enlightenment, a confused
world turns with uncertain trajectory through a transformation
that denies absolutes, intractably unknowable and without
bearing.
Đoàn Minh Huyên’s articulation of the decline of dharma was
precedented in Vietnamese Buddhism in 1740 with a ceremony
performed before a “Dragon Flower platform” erected at Huế
by Thích Liễu Quán (1667–1742), whom a eulogy inscribed
68
Jan Nattier, Once upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of
Decline, 90–118.
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six years after his death described as “a precious rarity” during
the “dharma’s withering.”69 However, whereas Liễu Quán’s
ceremony was intended to revive Buddhism in Vietnam by
bestowing Buddhist precepts, which were grafted to Vietnam
from the Chinese north, en masse, Huyên’s evocation of the
Dragon Flower prophecy dissolved them. Since Huyên believed
that only the faintest echo remained of authentic dharma and its
precepts, he was incredulous of their genuine forms. For him, the
notion of “true” precepts was an intangible memory. Although
Huyên acknowledged that following precepts was desirable,
he felt that their practice was too tenuous to credit or prescribe.
Therefore, he deemed himself a layman and taught his followers
lay-oriented Buddhist devotion, as Huyên conveyed, “My lot is
that of a devout layman, a teacher who teaches people to do good
and cultivate” (96). Moreover, Huyên was too suspicious of
expressing genuine dharma even to consider himself “Buddhist.”
Instead, he and his followers called their teachings “the good
way” (đạo lành) and referred to themselves simply as “people
of the Way” (người đạo), a name that has sometimes led to their
mischaracterization as Daoist.70
In his adaptation of Buddhist practices to lay contexts, Đoàn
Minh Huyên bore similarities with members of Chinese lay
Buddhist associations.71 At the same time, he reflected parallel
developments among some Buddhist traditions elsewhere in
mainland Southeast Asia. For instance, Huyên’s telling of the
Dragon Flower prophecy was probably colored by its Khmer
69
70
71
The 1748 stele said of Thích Liễu Quán, “Today, with our generation’s
teachings and withered dharma, none are able to perform the great task [of
expounding authentic dharma], so [to have had] a monk like Liễu Quán is
truly a precious rarity” (當今之世教衰法末能為大事者故有如了觀和尚者
實希矣). Trần Trung Hậu and Thích Hải Ấn, Chư tôn Thiền Đức Cư sĩ hữu
công Phật Giáo Thuận Hóa (TpHCM: NXB Tổng Hợp TP. HCM, 2011), vol.
1, 121.
E.g., Đỗ Thiện’s fifth chapter “Daoists from the Mountain” in his otherwise
excellent Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern Region,
165–206.
Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, 31–32.
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iterations.72 In addition, Huyên’s self-characterization as a lay
devotee resembles the appearance of Burmese thaumaturges
and Thai spirit-mediums, whose affiliation with Buddhism is
ambiguous, but appeared especially at times when dharma was
thought to be in decline.73 As a lived tradition, Đoàn Minh Huyên’s
Intangible Way found expression through aniconic devotional
practice. Since he believed that genuine forms of worship could
no longer be determined, he taught his followers to do without
traditional Buddhist paraphernalia, images and spaces—an
aniconism that may have been inspired by Islamic practices
associated with Cham and Malay communities.74 Instead of
worship at a temple with monks before an alter populated with
votive statues and images, Huyên and his followers moved
devotional practice into ordinary spaces, including the home.
For observances, they simply offered water and incense before a
vermillion cloth.
Another way Đoàn Minh Huyên practiced the Intangible Way
was by vernacularizing Buddhist teachings. Although Huyên
did support sutra recitation (142), he felt that the traditional
Sinographic sutra, too, were suspect. Therefore, following the
course of the dharma’s receding, Huyên translated his teachings
into intangible oracular forms, effectively erasing the last “dregs
of dharma” found in material texts. In addition, Huyên gave the
symbolic transmission of his teachings new vernacular meaning
by recreating the already immaterial bestowal of the “mind-seal”
(tâm ấn, 心印) from teacher to disciple into the “bowels of the
sect” (lòng phái), which consisted of cabalistic prayers intended
72
73
74
Đỗ Thiện, Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern Region,
191; Philip Taylor, The Khmer Lands of Vietnam: Environment, Cosmology,
and Sovereignty (Singapore: NUS Press and NIAS Press, Asian Studies
Association of Australia, 2014), 1, 27–30.
Pattana Kitiarsa, Mediums, Monks, and Amulets: Thai Popular Buddhism
Today (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2012), 16–18; Thomas Nathan
Patton, The Buddha’s Wizards: Magic, Protection, and Healing in Burmese
Buddhism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 12–37.
Đỗ Thiện, Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern Region, 196.
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IS
to inscribe not just the mind of devotees, but also their physical,
geomantic, and spirit-filled landscape.75
Finally, Đoàn Minh Huyên embodied the Intangible Way
through eccentricity. Because of the intractable indeterminacy of
true dharma, for Huyên the line between saintliness and insanity
blurred. Instead of claiming authenticity as a teacher, Huyên
embraced a maddening deferral of meaning that denied ultimate
truth. His comportment was thus that of unmoored craziness
“mobile, fluid, resilient—like reflections and shadows off the
river waves.”76 Therefore, in defiance of traditional expectations,
Huyên and several of his followers took to wandering, life at the
margins, extreme frugality, and unconventional behavior.
Four Debts of Gratitude—Tứ Ân (四恩)
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Although Đoàn Minh Huyên purportedly demonstrated his
familiarity with sūtra literature to his detractors, he appears to
have culled his teachings without recourse to material texts.77
Indeed, the only source he referenced in Esoteric Tradition is
an unidentified “good woman” (15). His ideas’ indebtedness
to scriptural study may be unclear, but aspects of his teaching
certainly have canonical precedents. Specifically, concepts from
the Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Abode of Innate HeartMind, namely the Four Debts of Gratitude (V. tứ ân, 四恩) and
Four Wisdoms (V. tứ trí, 四智), appear in Huyên’s Esoteric
Tradition.78 Whereas the Four Contemplations presumably
applied to meditation practice (182), the Four Debts of Gratitude
spoke to moral cultivation (88). In lived practice, the former
emerged as the guiding tenets of Huyên’s moral philosophy.79
75
76
77
78
79
Ibid., 197.
Ibid., 204.
Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, 11, 23;
Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 49.
Sūtra on the Contemplation of the Abode of Innate Heart-Mind (V. Bổn
sanh tâm địa quán kinh, 本生心地觀經) was purportedly translated into
Sinographs in eight fascicles in Tang China in 740. (T.159.3.291–331).
Much of the emphasis placed on the Four Debts of Gratitude in practice
today among traditions that ramified from Đoàn Minh Huyên’s teachings
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They were debts of gratitude to (1) father and mother, (2) the
lands and waters, (3) Threefold Jewels, and (4) humankind.80
Đoàn Minh Huyên’s Intangible Way prescribed an elemental
life at the remote periphery, the starkness of which one of his
disciples described as “treading here and there in grass sandals
beneath the vast skies, donning tattered lotus robes amidst
extensive mountains and rivers.”81 Despite Huyên’s minimalist
way of life, once agrarian communities began to form around
his teachings, he needed to provide them unifying guidance. He
accomplished this with the Four Debts of Gratitude.
Aside from identifying the family as the core social unit in
the “fields,” the first debt of gratitude to one’s father and mother
(ơn cha mẹ) addressed the question of continuity through the
dispersion of Đoàn Minh Huyên’s teachings without the benefit
of institutional structures. Specifically, it established lineage as
a model of transmission by making a child’s filial duty to his
parents the foremost moral imperative. This inviolable childparent bond and concomitant sense of ancestry mirrored the
teacher-disciple lineages that ramified from Master Buddha.
Meanwhile, the second debt to the lands and waters (ơn đất
nước) spoke to elemental life in the Seven Mountains. In the
frontier, Huyên’s followers took to transforming the sacred
wilds, and so they beheld their natural surroundings and nature
M
probably owes itself to Ngô Lợi’s (a.k.a. Patriarch Buddha) systemization of
teachings under the umbrella of the Dragon Flower prophecy according to
the formula “study Buddha and cultivate humaneness” (học Phật tu nhân, 學
佛修仁), which has generally been interpreted as a synthesis of Buddhist and
Confucian moral principles. See Đinh Văn Hạnh, Đạo Tứ Ân Hiếu Nghĩa của
người Việt Nam bộ, 1867–1975, 85–98.
This discussion of the Four Debts of Gratitude is indebted to Đinh Văn
Hạnh, Đạo Tứ Ân Hiếu Nghĩa của người Việt Nam bộ, 1867–1975, 85–89;
Đỗ Thiện, Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern Region,
193–195; Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam,
25; Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Nhận thức Phật giáo Hòa Hảo, 96–102; Recluse (Trần
Văn Nhựt) and Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Thất Sơn mầu nhiệm 77–82; Trần Văn Quế,
Tứ Ân Hiếu Nghĩa, 31–33; Vương Kim (Phạm Bá Cẩm), Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương
(Sài Gòn: BXB Long Hoa, 1966), 127–131; Vương Kim (Phạm Bá Cẩm) and
Đào Hưng, Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 83–92.
Giày cỏ đến lui trời đất rộng; áo sen xài xạc núi sông dài. Nguyễn Văn Hầu,
Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 45.
80
81
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spirits with awe. Even today, some traditions in the Seven
Mountains continue to venerate their natural landscape and its
spirits by depicting nature images on the trần đièu, the votive
vermillion cloth. Embodied practices, too, reflected belief in the
spirits of the land.82 Thus, gratitude towards the lands and waters
intimately bonded Huyên’s followers with the liminal frontier at
the “horizons of imagination.”83
At the same time, indebtedness to the lands and waters
implied gratitude to their dynastic as well as agrarian
custodians.84 Indeed, in Esoteric Tradition, Đoàn Minh Huyên
mentions trustworthiness between subject and ruler (68, 75, 90).
Generations later, some of Huyên’s epigones took the second
debt of gratitude to patriotic extremes, sometimes prefixed with
modern neologisms like “fatherland.” However, Huyên and most
of his followers adopted an attitude of avoidance by cloistering
in peripheral spaces rather than take political action.85 Huyên was
uninterested in statecraft; instead, he conveyed the eschatology
of kingship. Like everything else about his teachings, Huyên
understood the royal undertones of his teachings according to the
Intangible Way. Specifically, during the dharma’s receding, the
symbiotic relationship between (often kingly) lay patrons and
Buddhist monastics that marked so much of Buddhist history
dissolved, effectively collapsing secular and religious spheres.86
Hence, in place of a dynastic emperor, in Esoteric Tradition,
Jason Hoai Tran, “Thần quyền: An Introduction to Spirit Forms of Thất Sơn
Vietnamese Martial Arts,” Journal of Asian Martial Arts 13, no. 2 (2004):
70–71.
“Horizons of imagination” is my adaptation of Đỗ Thiện’s “imagined
horizon” in Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern Region,
177–178.
Ibid., 189–206.
Ibid., 189.
This collapsing of the ultimate secular and religious authorities through the
Maitreya prophecy has a long history in Vietnamese Buddhism that can be
traced at least to the fourteenth century, when stories were recorded about the
Buddhist thaumaturge Từ Đạo Hạnh’s (徐道行, 1072–1116) reincarnations
as a Vietnamese king on earth and then as the bodhisattva who will become
Maitreya in the Tuṣita Heaven. Nguyễn Tự Cường, Zen in Medieval Vietnam:
A Study and Translation of the Thiền Uyển Tập Anh (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1997), 180–181.
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82
83
84
85
86
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Huyên’s ruler is the so-called Lord of Enlightenment; that is
Maitreya Buddha (200).87
As Đoàn Minh Huyên’s presentation of the debt of gratitude
to the lands and waters suggests, more than anything else
Huyên’s Four Debts of Gratitude carried soteriological meaning.
This is even more evident in the last two debts of gratitude to
the Threefold Jewels and humanity. With the former, Huyên
beckoned his followers to take refuge in “Buddhism” as
embodied in the threefold bodies of the religion: Buddha (V.
Phật, 佛), his teachings (V. pháp, 佛; S. dharma), and their
human vessels (V. tang, 僧; S. saṅgha). Nevertheless, his were
attenuated Threefold Jewels, since, as discussed above, each
was radically “shallowed” following the Intangible Way. As for
the last debt of gratitude to humanity, Đoàn Minh Huyên taught
universal compassion and altruism to his followers. Practicing
these virtues entailed morality, reparation of character, and
renunciation of wickedness, a message that likely resonated with
Huyên’s followers, many of whom were marginalize peoples,
including criminals, vagabonds, outcasts, and defrocked monks.88
Taken as a whole, perhaps the most important aspect of Đoàn
Minh Huyên’s Four Debts of Gratitude was the idea of recollection
and return imbedded in the language of indebtedness. Gratitude
exists only as a product from a previous time, and so Huyên’s
emphasis on gratitude beckoned his followers to return to the past.
This soteriological journey of return through memory constituted
the essence of Huyên’s teachings, to which we now turn.
87
88
Ho-Tai Hue-Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, 29. Some
later traditions seem to have associated the “Lord of Enlightenment” with a
reincarnation of Emperor Minh Mạng (1791–1841). See note on the Bửu Sơn
Kỳ Hương poem above.
Ibid., 6–7, 23. That the intimate relationship between errant and fringe
persons and religious specialists associated with Đoàn Minh Huyên’s
teachings perpetuated up through the twentieth is evidenced by contemporary
anecdotal accounts. E.g., see the individual referred to as “Tiger” in Nguyễn
Văn Quảng and Marjorie Pivar, Fourth Uncle in the Mountain: A Memoir of
a Barefoot Doctor in Vietnam, 100–106, 309–313.
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Recollection of Buddha—Niệm Phật (念佛)
Sunlit is the scene, shadowy the homeland;
Shouldering blessings, one returns to the sights of old.
Possessing the karmic affinity, spirits and saints escort you,
Because of your good recollection morning and night, time after time.
(196–197)
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With these words in Esoteric Tradition, Đoàn Minh Huyên
spoke of what must be considered the foremost practice of
his teachings, niệm Phật or “Recollection of Buddha.” Huyên
felt that the potency of this practice was such that “with one
utterance of correct recollection one is at peace” (8). Here,
Huyên referred to the six-syllable incantation Nam Mô A Di Đà
Phật (“refuge in Amitabha Buddha”) associated with Pure Land
Buddhism. At the same time, as the above quotation reveals, for
Huyên “correct recollection” entailed a visionary journey. Thus,
in Huyên’s teachings, niệm Phật was as much about meditation
and visualization as it was about vocal recitation of the mantra.
The movement of Đoàn Minh Huyên’s visionary journey
coursed through time and space. By recalling Buddha through
recitation, practitioners summoned Buddha to the present.
Simultaneously, by conjuring a memory they themselves
journeyed back to the “fountainhead” of Buddhist time, Buddha’s
original disposition of pristine dharma likened in the excerpt
above as the “homeland” among “sights of old.” In this language
of return through recollection, Huyên’s teachings resemble
those that have been practiced among Buddhists elsewhere in
Southeast Asia to this day.89
At the same time, Đoàn Minh Huyên’s visionary transformation
through recollection evoked Māhayāna teachings about the
relativity and non-duality of Amitābha’s Pure Land “beyond-overthere” and Śākyamuni’s seemingly defiled world in the here-andnow that are found in scriptures like the lay-oriented Sūtra Spoken
89
Julia Cassaniti, Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist
Asia (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2018), 27–28, 32–33.
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by Vimalakīrti.90 Huyên alluded to these teachings to add spatial
depth to the temporal language of recollection. For instance, he
said, “’Amitābha,’ with the six words ‘Nam Mô,’ one transmigrates
to be born in the Pure Land, coming and going at ease. Once you
escape the sea of suffering, you cross over to take shelter from the
cycle of mundane dust…” (94). Here, Huyên cast the Pure Land
“over there” beyond the ordinary world. However, as we saw in
the quote above, his journey beyond circled back to the familiar.
Hence, the visionary path through cultivation led back to a “Pure
Land” inherent in the immediate world of the present.
In essence, Đoàn Minh Huyên’s pilgrimage through the delta
waterscape and across the Bassac River, known to his devotees
as “Jeweled River” (Bảo Giang), to the mountainous western
periphery paralleled the bodhisattva’s ferrying of sentient beings
to the western Pure Land on the “other shore.”91 This journey
through memory returned his followers to a pristine past, back
to Buddha, while, simultaneously, his cultivation of niệm Phật
recalled Buddha to the present, thereby conjuring a Pure Land in
the here-and-now of the Seven Mountains. Ultimately, Huyên’s
flight to a remote past was a transformation of the local present.
Through recollection of Buddha, he and his followers transformed
the world, cycling around to a renewed Fountainhead of dharma
at Maitreya’s Dragon Flower Assembly.
To understand the transformative power of Đoàn Minh Huyên’s
niệm Phật practice, it is helpful to see it through the imagery of
pilgrimage. Even today, when one careens about remote Buddhist
landscapes in Vietnam, from an unseen distance, one senses the
whiff of incense emanating from sparse hermitages and the faint
murmurs of chanting bonzes (even if, nowadays, often replicated by
the constant drum of audio systems). These synesthetic sensations
90
91
Duy Ma Cát sở thuyết kinh 維摩詰所說經 (S. Vimalakīrti nirdeśa sūtra),
T.475.14.538c9–12.
This journey across the “Jeweled River” to the Seven Mountains was
expressed in a prophecy attributed to the sixteenth-century prognosticator
Trạng Trình (Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm 1491–1586): Bảo giang thiên tử xuất,
thiên hạ kiến thái bình 寶江天子出,天下見太平 (“At Jeweled River, the
son of heaven will appear, and all under heaven will see absolute peace”).
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texture the pilgrim’s visionary trek through a transformative
space. Meanwhile, the pilgrim’s inner meditations resonate with
the votive manifestations about them. The sacred landscape
transforms the pilgrim, but, at the same time, it is the pilgrim’s
obeisance through journeying that engenders the scene’s magic.
Similarly, Đoàn Minh Huyên sought to transform the frontier
landscape through piety. Day after day, he and his followers
made votive offerings of water and incense during matutinal
and crepuscular observances in “recollection of Buddha.” They
cleared the land and inscribed it with talismans bearing the
incantation Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương—“marvelous incense pervades
these jeweled mountains”—the same mantra with which they
inscribed themselves with “the bowels of the sect” (lòng phái).
Their inward and outward journeying was to take them back and
beyond to a pristine “fountainhead” era that they summoned to
the local present by virtue of their cultivation. Their chanting,
incense, talismans, and visionary meditation permeated the land,
inscribing it with prayers that recalled Buddha and transformed
the world. Huyên articulated his ideas of journeying, return,
and transformation in language reflective of his waterscape. For
example, he used visionary imagery of ferrying through floods
and storms that spoke to tangible exigences in the delta.92 Through
changing, fluid riverine places like his native islet, Huyên saw
himself as a helmsman who would ferry his followers on their
spiritual quest to the Seven Mountains (27, 29).
Besides imagery, by vernacularizing his message, Huyên made
use of peculiarities in the Mekong Delta dialect(s) of Vietnamese
to convey the visionary journeying of niệm Phật cultivation.
For instance, since the Vietnamese word thiền (禪), meaning
“meditation,” can be pronounced thuyền like the word for “boat”
(船) in the delta, Huyên was able to juxtapose boating and
meditation to set cultivation practices in motion.93 Thus, Huyên cast
meditation as a journey with language like “At the Ship’s Gate (at
92
93
Đỗ Thiện, Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern Region,
192.
Thiền (禪) also refers to the Meditation Sect, a major Buddhist tradition
in Vietnam that is related by lineage to Chinese Chán, Japanese Zen, and
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the gate of meditation), inspired, I concentrate on Amitābha in my
bowels, relying on the Boat of Prajñā for peace (relying on prajñā
meditation for peace)” (2–3) and “Whose boat (meditation) runs
to Peach River? On the boat of Old Prajñā (through meditation of
old Prajñā), Buddha enters to ferry the people” (47).
Similarly, Đoàn Minh Huyên took advantage of the
multivalence of the word trở 爼 to creative effect in his
vernacularized teachings. In Vietnamese trở can mean “turn,”
“return,” “shift,” and “transform.” Thus, in Esoteric Tradition,
Huyên utilized a concatenation of trở over several enjambed
lines to convey his multifaceted message about reorientation,
return, and transformation discussed above:
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Turning (returning to/transforming) people, turning things,
turning years, turning days,
Turning food and turning dress immediately,
Turning husbands, turning wives, turning lords and kings,
Turning hills, turning mountains, turning gardens,
Turning buffalos, turning fields, turning roads that come and go,
Turning time, turning seasons, and then,
Turning trees, turning fruits, turning flowers’ timing,
Turning intimates, turning friends and confidantes… (161–165)
A Translation
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Scholars of Sino-Vietnamese have sometimes described
translation as shining a lamp or lighting a candle, an imperfect
act that surrenders obscurities to darkness because of interpretive
chooses made during translation.94 But I am fond of shadow.
Like Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965), I find that it is the “magic
of shadows” that engender mystery.95 This is especially true for
94
95
Korean Sŏn. In 1850 at Sam Mountain, Đoàn Minh Huyên was nominally
ordained as a 38th generation bonze of the Lâm Tế (臨濟) lineage.
E.g., Claudine Ang, Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural
Projects on the Mekong Plains (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia
Center, Harvard University Press, 2019), xii.
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and
Edward G. Seidensticker (Stony Creek, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), 20.
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prophetic writers like Đoàn Minh Huyên, for whom “language,
as an outdated convention, must be exploded by silence to
communicate the idea of renewal” and so “necessarily cryptic.”96
Therefore, in this translation, I have made no effort to cast light
through murk and instead let mystery dwell in the intractable
dimness of language. Where obscurity dwelled in Huyên’s
prolific use of non sequitur, aposiopesis, rambling enjambement,
and lexical arcana, I veered towards literal word-by-word
translation and retained word order with the hope of rendering in
translation the distressed, disquieted, and disorienting sensations
I encountered when reading the original. As for my commentarial
thoughts about the text, I have banished them to the umbrage
below the footer. After all, perhaps, Huyên liked shadow, too.
At least, from what I can glean of him, he hoped that his words
would lead us to an umbral place (196).
Aside from Đoàn Minh Huyên’s mystical language, the
difficulty of the script used in the text no doubt contributed to my
confusion. Esoteric Tradition is written in chữ nôm or demotic
Vietnamese Sinographs, the writing system that was used to
represent Vietnamese vernaculars before they were gradually
supplanted in the nineteenth century by quốc ngữ, the Vietnamese
Latin-based alphabet that is used today. Whereas quốc ngữ was
based on northern dialects of Vietnamese, the choice of phonetic
components used in the text’s chữ nôm reflect pronunciations of
Vietnamese southern dialects. For example, speakers of southern
Vietnamese dialects often conflate ending consonants, and so, in
Esoteric Tradition, the word for “let be,” which in conventional
quốc ngữ is written“mặc,” is rendered mặt (𩈘). Similarly, the
now standard sang (“go over”) is san (訕), màng (“hope to”) is
màn (槾), and bang (realm) is ban (般). Initial consonants also
reflect southern dialects such as the rendering of the northern
“v” in vật vờ (“reeling”) to the southern y-sounding “d” of dật
dờ (逸𣉹). To appreciate Huyên’s use of southern Vietnamese in
Esoteric Tradition, I have consistently used non-standard quốc
96
Đỗ Thiện, Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern Region,
191.
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ngữ to approximate southern Vietnamese pronunciation (e.g.,
nhân ➝ nhơn, bảo ➝ bửu, tính ➝ tánh, hoàn ➝ hườn, etc.)
and, where such distortions might be unintelligible to a reader
of standard Vietnamese, I indicated conventional spellings
parenthetically [mặt(c), màn(g), etc.].
Another feature of Esoteric Tradition that is difficult to render
in translation is the poetry of Đoàn Minh Huyên’s verse. Huyên’s
Esoteric Tradition consists of 201 lines of 6-8 verse, in which
each of the 201 lines have an “upper” six-word segment followed
by a “lower” eight-word segment. Although the extant text
(see below) was written as a continuous string of Sinographs,
traditionally, the first segments of each line would be written at
the top of a page, while the second segments would be written at
the bottom, creating a visual effect with all six-word segments
at the upper portion of the page and the eight-word segments at
the lower portion. In 6-8 verse, the sixth word of both segments
rhymes with level (bằng, 平) tones, while the final level-toned
word of the lower segment determines the rhyme of the next line.
This arrangement can be visually represented as follows:
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☐☐☐☐☐W,☐☐☐☐□W☐X。
☐☐☐☐☐X,☐☐☐☐☐X☐Y。
☐☐☐☐□Y,☐☐☐☐☐Y☐Z。
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Thus, 6-8 verse allows for a continuous series of indeterminant
lines linked by the final rhyme of one line with that of the sixth
words of the segments in the following line. This rhyming
structure facilitates memorization and oral transmission of the
poem, often in fragments, as was probably the case with Esoteric
Tradition. To help bring out the lyrical form of Huyên’s writing
and for ease of reference, in my translation and transliteration,
each 6-8 line is numbered from 1 to 201.
This English translation and Vietnamese transliteration are
based on a handwritten copy of Esoteric Tradition that was
commissioned in 1973 by Nguyễn Văn Hầu (1922-1995), to whom
this study is immensely indebted. Hầu, a cultural historian of the
Mekong Delta and himself a follower of the Hòa Hảo tradition,
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was presented an earlier 1909 copy of the text in 1973 during the
course of his research. Upon further inquiry, Hầu learned from
villagers of Tòng Sơn, Đoàn Minh Huyên’s birthplace, that, when
expelled from the village in 1849, Huyên left the text of Esoteric
Tradition behind the community house, where he had been staying.
After Huyên traveled to Trà Bư, his relatives tracked him there and
beseeched him to return home. Huyên denied their wishes, but he
did tell them about the text that he left at Tòng Sơn. Indeed, when
his relatives got back to Tòng Sơn, they found Esoteric Tradition,
which they circulated among the villagers both orally and by
copying by hand. When not in use for study or reproduction, the
original was placed on a votive altar in the village.97
Sixty years later, a copy of Esoteric Tradition was made by a
certain “Disciple Trương.” This would become the only surviving
version of Đoàn Minh Huyên’s text. Due to the vicissitudes of
twentieth century Vietnam, in the decades that followed, Đoàn
Minh Huyên’s text was thought to be lost. Eventually, in 1963,
Tòng Sơn Village authorities rediscovered Disciple Trương’s
1909 handwritten copy, which they entrusted to Nguyễn Văn Hầu
in 1973. In that year, Hầu published his study and Vietnamese
transliteration (phiên âm) of Esoteric Tradition. He intended to
append a photocopy of the 1909 text to his study, but since its
layout and condition were unsuitable for publication, he enlisted a
scribe named Thái Văn Ý to recopy the text. In Hầu’s testimony,
Ý faithfully reproduced the text “as is” regardless of omissions,
edits, additions, redundancies, and errors.98 Ý’s handwritten copy
appended to Hầu’s 1973 study is the version of the text used for
this translation. Since the text is untitled, I have adopted Hầu’s
name for it, Esoteric Tradition of Master Buddha of Western Peace
(Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An).
Although the villagers of Tòng Sơn found it meaningful to
convey Esoteric Tradition’s origin as a single text handwritten
by Đoàn Minh Huyên, the vagaries of its lost-again-foundagain transmission through manuscript copying, fragmented
97
98
Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Sấm truyền Đức Phật Thầy Tây An, 55.
Ibid., 56–61, 91.
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oral recitation, and moot memorization should pique suspicion
of its authenticity. Indeed, the appearance partway through the
text of “sitting ruefully” (80), which was a stock phrase for
beginning such prophecies, suggests interpolation in a layered
text. Furthermore, in his study of about a dozen Sino-Vietnamese
texts attributed to Huyên or his immediate followers, Hầu
determined that at least half were apocryphal, while several
others remained questionable.99 Nevertheless, after studying the
language and content of Esoteric Tradition, Hầu concluded that,
if not brushed by Huyên himself, then it probably was by one of
his contemporary ghostwriters.100
Here, I have followed Nguyễn Văn Hầu’s assessment.101
However, lingering doubts about Esoteric Tradition’s
authenticity lead us to one final consideration, genre. Esoteric
Tradition is regarded as sấm (讖) or esoteric “weft” texts beyond
kinh (經), conventional “warp” texts or “classics.” Since at least
the tenth century in Vietnam, Buddhists circulated sấm through
texts, inscriptions, and oral songs. In the nineteenth century, the
replication (transmission) of sấm, especially vernacular sấm,
through manuscript and oracular culture was an intensely creative
process across a wide swathe of participants. The transmission
of sấm over time, therefore, was a collective process that accrued
changing sentiments among people who found meaning in them.
Esoteric Tradition, then, even if apocryphal in part or in
entirety, still conveys the prayers, sentiments, hopes, and fears of
Mekong Delta inhabitants for whom Master Buddha’s message
resonated. Just as Śākyamuni Buddha’s journey through
countless past lives to Buddhahood suggests our own path to
enlightenment, so too is Maitreya’s story our own. In this sense,
the Dragon Flower prophecy and the words of Master Buddha
continue to perpetuate through generations “like the rhythms of
a wooden fish.”
99 Ibid., 19–26, 50–52.
100 Ibid., 27.
101 I am, however, more skeptical of the other two chữ nôm texts that Nguyễn
Văn Hầu deemed authentic, Giác mê (Awakening from Delusion) and Thập
thủ liên hườn thi (Ten Continuously Linking Poems).
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ESOTERIC TRADITION OF VENERABLE
MASTER BUDDHA OF WESTERN PEACE1
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On the twenty-seventh day of the intercalary second month in
the year Kỷ Dậu,2 disciple Trương assisted in writing down a one
fascicle litany.3
4
5
6
7
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2
3
The original text, which was composed by Đoàn Minh Huyên 段明暄 (1807–
1856) in circa 1842, is untitled.
April 17, 1909.
The original text is untitled. Disciple Trương referred to it only as nhất quyển
doãn 一卷尹. The last Sinograph doãn appears nonsensical. Here, I follow
Nguyễn Văn Hầu’s (1973) transcription giảng, which means “lecture” or
“litany.”
Assuming that “Nhâm” refers to the “earthly branch” (can) of a given year,
then most likely the year in question is Nhâm Dần or 1842, since Ven. Đoàn
Minh Huyên was confined to Tây An Pagoda by 1851 before the next “Nhâm”
year (1852). If so, then the text suggests that Master Buddha returned to or
at least traveled through his native region, perhaps many times, several years
before he revealed himself to his native villagers and family in 1849.
Hổ Cứ is now Mỹ Xương Village in Cao Lãnh District of Đồng Tháp
Province. Hổ Cứ was a rival village across the Mekong River from Ven.
Đoàn Minh Huyên’s native village of Tòng Sơn, which is now Mỹ An Hưng
Village in Lấp Vò District of Đồng Tháp Province. The words bước sang,
“peregrinate across to” or “come over to” in the couplet may suggest that
Master Buddha crossed over to the left bank of the Mekong River to Hổ Cứ
from his native village during the early autumn of 1842.
The month of the boar is the tenth lunar month, approximately September.
Phật Thích Ca or “Śākyamuni Buddha” is the patriarch Buddha (bổn sư)
of our present dispensation of the Dharma. Đạo 道, which means “way,” is
often used to describe various religious and philosophical traditions.
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1
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1 Upon Nhâm,4 across to Hổ Cứ5 I peregrinate;
In the month of the boar,6 I teach enlightenment to seek
the way out.
2 Miraculous—I delight in the Đạo of Śākyamuni;7
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At the Ship’s Gate,8 inspired, I concentrate on Amitābha9
in my bowels.10
3 Relying on the Boat of Prajñā11 for peace,
Entering the mountains of Five Entanglements,12 I
faithfully and sincerely cultivate with reverence.
4 Filial piety and trustworthiness, completely upholding these
words,
At the transcendents’ shore and the cranes’ spring,13 I
hold a hook and wait.14
The words thuỳen môn, here translated “Ship’s Gate,” also means “Gate
of Meditation.” Since a Vietnamese word for “boat” 船 and transliteration
of the Sanskrit dhyāna 禪 (meditation) are both pronounced thuyền in the
Vietnamese Mekong Delta dialect, the Sinographs 禪門 simultaneously
convey two meanings central to the Master Buddha’s teachings, the vivid
imagery and metaphor of ferrying through a water-bound world and the
teachings of the Dhyāna (Meditation) Sect of Buddhism.
Phật Di Đà or Amitābha is a coterminous Buddha presiding over a Buddha
Field to the west of Śākyamuni’s. Amitābha’s Buddha Field is also known as
Tịnh thổ (S. Sukhāvatī) or “Pure Land.”
In Vietnamese, bowels (V. lòng) are the site of visceral emotions, deep
feelings, and penetrating cognition.
Prajñā (V. bát nhã) is wisdom abiding in emptiness (V. không, S. śūnyatā); it
is one of the six pāramitā (V. lục độ) or Buddhist ideals to be perfected on the
path to cross over to liberation from suffering. As with “Ship’s Gate” above
(note 6), “relying on the Boat of Prajñā” also means “relying on the wisdom
(prajñā) from meditation (dhyāna).”
Ngũ uẩn or Five Entanglements (S. pañca-skandha) are constituents of the
illusion of self: form (V. sắc, S. rūpa), sensation (thụ, vedanā), perception
(tưởng, saṃjñā), impulse (hành, saṃskāra), and consciousness (thức,
vijñāna). The Sanskrit version of the term seems to have meant something
like aggregate heap or pile, but the Sinographic term used here, uẩn 蘊
implies something closer to intertwined bramble-wood or hempen knots. The
image is that of a heterogenous knot of prickly twigs or bristly threads.
Transcendents or tiên 仙 are beings (usually former humans) who have
achieved extreme longevity and attendant supramundane powers through
various cultivation practices. Transcendents were thought to manifest as
cranes as reflected in the depiction of transcendents’ mystical transition from
mortal life to immortality as “feathered transformation” (V. vũ hóa, 羽化) or
sprouting wings to fly off as a white crane. Transcendents were sometimes
thought to live on the periphery of the mundane world, as seems to be the case
in these lines. They were also believed to inhabit heaven. In fact, elsewhere in
the litany, transcendents seem to be conflated with the sūtra literature’s deva,
the heavenly beings of Buddhist cosmology.
This couplet puns on the word câu, which, in the upper line, means “words,”
while in the lower line means “hook” or “fishing hook.”
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5 I espy the masses’ boat drifting in abandon,
On the waves of the open sea, teetering on the rivers of
delusion!
6 Take heed whoever conducts themselves gracelessly,
Unconcerned about water and fire and thorns all around.
7 Because of themselves, everyone readily sees everyone,15
Let themselves fall and bury themselves.
8 Transcendent Buddhas are utterly manifest and numinous;
With one utterance of correct recollection one is at
peace.16
9 Each and every one of us is amidst heaven;
Humaneness and compassion must be upheld without
deceitful speech.
10 Change in the world is sudden;
The good endure, while the wicked perish, ordained by
Heaven’s Court.
11 Revolutions of time spin the mundane world of dust;
Failing to understand, one conspires deeply towards
others.17
12 Degenerate, one misses one’s place with the heavenly
Buddhas,
As mountains split and land crumbles, drifting into the
offing.
13 One must act as if heading out this very day;
Young and old, please remember to uphold this with
vigilance.
14 Years are like lightning, months like a shuttle;
15
16
17
Nguyễn Văn Hầu renders this line “Bởi mình ai dễ mặc ai,” which means
“For their own sake, everyone readily neglects everyone (else).”
Here chánh niệm 正念 (S. samyak-smṛti) refers to niệm Phật, the practice
of focused recollection and constant mindfulness of Buddha(s), usually
Amitābha Buddha. In practice, chánh niệm is usually accompanied by
recitation of the Buddha’s name, in Vietnamese “Nam Mô A Di Đà Phật.”
Master Buddha’s use of chánh niệm suggests that he interpreted chánh niệm,
the seventh practice of the Eightfold Path, as the recitation and mindfulness
of Amitābha Buddha.
The phrase “conspire deeply towards others” may allude to the aphorism
mưu thâm họa diệc thâm 謀深禍亦深or “when one conspires deeply, the
calamity is also profound.”
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Luân hồi 輪迴 (S. saṃsāra) or “cycles of karma” refers to cycles of suffering
through karmic accretion that is associated with ongoing reincarnation.
In these lines the Sinograph vân (雲), literally “cloud,” is translated as a
variant for the homophonous vân 云, which indicates the beginning of a
statement or quote.
In Vietnamese, xa gần, translated “near and far” and “distant and close” can
be understood both spatially and temporally.
Đạo means “way” or “path” (see note above). Here, the depleted Đạo means
that the time of Śākyamuni’s dispensation is running out.
Master Buddha’s use of a qualifying word for animated objects, con (lit.
child), in con tạo or “forces of creation” may suggest the personification of
the Daoist inspired concept of tạo hóa (造化), which is usually understood as
an impersonal force of creation and transformation akin to today’s expression
“laws of nature.” However, it should be noted that in relatively rare cases con
can also be applied to inanimate objects like knives (con dao) and spinningtops (con quay).
There is an extraneous Sinograph in this line of the original text that does
not agree with six-eight verse: “Đời bạo ngược ít người hiếu trung.” Here, I
am following Nguyễn Văn Hầu by deleting the word người, which does not
significantly affect the meaning of the line.
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Rotations of time spin the world—cycles of karma are
no game!18
A good woman has transmitted these words:
First, “the skyward path, the workings of heaven are
vast.”
Second, “the saints are responsive and bright;”
Third, “the court draws together wavering families.”19
Gazing towards the distance somehow seems close;20
Near and far winds whisk dust clean away.
Black-haired children and hoary-headed men,
People of the sunlit world, heed! —how can you not see
our age?
The Đạo is depleted! The Đạo is depleted!21
Ancient places and old scenes will found an age of
reparation.
Ruefully folding my arms, ruefully folding my arms,
I see the forces of creation uncanny in their deft
construction.22
In an age violent and cruel, few are filial and faithful;23
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Mouths are calculating, and bowels indulge in deep
scheming.
The good encounter goodness, but become wicked in the
end;
Compounding karmic retribution amongst themselves,
who will rescue them?
Forthrightly consider, straightforwardly take heed,
A path leads to heaven—seek the way to go.
Why listen to speech of right and wrong?
Blame corporeal eyes that fail to see.
Open your eyes widely;
Waters stir and waves ripple thunderously by the ears.
How woeful, heed! How woeful, heed!
Pity the world of dust! —I keep teaching, but none listen.
As rising waters close in, and a gale moves the raft,
Hold the tiller and single-pointedly follow along.
The journey is precarious, the sights hazardous;
Alone it is all but impossible to punt and row through.
Why do you not examine what comes before and after?
If you disdain the helmsman, then who will help take you
along?
People of our age are like a midday market,
Scattering and meeting, meeting and scattering so many
times.
Crying unwanted cries and laughing unwitting laughter,
Feelings dissipate, oh dearests! —as our age dries up,
what will be left?
Plaintive tears, plaintive tears,
Shall we pity those who harbor compassion in their
bowels?24
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24
Here, Master Buddha like many Vietnamese Buddhists articulates Buddhist
compassion in the canonical Buddhist idiom (từ bi, 慈悲), understood as a
combination of kindness (V. từ 慈, S. maitrī) and pity (V. bi 悲, S. karuṇā),
through the vernacular thương, which can simultaneously convey meanings
of love and pity as well as hurtfulness, injury, and pain. Hence, Master
Buddha voiced his understanding of compassion as that born from resonating
with others’ suffering as well as the universal suffering that is the inexorable
condition of life. In this sense, Master Buddha’s vernacularized understanding
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33 Filter pure water! Filter pure water!
What is there to fear from the dissolution of ants and
bees?
34 Restrain your mouth, and swallow your words;
Let be the affairs of the world and whomever scoffs.
35 Wholeheartedly pray with the words “Như Lai;”25
Brushing off the words “reputation” and “profit,” letting
be whomever vies to contest their skills.26
36 Scenes of natural calamities, places of natural disasters!
With utmost effort forge iron to whet into a needle.
37 The scene is very severe! The scene is very severe!
In the making of ten thousand autumns, how hard is it to
find?
38 Withered with gloom, withered with gloom,
This muddled era churns in an age of dreams.
39 The cat’s cry resounds! The cat’s cry resounds!27
Scaring snake and dragon to flee into the mountains and
hide.28
40 Flags fluttering, drums rolling,
People rise as others fall towards two disparate paths.29
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of compassion comes close to what Nāgārjuna is attributed with identifying
as sinh duyên từ bi (生緣慈悲), “kindness and pity of the karmic threads
of life” or just “compassion for living creatures” without denying the more
refined compassion of Arhats and Buddhas marked by insight into reality
through selflessness and nondiscrimination. See Nāgārjuna’s (perhaps
apocryphal) commentary on the “three compassions” or tam bi (三悲) in the
Treatise on Traversing Beyond with Great Wisdom (V. Đại trí độ luận, 大智
度論; S. Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra), T.n1509.v25.p350b25–26.
Như Lai 如來 (S. tathāgata), “thus-come-one” or “as-is” is an epithet for
Buddha(s). By speaking of “the words” như lai, Master Buddha may have
been instructing his auditors to contemplate the literal meaning of the term as
existential “thusness.”
In spoken vernacular, tài can mean both wealth and talent. The Sinograph in
the text is 才 (talents, skills).
By alluding to the Vietnamese zodiac, the cat’s cry suggests the year Quý
Mão (1843), one year after Master Buddha delivered this litany in the year of
the tiger, Nhâm Dần (1842).
The snake and dragon allude to the years Giáp Thìn (1844) and Ất Tỵ (1845).
That is rising towards higher rebirth (such as towards heaven) and falling
towards lower rebirth (such as towards the hells).
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Thương, here translated “pity,” also means compassion, love, and hurt. See
note above.
There is a superfluous Sinograph in this line: gắng công thường lục tự nam
mô. Here, thường (constantly) is omitted from translation. The “six words
nam mô” refer to recollection of Buddha through mindful recitation (see note
above).
Long Hoa or Dragon Flower refers to the Dragon Flower Assembly (hội
Long Hoa) where the future Buddha would establish a new dispensation of
Dharma, rescue the suffering, and punish the wicked.
Cờ (flag) might alternatively refer to chess with possible translations like
“the world is as if besieged in chess” or “the world is as if checked in chess.”
In contrast to the earlier use of con tạo for the forces of creation, here, máy
tạo suggest a more impersonal mechanism of creation.
The words sông Đào (滝陶), here translated “Peach River,” can also mean
“Đào’s river,” since the words đào is both a surname and a word for “peach.”
As such, sông Đào may allude to Tao Qian’s 陶潛 (Đào Tiềm, 372?–427)
Record of Peach Blossom Spring (桃花源記). The story narrates the
journey of a fisherman who followed a secluded river to a hidden world of
transcendents descended from men of a former era. If so, then “Peach River”
evoked a transcendents’ paradise.
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41 Bowels writhing in pain, bowels writhing in pain!
Transcendent Buddhas pity30 them with a stomach
withering from sorrow.
42 Exert yourself with the six words nam mô;31
Amidst calamity, with luck a fish from a spring may come
across a lotus lake.
43 Heavenly Buddhas, bowels rent with pity,
Teach among the good to take refuge in the Dragon
Flower.32
44 Wind stirs the tips of fluttering grasses,
You shall see that the world is like a flag33 under siege.
45 Reeling sights! Reeling sights!
Branches fall away toward a different age, transforming
the world.
46 Looking into the workings of creation—it’s over;34
Teetering on the vast sea, falling away on the banks of a
pond.
47 Whose boat runs to Peach River?35
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Here, the personification of Buddhist wisdom, “Old Prajñā,” is used as an
epithet for Buddha. As noted above, “boat” (V. thuyền) can pun to mean
“meditation” (V. thiền, S. dhyāna), while prajñā can be understood as
the wisdom derived from meditation, namely that on impermanence and
emptiness (S. śūnyatā).
Ngạ quỷ or “hungry ghosts” (S. preta) describe creatures born into one of
the six paths of transmigration, where these unlucky beings suffer perpetual
hunger, surviving like maggots on unsavory sustenance (excrement, rot,
etc.). In Vietnam, they are often conflated with cô hồn or “forlorn ghosts,”
who lack descendants to provide for them with offerings.
The west is the direction where Amitābha’s Buddha Field is thought to
exist.
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On the boat of Old Prajñā, Buddha enters to ferry the
people.36
Exhorting people to cast away mundane dust,
He will lead them away from delusion’s mooring, people
heed!
The likes of beasts and hungry ghosts,37
Are hopelessly lost, exiled to desolate plights.
Towards the west,38 trek straight out in search,
For ten thousand eras seek recourse in precious pearls—
what is lacking?39
With sincerity I teach thoroughly,
Oh, young and old! Why do you not take care?
I now watch as suddenly in the world,
Endless ghosts lead themselves along—who could shelter
us?40
Here in the morning, lost by night in a life of hardships,
Like a flash of lightning whose brilliance cannot endure.41
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Seeking recourse in “precious pearls” refers to seeking refuge in the “Three
Jewels” of Buddhism: Buddha, Dharma, and Saṃgha.
If, instead of bênh, the Sinograph 兵is read binh with the meaning “army”
as did Nguyễn Văn Hầu, then the line means, “Endless ghosts lead an army
of sorrow—how can we be alright?” In that case, the text’s Sinographs for
“army of sorrow” (埃兵) is a variation of 哀兵. It should be noted that bênh
and binh are not clearly distinguished in spoken southern Vietnamese.
Likening the breadth of human life to a momentary thunderbolt is a common
image for impermanence in canonical Buddhist literature such as the
Diamond Sūtra (V. Kim cương bát nhã ba la mật kinh, 金剛般若波羅蜜經;
S. Vajracchedikā prajñāpāramitā sūtra, T.235.08.752b28–29). In addition,
in Vietnam, the image of lightning calls to mind a well-known gāthā poem by
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54 Spanning through the watches of the night, spanning
through the watches of the night,
Sighing and sighing, I worry for our generation,
55 As I mull over a world depleted;
Suffering increases, adding to suffering in an age of
affliction.
56 There! There! Ghosts and demons strike up chaos;
Snakes afflict, and tigers bite at this thorny moment.
57 Some are besieged by bandits;
Others starve, their lives now without peace.
58 Struggling through many upheavals,
I am afraid that the state of the world is like a boat running
away into the offing.
59 I am out of words! I am out of words!
Admonishing and teaching people with the karmic
affinity for goodness.42
60 In my bowels, I reprove their abundant unscrupulousness;
The sick and afflicted pray for relief in vain.
61 Perverted to deviant treachery,
They destroy the monkhood, break observances, and
scheme to harm people in their bowels.
62 Today’s world has already shallowed,
To open, transform, and establish the Fountainhead era.43
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an eleventh-century monk named Vạn Hạnh, who began his poem, “Life is
like a flash of lightning, coming into existence only to return to nothingness”
(my translation). See Thiền uyển tập anh (禪苑集英), xylographic text in
Nguyễn Tự Cường, Zen in Medieval Vietnam (Honolulu, HI: University of
Hawai’i Press, 1997), 53b, Nguyễn Tự Cường’s translation on page 176.
Thiện duyên can be translated as both “karmic affinity for goodness” and
“good karma,” because of the cyclical nature of karmic causality. Those who
meet a good teacher had the good karma for such a lucky encounter and,
having learned goodness from the teacher, cull through meritorious deeds
the karmic seeds that mature later when they meet another good teacher in a
future lifetime. C.f., this excerpt from Ven. Huỳnh Phú Sở’s teachings, “With
good karma you clearly get this Madman/ just owing to a bit of good karma
from a former life” (Duyên lành rõ được Khùng Điên/ chẳng qua kiếp trước
thiện duyên hữu phần).
Thượng ngươn (上元), here translated Fountainhead, literally means
something like “first prime” or “first of the first.” For instance, in the Sinitic
lunisolar calendar, the first full moon of the first month is called thượng
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63 The wheel of heaven and earth revolves in cycles;44
At this juncture, you will see fire burn ashen eyebrows.
64 Few show that they are able to fathom,
As if holding a cup in the hand that sadly slips and
shatters.
65 The old master’s words of instruction said it all;
Eating people, will people feast until nothing is left?
66 Grievances pile up with retribution,
Greedy for wealth, they accumulate recklessly without
reflecting on themselves,45
67 Causing father and child to fight one another.
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ngươn, which is the Lantern Festival. In Sinitic numerology, astrology, and
calendrical studies, ngươn 元 is understood as a unit of cyclical time generally
calculated from smaller cycles like epoch (hội), revolution (vận), generation
(thế), and solar year (tuế). Depending on the school of calculation, one
ngươn cycle could consist of several thousand to over one-hundred thousand
years. In Master Buddha’s teachings, this numerological sense of cyclical
time is conflated with Buddhist cyclical time in which one dispensation of
the Dharma is divided into three eras from the moment a Buddha “turns
the wheel of Dharma” with his first teaching until, eventually over many
generations, his teachings are corrupted, forgotten, and lost. Thereafter, a
new Buddha would appear to initiate a new dispensation. These three periods
of dispensation are “True Dharma” (chơn pháp), “Semblance Dharma”
(giả pháp), and Later Dharma (mạt pháp). Master Buddha articulated this
canonical Buddhist periodization of cyclical time through the imagery of the
watery landscape of his Mekong Delta homeland. Since, in Vietnamese, the
word ngươn (cyclic era) is pronounced the same as a Sinitic word for “spring”
or “fountain” (源), Master Buddha imagined through pun and metaphor a
Buddhist cosmology in which the “Upper Spring” or “Fountainhead Era”
originated in the Himalayas with the teachings of Śākyamuni, descended
downstream along the Mekong River, and concluded at the “Lower Spring”
or “Receding Spring in Vietnam. Thus, Master Buddha saw Vietnam,
specifically the Seven Mountains, as a site of shallowed waterscapes that
mirrored the moral depravity and degeneration of Buddhism that he believed
he had experienced. As such, it would also be the place of a new dispensation
in a renewed era.
In Buddhism, turning of the wheel (of Dharma) is a canonical image for the
dispensation of Buddhist teachings.
Here, tích đại (積大) is translated according to the vernacular so that đại
means “recklessly” in “accumulate recklessly.” Alternatively, Master Buddha
may have had in mind tứ đại 四大 (S. mahābhūta) or “four elements,” which,
in Buddhist sūtra literature, refers to four elements (earth, fire, water, and
wind) that aggregate to constitute physical existence.
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If the father is not good and filially pious, then how could
the child be good?
Loyalty to the ruler and the relationship between father and
child come first,
But betraying one’s ruler and killing one’s father, in what
book’s passage is that found?
Heaven renders a hundred beings to waste,
Such that ferrying across is arduous with unspeakable
toil.
Mountaintops float on water, and earth builds up,46
Dragons lurk at the bottom of the sea as rivers constantly
catch the dew.47
When of marvelous incense we partake,
Longevity shall increase ten thousand years, and its
fragrance shall linger enduringly.48
To live this life is insufferable, oh!
Hundreds of thousands of miseries relentlessly pile up
upon you.
Wealth will be no more! Poverty will be no more!
Lives will be lost as possessions dissipate, everyone just
the same;
Causing wives to kill husbands,
And children to harm their mothers for lack of love.
When the common spirit among siblings split,
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The Sinographs for phù thủy (浮水) mean “afloat on water” or “drift on
water.” However, if they are taken for their pronunciation only, then they
suggest geomancers’ practice of manipulating the landscape by tapping
“dragon veins” (V. long mạch龍脈) in the ground, building mounds, and
planting talismanic flags in the earth, all of which were commonplace during
Master Buddha’s lifetime.
Lurking dragons implies geomantic dragon veins and dragon spirits, who
were associated with rain and water.
In this line, Master Buddha relates the prophecy of the Seven Mountains
or the “marvelous incense throughout the jeweled mountains” (V. bửu sơn
kỳ hương, 寶山奇香). According to the prophecy, in the Seven Mountains,
specifically Forbidden Mountain (núi Cấm) a future Buddha would inaugurate
a new dispensation as the landscape (and waterscape) physically transformed
into a land of bejeweled mountains redolent with incense.
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“Receding Spring” or “Lower Spring” (hạ ngươn) is the dystopian end time
of Śākyamuni’s dispensation of Dharma. Master Buddha likened dharma’s
fading to a receding tide or river. See note on “Upper Spring” (thượng ngươn)
above.
The “Three Eras” or “Three Springs” (tam ngươn) refer to the reoccurring
periodization of a Buddha’s dispensation into “true,” “semblance,” and
“later” Dharma. See note above.
The image of mulberry fields turning into the sea and back again is a classical
metaphor for epoch change. This allusion originated in the biography of Wang
Yuan (王遠) in chapter seven of the Biographies of Divine Transcendents (
神仙傳). In it, the transcendent Wang Yuan holds a feast in the human world
and summons his subordinate Lady Ma (麻姑), whom he had not seen for
five hundred years, to join him. After a short trip to Penglai, the mythical
land of transcendents, Lady Ma appears before Wang Yuan and says, “Since
I have waited upon you, [I] have seen the Eastern Sea three times become
mulberry fields. Coming to Penglai, the water was shallower than in the past.
When [I] came upon it, it was just about halfway [up]. How it shall once
again revert back to land!” (my translation). For the full episode, see Robert
Ford Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: Ge Hong’s Traditions
of Divine Transcendents” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002),
259-264.
Master Buddha may have been referring to one of many methods of
calculating auspicious and inauspicious times with the hands such as running
the fingers over prayer beads or the giấp độn finger-counting technique.
The textual origin of the Sinographic phrase “humans and beasts are alike” (
人物與同) is obscure.
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And ruler and subjects betray one another, then is the
Receding Spring.49
Transforming the waters of the sea, shattering mountains,
Dispelling the realm of ghost and demons, righteousness
and humaneness will inaugurate an era.
The Three Eras have already come around to be restored.50
Mulberry fields turn to blue seas, falling apart to spin in
transformation.51
Tracing my fingers again and again, I calculate with my
hands the nights and days;52
People of today seem to see that now is the time, and yet
they do not.
It is written, “humans and beasts are alike;”53
Yet whereas beasts know their nature, humans fail to
show emotion.
Sitting ruefully, I sigh and reprove alone,
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Here, Master Buddha takes advantage of the dual meaning of thuyền, which
can mean both boat and meditation with the effect of juxtaposing the quest
to ferry the world’s creatures to salvation with Śākyamuni Buddha’s way of
meditation. See note above, too.
Amitābha is the Buddha of the Pure Land in the west (see above). Quan
Âm (S. Avalokiteśvara) is an advanced bodhisattva (S. mahābodhisattva)
associated with Amitābha’s Buddha field. In Vietnam, the bodhisattva is
imagined variously as a masculine yogin with one-thousand hand-eyes as
well as various female emanations.
Đoài 兌is one of the eight trigrams, ☱. It is associated with the west, and,
in literature, “mountains of Đoài” usually evokes sunset, since the sun sets
in the west. Hence, “mountains of Đoài” (non Đoài), can be interpreted as
the western mountains, where the Seven Mountains are located in the west
of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, and evokes the literary allusion to “sunset
mountains.”
The bodhi tree or “tree of enlightenment” was a bo tree, under which
Śākyamuni realized Buddhahood.
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Pitying that things of the world will suddenly be
extinguished.
People compete amongst themselves haughtily with spirits
and flesh,
Cursing their own fathers and mothers everywhere
upriver and downriver.
Transformation through rebirth, I see it all,
A child who does not repent, at the end of life, will
become a deviant ghost.
Marvelous is the way of Śākyamuni’s boat!54
Quan Âm rescues from suffering, while Amitābha ferries
away the living.55
In the Đoài mountains56 uphold trustworthiness and sincerity
in your belly,
I, as teacher, will provide study for laymen who have yet
to comprehend.
Brothers and sisters, whoever shall heed,
Follow me and study the path—you must perk your ears
and listen.
Buddha passed on how to plant the bodhi tree;57
Uphold the words “illumined truthfulness,” never
dishonest.
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Nguyễn Văn Hầu amended the word vào, here translated as “enter,” to
thoát, meaning “escape,” because he thought that from context, one should
want to escape rather than enter the mundane world of suffering (Sahā
realm). However, if Master Buddha was speaking from the perspective of
a bodhisattva, who plunges into realms of suffering of their own volition to
rescue others, then the line need not be corrected.
In Buddhism, the Sahā realm is the mundane “dusty” world marked by
suffering.
“Skill-in-means” (V. phương tiện, S. upāya) is the Mahāyāna use of
provisional, expedient means to lead creatures along the Buddhist path
according to their relative conditions and inclinations. See, for instance, the
second chapter of the Lotus Sūtra (T.262.9.5b24).
“Devotional charity” (V. bố thí, 布施; S. dāna) is one the pāramitā, or
qualities to master on the path towards Buddhahood.
In Buddhist sūtra literature, the expression “river’s sands” usually alludes to
the innumerable sands of the Ganges River.
Nowhere in his litany did Master Buddha explicitly delineate what he meant
by “four debts of gratitude.” However, the context of the lines about this
expression in the text seems to agree with tradition, according to which they
are debts of gratitude to parents (cha mẹ), the land and waters (đất nước),
Three Jewels of Buddhism (tam bảo: Buddha, Dharma, and Saṃgha), and
humanity (nhân loại). This teaching about the “four debts of gratitude” has
as its antecedent the Great Vehicle Sūtra of Contemplation on the Mind’s
Ground of Original Life 大乘本生心觀經 (T.159.3.297a12–13).
The “task afterwards” refers to posthumous rites associated with ancestor
veneration, for which Master Buddha proscribed daily morning observance.
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87 Wanting to enter58 the Sahā realm,59
Through skill in means60 and devotional charity,61 store
up fortune like the river’s sands.62
88 Respect heaven. Respect earth and divine luminaries,
At the ancestors’ gate, venerate their shrines and fully
uphold the Four Debts of Gratitude.63
89 We owe life to our parents, to whom we are foremost filial;
For the task afterwards, earnestly act with propriety at
dawn.64
90 Upholding loyalty to the ruler in the bowels without error,
Polish the word “fidelity” displayed like vermillion on
stone.
91 One who cultivates must teach one’s children and
grandchildren,
So that Đạo will be passed on and inherited, and the gates
of Buddha will long endure.
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92 Śākyamuni, the thus-come ancestral Buddha,
For six years suffered austerities regardless of travails.65
93 As this moment comes, divine dragons descend;
We are as if on a little boat buffeted by the wind on the
rivers and lakes.66
94 Amitābha, with the six words “Nam Mô,”67
One transmigrates to be born in the Pure Land,68 coming
and going at ease.
95 Once you escape the sea of suffering, you cross over,
To take shelter from the cycle of mundane dust and avoid
the realm of life and death.
96 My lot is that of a devout layman,
A teacher who teaches the people to do good and cultivate.
97 The Receding Spring in the world approaches,
Awaken your heart, realize it for yourself earnestly and
quickly.
98 It is not difficult to abide in cultivation;
The words “devotional charity” should come first.
99 As benevolent spirits record on both sides,69
Increase goodness and decrease evil—because of
wickedness come these transmitted words.
100 In ancient times, Buddha taught but was not believed,
People listened and abandoned him, saying that they
were wise.
101 Greedy for wealth and cultivating a web of material things,
In order to nourish their flesh, they did not heed a word.
102 Killing and injuring the living in disport,
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Śākyamuni is said to have practiced severe asceticism and austerities for six
years before achieving enlightenment.
Dragons are spirits related to bodies of water and rain-making.
See notes on recollecting the Buddha and Amitābha above.
The Pure Land is the realm of Amitābha. See note above.
Thiện thần 善神 or “benevolent spirits” are described in Buddhist literature
like the Consecration Sūtra 灌頂經 as protective deities (V. hộ pháp 護法, S.
dharmapāla, T.1331.21.497a21). Here, Master Buddha clearly has in mind
the Vietnamese iteration of two such deities, Ông Thiện (Mr. Good) and Ông
Ác (Mr. Evil), who are also called Khuyến Thiện (Encourage Good) and
Trừng Ác (Punish Evil). These two spirits are said to record each individual’s
karmic merits and demerits accrued throughout life.
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Deceitful husbands and prurient wives were rich in
shameful speech.
Seeing this, I feel sorry for myself;
To speak of it is terrible, but to stay silent only compounds
my sadness.
Flying high and running far cannot escape,
Being caught in the net and left exposed so pitifully.
Who knows that transcendent Buddhas will convene,
To save the living and ferry the dead everywhere in the
realm of dust,
To teach and encourage the masses of the dusty world’s
numerous regions,
To uphold the words “forbearance and goodness” in
bowels set on cultivation?
Abandon words and do not contend;
Bodhi70—one seed of a sincere heart can go beyond.
At the serene supreme assembly of the Dragon Flower,71
Come that time, whether morning or night, evil and good
will eventually be known.
My lot is that of a layman who dares to expound,
The precepts, ceremonies, and disciplines that I
demonstrate and explain.
At the Prime Fountainhead, Ven. Śākyamuni Buddha,
Descended to be born in the world at the time of the
Dragon Flower Assembly.
Whence people with lives spanning a hundred years return,72
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Bodhi means enlightenment or awakening in Buddhism.
The Dragon Flower Assembly is the convocation of a Buddha inaugurating
a new dispensation of Dharma. The Dragon Flower Assembly was often
conveyed with millenarian undertones. Belief in the imminence of this event
was not unique to the Seven Mountains but was endemic throughout the
Mekong Delta regions of Vietnam, and it is also a prominent feature, for
instance, of Cao Đài theology.
In Vietnamese, “to return” is a euphemism for death that is used in expressions
like “return to heaven” (quy thiên, về trời) and “return to the immortals and
serve Buddha” (quy tiên chầu Phật). In Vietnam, one hundred years was
considered human’s natural life span.
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Their hundred years of longevity decrease, falling to
depart in youth:
Reduced all the way to thirty,
People three thước73 tall live a life of starvation.
With many periods of calamity and torment,
To now be thus reduced is indeed without error.
People two thước tall do not last long;
Disease and sickness incessantly bring hardship.
Reduced in age, just stepping over to ten.
People one thước tall meet calamity—people, heed!
Truly, great changes are transpiring in the mundane world;
Ten-thousand men and women trek right into the
mountains.
What the books still record is not empty;
A girl with a husband, in five months, forms a pair.
At the end of summer, customs are strained;
At dawn and dusk, with the kingdom in chaos, people do
not seem human.
Unjust punishment and imprisonment are everywhere;
But right before the eyes a place awaits.
With death one returns through the six paths74 and four
births;75
On the path of transcendents76 and way of humans,
fortunately one is at peace,
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The former thước was approximately half a meter, although Master Buddha’s
usage appears chiefly rhetorical as opposed to descriptive.
The “six paths” are six “walks of life” through which living beings
transmigrate from one life to the next. They are the paths of the hell-born,
hungry ghosts (V. ngạ quỷ, 餓鬼; S. preta), animals, asura (V. tu la, 修羅),
humans, and deities.
The “four births” are four means of transfer from one path of transmigration to
the next. They are (re)birth through eggs, the womb, moisture (i.e., creatures
perceived to come into existence without eggs or womb like worms, etc.),
and (immaculate) transformation (deities, asura, preta, hell-born).
From the explanatory passage that follows this line, it appears that Master
Buddha associated the “path of transcendents” (V. tiên đạo, 仙道) with the
“path of deities” (V. thiên đạo, 天道).
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121 While the likes of asura77 and preta,78
Animals and the hell-born suffer many calamities and
hardships.
122 The four births are delineated clearly:
Eggs, fetus, moisture, and transformation are the realms
of Saṃsāra.
123 Uphold fasting and the precept against killing79—people,
heed!
Above is the Pure Land, the place that awaits.
124 As a human, you can understand kindness;
So with transmigration through life so tremendous, save
all species of beings.
125 The saints and spirits are illumined, right, and good!
But as for wickedly killing all creatures first and foremost,
126 The things living creatures do are full of upheavals,
For they kill and harm the living without regard for
heaven and earth.
127 Shiftily they indulge in killing for sport,
Only to later return to hell, where their misdeeds are
punished without mercy.
128 Murderousness, debauchery, vicious sins,
Spiteful words, and treacherous speech—heaven will
work to compound their punishment.
129 Brazen with duplicitous tongues and wicked mouths,
Although people do not see it, people’s sins are numerous.
130 Ever so greedy and devious,
Hell awaits the time they cycle through Saṃsāra.
131 Unfilial, they go against their fathers’ and mothers’ words,
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Asura are spirits distinct from heavenly deities and inclined towards violence
(whether good or bad).
Preta are “hungry ghosts.” See note above.
The precept against killing is one of five precepts for a Buddhist layman
like Master Buddha was in ca.1842 (monastics typically observed at least
ten). Trì trai (持齋) or “fasting” was generally used in the vinaya (monastic
disciplines) to refer to monastics’ abstinence from food after noontime.
However, Master Buddha associated the term with the precept of killing,
suggesting that he meant vegetarianism. Indeed, the vernacular reading of the
Sinograph for trai (齋) is chay, which means vegetarianism.
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Though their birth father and caring mother are sites of
deep gratitude.
Only when shadow officers80 come for them do they finally
realize,
That punishment will be administered so that their lot
will be that of wailing day and night.81
Clearly irreverent towards the Three Jewels,
They disparage the Buddha Dharma in many places
across a great expanse.
As a human, be awakened and clear yourself;
The transcendent Buddhas cherish you, and heaven’s
court has compassion, too.
Cultivate your heart, cultivate your nature, keep it up
constantly;
Cultivate through sūtra teachings transmitted from
Buddha’s hall,
Cultivate your nature, cultivate pleasant conduct,
Cultivate the six words of Amitābha—do not remiss.
Cultivate the two aspects of filial piety and righteousness;
Cultivate the relations, cultivate the disciplines, and
strive for fortitude of filial piety and loyalty;
Cultivate benevolence, cultivate virtue kept within your
bowels;
Cultivate a body of polished jade, and you will be sullied
with mud—do not bear it;
Cultivate merit by restoring shrine mounds;82
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82
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Âm quan (陰官) or “shadow officers” are beings who administer justice and
punishment in the hells.
The original text has the two Sinographs分據 (phận cứ), here translated
“[their] lot will be.” Nguyễn Văn Hầu interpreted the second character as an
error for xử 䖏 (處), thus yielding phân xử (分處), which means “judge” or
“arbitrate.”
A miễu in the Mekong Delta region is a small shrine dedicated to local spirits.
They are usually built on quiet mounds, foothills, and embankments. Votive
mounds were created as sites of worship ceremonies. Nguyễn Văn Hầu
interpreted the Sinographs (廟𡊨), here transliterated miễu đàn and translated
“shrine mounds” as a variant of miếu đường (廟堂), which can be pronounced
miếu đàng or miếu đàn for some Vietnamese speakers in the Mekong Delta.
Miếu đường, as Hầu explained, refers to the ancestral temple of the royal
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Cultivate wealth for devotional charity, but without
devious practices;
Cultivate prayer for saintly longevity and heavenly spring,
For people’s health and creature’s care, for escape from
grievance, hunger, and cold;
Cultivate prayer for the ten thousand seas and thousand
mountains,
For the pristine rivers to flourish and the myriad islets83 to
be at absolute peace.
Dawn and dusk prostrate to Buddha and recite sūtra;
Supplicate the Master to become virtuous and reborn on
the marvelous path.84
Fish that swim deep in a river cannot be seen;
Hawks in the vast, expansive sky fly stratospherically.
Enlightened, one enjoys the celestial peach;
The deluded, hell—whence shall one be reborn?
One’s hands bind oneself tight;
Seeing this with one’s own eyes, one holds one’s silence,
mute.
One bustles upon hearing about sin and fortune;
When in pain one thinks of Buddha, but once it’s gone
then no more.
Find words of empathy and move your lips;
But not of praise and scorn, say “enough!” without
designs.
Cases of errancy will be clearly stated,
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84
family. That seems unlikely, since, in 1842, the Nguyễn Dynasty’s ancestral
temple, called Temple of Generations of Ancestors (Thế Tổ Miếu, 世祖廟),
was located in Huế far removed from Master Buddha’s homeland and known
travels.
Nguyễn Văn Hầu treated the Sinographs 萬般 as a variant for the phonetically
similar 萬邦 (vạn bang), which means “ten thousand states.” However,
considering these lines’ succession of geographic terms (seas, mountains,
rivers), the Sinograph 般 is here read bơn, meaning an islet on a river.
Here, prostrating before the Buddha/Master with the resolve to become
virtuous and reborn (in the Pure Land) reflects the practice of phát nguyện 發
願 (S. praṇidhāna) or “profession of the vow” to assume the bodhisattva’s path
towards the enlightenment of a Buddha and rebirth in Amitābha’s Pure Land.
See Amitābha Sūtra Spoken by Buddha 佛説阿彌陀經 (T. 366.12.347b7).
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So that, in Yama’s court, such sins’ retribution through
Saṃsāra will be hard to fathom.
What the sūtra say and Buddhas teach are parched of words;
The enlightened see this, but the deluded do not.
Some places are joyful, others miserable and compounded
by sorrow;
The mired and the pure, two paths—with which way will
you be concerned?
With the right karma you enjoy high authority.
Without it you encounter an impoverished later life.
Gilded words inscribed for a thousand neighbors,
Do not dither—people, heed!
The rivers and mountains already flooded,85
How could you not see that you have rashly lost your
chance for Dharma?
Muddled through many drifting currents,
Your spirits take to flight, fluttering like reeling threads.
Darting past like an arrow,
To a different homeland, a different place, a region apart
from beast and fowl.
Day and night obscured in darkness,
Only once your ethereal spirits scatter, and your corporeal
ones are lost does the cycle of Saṃsāra transpire.86
Inaugurating the turning and founding of an era,
With different kinds of beasts, different humans, and new
people.
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85
86
Nguyễn Văn Hầu thought that the Sinograph for lụt (𣹕), meaning “flooded,”
was an error for cạn (𣴓), meaning “dried up” or “parched.” Hầu’s reading
thus agreed with language elsewhere in the litany such as “parched of
words,” “age dries up,” etc. Here, the Sinograph is translated “flooded” in
consideration of the imagery of nỗi dật dờ, which means “drifting currents.”
Here, Master Buddha conveys the belief that humans possess an aggregate
“soul” composed of ethereal and corporeal spirits known as hồn and vía,
respectively. After death, the ethereal spirits ascend towards the heavens,
while the corporeal spirits descend to stay on earth, often remaining with the
corpse. Humans are thought to have three ethereal spirits, but while men have
seven corporeal spirits, women possess nine.
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158 People, Buddhas, saints, transcendents, and spirits shall
endure;
What ghost or sprite could disrupt the world of dust?
159 Embracing the world like a gourd,
The heavenly Buddhas will settle absolute peace
everywhere.
160 Now as you meet a Buddha who will descend to the living,
The hundred clans are advised to do good and cultivate
themselves.
161 I see the affairs of the world drawing near:
Turning people, turning things, turning years, turning
days,
162 Turning food and turning dress immediately,
Turning husbands, turning wives, turning lords and kings,
163 Turning hills, turning mountains, turning gardens,
Turning buffalos, turning fields, turning roads that come
and go,
164 Turning time, turning seasons, and then,
Turning trees, turning fruits, turning flowers’ timing,
165 Turning intimates, turning friends and confidantes,
With speech and voice different from the past;
166 Turning bowels intent on slippery speech,
Turning sickness, turning disease—how could the
medicines of old treat them?
167 In the world at present, ghosts and demons run amok;
Dharma spirits and talismans—can they save us?
168 As a human, do not rely on your ability;
What you see in the morning, by evening where is it to
be found?
169 For a time, you breathe in and out,
But once your breath ceases, how can you fathom the
scope of where you will end up?
170 One does not know how it was before birth;
With death one returns to the shadow realm, and the spirit
enters the gates of hell.
171 Three times a day the aggrieved spirit is beaten,
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Such profound, cruel grievance—who do you suppose
would come to the rescue?
It is right before your eyes! Why are you ignorantly
unconcerned?
When the river has no bridge, whose ferry will you call
upon to carry you?
Left parched passed noon,
How could it do to go on toiling to dig a well?
When still of unmatched vitality,
Why not cultivate and practice, for once old, what will
you know?
When born in the past, one’s nature was originally good;
As one matures and accumulates wickedness, one frets
that one has harmed oneself.
By nature, at birth, humans possess a spiritual quality;
It is because of oneself that one is deluded by dust and
confusion—who else is there to blame?
That sins amass in a jumble is not in error;
I beseech you to repent and whet your spiritual nature,
So as to restrain yourself;
With wife bound and children tethered, teetering adrift
you shall not fall.
Sahā is an idyllic realm,87
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241
Here, Master Buddha evokes the relativity of purity and defilement found in a
number of prajñāpāramitā sūtra, which teach that the messy mundane world
is essentially pure and, therefore, through personal cultivation and reparation,
one’s mundane existence can become the site of perfect enlightenment to
pure Buddhahood. For example, in a passage in chapter one of Sūtra Spoken
by Vimalakīrti (V. Duy Ma Cát sở thuyết kinh, 維摩詰所說經; S. Vimalakīrti
nirdeśa sūtra), Vimalakītri, an advanced bodhisattva posing as a sick laymen,
explains to Śāriputra, Śākyamuni’s muddled student who suspects that his
teacher’s enlightenment is imperfect, because the world he inhabits is full
of misery: “Could it be that because the sun and moon are impure, the blind
cannot see them..? …All living creatures sin, so they cannot see that Thus
Come’s (Śākyamuni’s) Buddha realm is marvelous and pure. That is not the
fault of Thus Come. Śāriputra, it is not that this land of ours is impure. You
just cannot see.” (T.475.14.538c09–12).
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185
186
187
Here, mahā, a Sanskrit term meaning “great”, is transliterated in Vietnamese
as ma ha.
The Lady Buddha (V. Phật bà) is Quan Âm (S. Avalokiteśvara) in her female
manifestation. Here, Master Buddha appears to allude to her depiction
wearing white robes and holding a vase of dulcet nectar that soothes living
creatures’ suffering.
The image of slanted sunlight implies that the day is nearing its end; in other
words, time is almost up.
It is unclear what Master Buddha meant by “four wisdoms,” since the
term has different meanings across many canonical texts and traditions,
and nowhere in the litany did he explicate. He may have had in mind the
four kinds of cognition theorized by Yogācāra masters that like the “four
debts of gratitude” are found in the Great Vehicle Sūtra of Contemplation
on the Mind’s Ground of Original Life. They are the mind’s cognition of
rounded reflection, equanimity, marvelous observation, and actualization.
(T.159.3.298c10–25).
Incense and water are the votive staples of Master Buddha’s spartan tradition.
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If you delight in seeking prajñā as you approach the open
mahā88 sea.
If hungry, then find recourse in Śākyamuni’s field;
If thirsty, then rely on the Lady Buddha’s water for
nourishment.89
The teacher’s words, in times past, explicated;
Take refuge in the words “tranquility” to trace the way
through the clouds.
Sunlight is falling aslant through the trees,90
Polish the words “four wisdoms”91 and resolve to always
study prudently.
Cultivation does not distinguish rich and poor;
Dawn and dusk, observe the incense censer and bowl of
water.92
With empathy, heaven and the Buddhas will see;
Why desire for quantity? One should not crave like a pig.
Two spirits hold the registers on both sides,
Recording sins and fortune to submit on humans’
behalves.
With jade right at home, why not polish it?
What dust is there to speak of?—smile and pass it on.
Without seeing ahead, without looking back,
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People today seem as if dreaming—how could their
vision be steady?
A phoenix mirror illuminates above and below;
A ruddy horse takes off, galloping up and down both
ways.
Flashing by like a flitter of moonlight,
Sometimes full, sometimes crescent, it ever so brightens
and fades.
Flowers fall—in just a moment, spring passes;
If you do not cultivate in youth, then once old what will
you know?
With loose words, speaking irreverently,
What do you know of rules and ritual?
Birth in this life is so miserable,
That spiraling downward, in what lifetime can you live
again?
I advise you to reform your evils and do good;
Devotedly cultivate the Three Jewels and study for
penetrating clarity.
The snake that is able to cultivate can become a dragon;
As a human, why not look within yourself,
Such that your body suffers adrift,
With calamity here and disasters there, transforming to
be reborn in every way?
Sunlit is the scene, shadowy the homeland;
Shouldering blessings, one returns to the sights of old.93
Possessing the karmic affinity, spirits and saints escort you,
Because of your good recollection morning and night,
time after time.94
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94
The world of living is described as the “sunlight word,” while the realm of
the dead is depicted as the “shadow realm.” Here, Master Buddha returns to
the idea that the transition at death is to return.
Here, the Sinograph trưa 𣆐, which normally means “noontime,” may be a
mistake for the graphicly similar đêm 𣈘, which means “night.” In any case,
the expression sớm trưa means “morning and night” rather than “morning
and noontime,” since the former is the phrase’s meaning in classical usage
as in the folk-expression, ớ người dãi gió dầm mưa/ màn trời chiếu đất sớm
trưa nhọc nhằn (“Oh, you!—exposed to the wind and seeped in rain/ with
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198 My words spoken short and long have dried up,95
Prostrate to Teacher,96 go back and return to your original
home.
199 Mouth chanting the recollection of Amitābha,
Hands tracing the prayer beads, I keep vigil over my
bowels.97
200 Reverently make offerings to the Lord of Enlightenment98
for prosperity,
For people’s health and creatures’ care, for a heavenly
spring of absolute peace,
201 For kind fathers and pious children, for loyalty and fidelity,
For pristine rivers and pacific seas, for peace and stability
inside and out.
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Handwritten by Thái Văn Ý, who served as scribe, on the twentyfifth day of the eighth month in mid-autumn of the year Quý Sửu.99
95
96
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sky for your mosquito net and the earth as your mat, you are weary morning
and night.”). This interpretation “morning and night” agrees with Master
Buddha’s instructions elsewhere in the litany for morning and evening
recollection practice (i.e., recitation and mindfulness of Buddha. See note on
chánh niệm above).
Here, Master Buddha is referring to the 6–8 verse in which he composed
Esoteric Tradition.
Here, Master Buddha’s use of thầy or “Teacher” probably referred to Buddha
as an epithet rather than himself as a first-person pronoun.
Here, Master Buddha describes the practice of “recollecting Buddha” (niệm
Phật) by focusing the mind and reciting the name of Amitābha with a beaded
rosary.
“Lord of Enlightenment” was an epithet for the imminent Buddha (Maitreya).
September 21, 1973.
SẤM TRUYỀN ĐỨC PHẬT THẦY TÂY AN
Tuế thứ Kỷ Dậu niên, nhuận nhị ngoạt nhị thập thất nhựt,
Trò1 Trương trợ bút, nhứt quyển giảng.
[1a]
2
Nhiệm mầu vui đạo Thích Ca,
3
Nương thuyền bát nhã cho yên,
4
Hiếu trung trọn giữ một câu,
5
Liếc xem thuyền bá bơ vơ,
6
Bớ ai ăn ở vụng về,
7
Bởi mình ai dễ thấy4 ai,
8
Phật tiên chí hiển chí linh,
9
Ai ai cũng ở trong trời,
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10 Biến dời cuộc thế thình lình,
11 Vần xoay5 thế giái phàm trần,
1
2
3
4
5
ngoạt trư2 giáo giác kiếm đường
chạy ra.
Thuyền môn hứng chí Di Đà
lòng chuyên.
vào non ngũ uẩn tín thành sùng
tu.
bãi tiên suối hạc cầm câu đợi
chờ.
sóng khơi biển thẳm3 dật dờ
sông mê!
không lo nước lửa nhiều bề
chông gai.
để cho sa sẩy mình chôn lấy
mình.
một câu chánh niệm thời mình
thảnh thơi.
nhơn từ phải giữ đừng lời trớ
trinh.
thiện tồn ác thất thiên đình số
phân.
sự mình không biết mưu [1b]thâm
ở người.
IS
Thừa Nhâm hổ cứ bước sang,
ES
1
Nguyễn Văn Hầu: Đỗ. This and further comparisons of my rendition with
Nguyễn Văn Hầu’s transliteration come from Hầu’s Sấm truyền Đức Phật
Thầy Tây An (Tòng Sơn: Ban Quản tự Tòng Sơn cổ tự, Ban Chẩn tế Giáo hội
Phật giáo Hòa Hảo, 1973).
Hầu: tháng heo
Hầu: thầm
Hầu: mặc
Hầu: xây.
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13 Phải làm như bổn nhựt trình,
14 Niên như điễn ngoạt như thoi,
15 Có người thiện nữ truyền lời,
16 Nhị Vân thánh ứng quang minh,
17 Ngó xa xem cũng thấy gần,
18 Hắc đầu tử bạch đầu ông,
19 Đạo vơi vơi đạo vơi vơi,
20 Buồn khoanh tay buồn khoanh tay,
21 Đời bạo ngược ít7 hiếu trung,
ES
22 Thiện phùng thiện ác đáo đầu,
non băng đất lở giữa vời linh
đinh.
trẻ già xin nhớ giữ gìn mà coi.
vần xoay6 thế giái luân hồi
chẳng chơi!
Nhứt Vân thiên lộ máy trời
thinh thinh.
Tam Vân triều hội gia đình phâ
vân.
xa gần gió tạc(t) bụi trần sạch
không.
bớ người dương thế sao không coi
đời?
đàng xưa cảnh cũ lập đời sửa xây.
thấy trong con tạo khéo xây lạ
lùng.
miệng thời toan tín(h) lòng dùng
mưu sâu.
oan oan tương báo ai hầu8 cứu
cho?
thiên đàng hữu lộ phải dò nẻo đi.
trách con mắc(t) [2a]thịt vậy thì
chẳng coi.
nước xao sóng dợn ầm ầm bên tai.
cám thương trần thế dạy hoài
không nghe.
giữ cầm lèo lái một bề thuận theo.
một mình khó nỗi chống chèo
đặng đâu!
khinh khi chú lái ai hầu rước đưa?
tan rồi lại hiệp hiệp tan mấy hồi.
tình tan(g) hỡi bậu cạn đời còn
chi.
thương chăng thương kẻ từ bi giữ
lòng.
sợ chi lũ kiến chòm ong chơi bời.
mặt(c) tình thế sự chê cười mặt(c)
ai.
phủi câu danh lợi mặt(c) ai tranh
tài.
chí công luyện sắt giồi mài nên
kim.
IS
12 Hư nên nhỡ phận Phật trời,
23 Thẳng mà tín(h) thẳng mà lo,
24 Nghe chi những tiếng thị phi,
IM
25 Mở hai con mắc(t) thồi lồi,
26 Cực bớ ai cực bớ ai,
27 Nước gần lớn gió đưa bè,
28 Dặm cheo leo cảnh cheo leo,
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29 Làm sao chẳng xét trước sau?
30 Người đời như buổi chợ trưa,
31 Khóc lỡ khóc cười lỡ cười,
32 Lệ lâm li lụy lâm li,
33 Lọc nước trong lọc nước trong,
34 Ăn nhịn miệng nói nhịn lời,
35 Dốc cầu đặng chữ Như Lai,
36 Cảnh thiên thai chốn thiên thai,
6 Hầu: xây.
7 This segment has an extra Sinograph: đời bạo ngược ít người hiếu trung.
8 Hầu: hầy
Q. Huyền - Esoteric Tradition of Master Buddha of Western Peace
38 Buồn dàu dàu buồn dàu dàu,
39 Mèo kêu vang mèo kêu vang,
40 Ngọn cờ phất trống thùng tan,
41 Quặn ruột đau quặn ruột đau,
42 Gắng công lục tự nam mô,10
43 Phật trời lòng lại xót xa,
44 Gió đưa ngọn cỏ phất phơ,
45 Cảnh đã xoay cảnh đã xoay,11
46 Xem trong máy tạo hết rồi,
47 Thuyền ai chạy tới sông Đào?
ES
48 Khuyên người sớm xả bụi trần,
muôn thu xây dựng9 khó tìm đặng
đâu.
hỗn ngươn xoay lại [2b]đời nay mơ
màn(g).
rắn rồng sợ chạy vào ngàn ẩn thân.
kẻ lên người xuống hai đàng khác
nhau.
Phật tiên thương chúng dạ sầu héo
khô.
vạ may cá suối gặp hồ liên hoa.
giáo trong thiện chúng Long Hoa
mà nhờ.
sẽ coi cuộc thế như cờ bị vây.
nhành rơi12 đời khác đổi thay
cuộc đời.
ngửa nghiêng biển thẳm rã rời bờ
ao!
thuyền ông Bát nhã Phật vào độ
dân.
dắt cho khỏi chốn mê tân bớ
người.
màng chi những chốn lạc loài đọa
thân.
hưởng nhờ muôn thuở bửu châu
thiếu gì?
bớ người lớn nhỏ sao không giữ
gìn?
vô thường quỷ dẫn ai bênh13 đặng
nào.
ví14 như trời chớp sáng nào đặng
lâu.
thở than than thở lo âu cho đời.
khổ tăng gia khổ trong đời gian
nan.
xà thương hổ giảo đa đoan hội
nầy.
phần thời đói khát thân rày chẳng
yên.
IS
37 Cảnh rất nghiêm cảnh rất nghiêm,
49 Súc sanh ngạ quỷ là loài,
50 Tây phương thẳng bước chơn lần,
IM
51 Tín thành truyền dạy vân vi,
52 Nay xem cảnh thế thình lình,
53 Sớm còn tối [3a]mất lao đao,
M
54 Dặm canh thâu dặm canh thâu,
55 Nghĩ trong cuộc thế vơi vơi,
56 Kìa kìa quỷ mị khởi loàn,
57 Phần thời giặc giã phủ vây,
9
10
11
12
13
14
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Here, I take 朶 as a variant of 孕.
This segment has en extra Sinograph: gắng công thường lục tự Nam mô.
Hầu: cảnh đã xây.
Hầu: nhành lai.
Hầu: binh.
Hầu: tỷ.
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59 Đã hết lời đã hết lời!
60 Trách lòng nhiều sự chẳng kiêng,
61 Biến sanh những sự tà gian,
62 Thế nay cạn sự đã rồi!
63 Chuyển luân thiên địa tuần hườn,
mày.
64 Ít ai tỏ biết đặng hay,
65 Thầy xưa lời dặn hẳn hòi,
66 Oan oan tương báo chập chồng,
67 Khiến xui phụ tử tương tranh,
69
Trời xui trăm vật trăm hao,
[3b]
70 Ngọn phù thủy cuộc đất xây,
IM
71 Bao giờ hưởng thọ kỳ hương,
72 Sanh thân này khổ bớ ai
73 Phú hết phú bần hết bần,
M
74 Khiến xui vợ lại giết chồng,
75 Anh em đồng khí tương ly,
76 Đổi dời hải thủy băng sơn,
77 Tam ngươn quy dựng18 lại rồi,
78 Lần lần tay tính tối ngày,
15
16
17
18
ví như cầm chén rủi tay bẻ rồi!
thực nhơn nhơn thực đến hồi
chẳng không.
tham tài tích đại mình không xét
mình.
cha không lành thảo con lành đặng
đâu?
phản quân sát phụ hãy15 câu sách
nào?
để cho đò khó16 xiết bao nhọc
nhằn.
rồng nằm đáy biển sông hằng
hứng sương.
tuế tăng vạn tuế lưu17 phương lâu
dài.
trăm ngàn việc khổ chất hoài vô
thân.
than vong tài tán quan dân cũng
đồng.
con mà hại mẹ tình không yêu vì.
quân thần phản nghịch thế thì hạ
ngươn.
tiêu đường quỷ mị nghĩa nhơn lập
đời.
tang điền thương hải rã rời đổi
xoay.
người nay như thể thấy rày lại
không.
ES
68 Trung quân phụ tử làm đầu,
sợ trong thế sự như thuyền chạy
khơi.
khuyên răn dạy biểu cho người
thiện duyên.
ốm đau cầu giảm an thuyên chẳng
màn(g).
hủy tăng phá giới lòng toan hại
người.
mở mang dời đổi lập đời thượng
ngươn.
hội này thấy lửa tàm lam cháy
IS
58 Lăng xăng nhiều cuộc đảo điên,
Hầu: hỡi.
Hầu: đồ khổ.
Here, I take晋 as a variant of 留.
Like above, I take朶 as a variant of 孕.
Q. Huyền - Esoteric Tradition of Master Buddha of Western Peace
80 Ngồi buồn than trách một mình,
81 Đua nhau rượu thịt nghinh ngang,
82 Biến sanh thấy sự hẳn hòi,
83 Nhiệm mầu thuyền đạo Thích Ca,
84 Non đoài giữ dạ tín thành,
85 Anh em ai có phục tòng,
86 Phật truyền trồng thọ bồ đề,
87 Muốn cho vào20 chốn ta bà,
ES
88 Kính trời kính đất thần minh,
89 Sanh tại tiên hiếu song thân,
vật còn biết tánh người không tỏ
tình.
thương trong thế sự thình lình tiêu
tan.
chửi cha mắng mẹ nhiều đàng
ngược xuôi.
tử nhi vô hối hết đời tà ma.
Quan Âm cứu khổ Di Đà [4a]độ19
sanh.
thầy cho cư sĩ học hành chưa
thông.
theo tôi học đạo phải dùng tai
nghe.
giữ câu minh chánh chớ hề sai
ngoa.
phương tiện bố thí hà sa phước
dành.21
tông môn phụng tự giữ toàn Tứ ân.
việc22 hậu vi nghĩa ân cần sớm
mai.
giồi câu tiết chánh tỏ bày bia son.
đạo truyền kế đạo Phật môn lâu
dài.
lục niên tân khổ chẳng nài nhọc
công.
ví23 như thuyền nhỏ bị phong
IS
79 Chữ rằng nhơn vật dữ đồng,
249
90 Trung quân lòng giữ chẳng sai,
91 Mình tu phải dạy cháu con,
92 Thích Ca Phật tổ Như Lai,
M
IM
93 Đến nay về hạ thần long,
giang hồ.
94 Di Đà lục tự Nam mô,vãng sanh Tịnh thổ24 ra vô thanh nhàn.
95 Thoát nơi khổ hải mới san(g),
lánh vòng trần tục khỏi đàng tử
sanh.
96 Phận tôi cư sĩ tín thành,
thầy truyền dạy chúng làm lành tu
thân.
97 Hạ ngươn cuộc thế cũng gần,
tỉnh tâm tự giác ân cần cho mau.
98 Chuyện25 tu chẳng khó ở đâu,
lấy câu bố thí làm đầu rất nên.
99 Thiện thần [4b]biên chép đôi bên,
thiện tăng ác giảm hư nên lời
truyền.
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
I take 土 as a variant of 渡.
Nguyễn Văn Hầu amended vào in this segment to thoát.
Hầu: gìn.
Hầu: một.
Hầu: tỉ.
Hầu: độ.
The Sinographic text has a tone indicator to distinguish this Sinograph’s
reading as chuyện from truyện and truyền.
250
Asian Philosophical Texts
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
M
117
ES
102
IM
101
kẻ nghe người bỏ nói mình khôn
ngoan.
Tham tài dưỡng vật đa đoan,
để nuôi thân thịt không toan nghe
lời.
Sát sanh hại vật ăn chơi,
gian phu dâm phụ nhiều lời trớ
trinh.
Thấy rồi mình lại tủi mình,
nói ra thời tệ làm thinh thêm sầu.
Cao bay xa chạy khỏi đâu,
mắt(c) trong lưới nhặt dãi dầu khá
thương.
Phật tiên tương hội ai tường,
cứu sanh độ tử mọi26 đàng trần
gian.
Giáo khuyên trần chúng nhiều phang, giữ câu nhẫn thiện lòng toan tu
hành.
Chừa27 lời đừng có đua tranh,
bồ đề một hột tâm thành đặng
siêu.
Long Hoa thắng hội tiêu diêu,
dữ lành đến đó mai chiều sẽ hay.
Phận mình cư sĩ dám bày,
luật nghi phép tắc diễn bày tỏ ra.
Nhứt ngươn đức Phật Thích Ca,
giáng sanh cõi thế Long Hoa hội
kỳ.
Người sanh bá tuế sở quy,
bá niên giảm thọ hạ dời28 thiếu
thời.
Giảm chí tam thập đến nơi,
người cao ba thước là đời cơ nguy.
Tai ương khổ não nhiều kỳ,
giảm chí vậy thời nay thiệt chẳng
sai.
Người cao hai thước chẳng dài,
ôn hoàng tật [5a]bịnh liên lai khốn
nàn.
Giảm chí thập tuế bước san(g),
người cao một thước tai nàn bớ
dân.
Thiệt là đại biến phàm trần,
vạn nhơn nam nữ thẳng lần sơn
trung.
Sách còn ghi nói chẳng không,
con gái có chồng ngũ ngoạt thành
song.
Mạt hạ phong tục long đong,
thần hôn quốc loạn người không y
người.
Oan hình lao ngục khắp nơi,
nhãn tiền tựu thị là nơi để dành.
Thác về lục đạo tứ sanh,
tiên đạo nhơn đạo phước mình
thảnh thơi.
Tu la ngạ quỷ là loài, súc sanh địa ngục nhiều tai khốn nàn.
Tứ sanh phân nói rõ ràng,
noãn thai thấp hóa là phang luân
hồi.
IS
100 Thuở xưa Phật dạy chẳng tin,
118
119
120
121
122
26
27
28
Hầu: mỗi.
Hầu: chử.
Hầu: di.
Q. Huyền - Esoteric Tradition of Master Buddha of Western Peace
124 Làm người cho biết hiền lành,
125 Thánh thần minh chánh thiện tai,
126 Chúng sanh nhiều việc đảo điên,
127 Đổi thừa sát hại ăn chơi,
128 Sát hại tà dâm tội hung,
129 Lưỡng thiệt ác khẩu trớ trinh,
130 Tham lam gian giảo vậy vay,
131 Bất hiếu phụ mẫu nghịch [5b]lời,
132 Âm quan về đến mới hay,
133 Bất kính Tam Bửu rõ ràng,
ES
134 Làm người tự giác tự minh,
cảnh trên Tịnh thổ29 là nơi để
dành.
vãng sanh vi đại cứu chư các loài.
ác sát mỗi vật đầu bài vi tiên.
sát sanh hại mạng không kiêng đất
trời.
sau về địa ngục tội hành không
dung.
vọng ngôn trá ngữ thiên công gia
hình.
người tuy chẳng thấy tội mình
nhiều thay.
ngục hình dành để đợi khi luân
hồi.
cha sanh mẹ dưỡng là nơi ơn dày.
hành hình phận cứ30 đêm ngày
khóc than.
khinh khi Phật pháp nhiều đàng
thinh thinh.
Phật tiên mến tưởng thiên đình
cũng thương.
tu trong kinh giáo Phật đường
truyền ra.
tu câu lục tự Di Đà đừng quên.
tu cang tu kỷ gắng bền hiếu trung.
tu trau vóc ngọc lấm bùn đừng
mang.
tu tài bố thí việc gian thì đừng.
dân khương vật phụ khỏi oan cơ
hàn.
hà thanh hưng vượng vạn bơn33
thái bình.
lạy thầy đức hóa tái sanh đạo mầu.
IS
123 Trì trai giái sát bớ người,
251
135 Tu tâm tu tánh giữ thường,
IM
136 Tu tánh tu hạnh nết na,
137 Tu hành hiếu nghĩa đôi bên,
138 Tu nhơn tu đức để lòng,
139 Tu công bồi đắp miễu đàn,31
140 Tu cầu thánh thọ thiên xuân,
M
141 Tu cầu vạn hải thiên san,32
142 Thìn hôn vái34 Phật đọc kinh,
29
30
31
32
33
34
Hầu: độ.
The original text has the two Sinographs分據 (phận cứ). Nguyễn Văn Hầu
interpreted the second character as an error for xử 䖏 (處), thus yielding phân
xử 分處, which means “judge” or “arbitrate.”
Hầu: miếu đàng (miếu đường).
Here the word sơn is pronounced askew (đọc chệch) with literary license as
san to preserve the rhyme.
Hầu: bang.
Hầu: lạy.
252
Asian Philosophical Texts
144 Giác thời đặng hưởng thiên đào,
145 Tay mình lại chặt lấy mình,
146 Tai nghe tội phước lăng xăng,
147 Kiếm lời dễ cảm khua môi,
148 Dị đoan án nói37 rõ ràng,
149 Kinh rằng Phật dạy cạn lời,
Chốn vui chốn khổ thêm sầu,
Hữu duyên đặng hưởng quyền cao,
Lời vàng tạc để thiên lân,
Nước non nay đã lụt39 rồi,
Mê man nhiều nỗi dật dờ,
ES
150
151
152
153
154
mênh35 mông trời rộng chim hâu36
bay cao.
mê thời địa ngục ngày nào đặng
sanh?
mắt thời thấy đó làm thinh không
rằng.
đau thời tưởng Phật hết rằng thời
thôi.
khen chê phải [6a]chẳng nói thôi
chi màn(g).
Diêm đình tội để khó toan luân
hồi.
giác38 thời đặng thấy mê thời thấy
đâu.
đục trong hai ngả toan âu nẻo nào?
vô duyên lại gặp thân sau cơ bần.
có đâu trễ nải quá chừng dân ôi.
nào hay vội lỡ một hồi pháp cơ.
hồn bay phưởng phất như tơ lộn
cuồn.
khác quê khác xứ khác nơi40 thú
cầm.
hồn sa phách lạc mới nên luân hồi.
khác loài thú vật khác người tân
dân.
yêu ma nào có loạn trần đặng đâu.
Phật trời phân định đâu đâu thái
bình.
khá khuyên bá tánh làm lành tu
thân.
trở người trở vật trở năm trở ngày.
trở chồng trở vợ trở vì quân
vương.
trở trâu trở ruộng trở đường [6b]vào
ra.
trở cây trở trái bông hoa trở kỳ.
lời ăn tiếng nói vậy thời khác xưa.
trở căn trở bịnh thuốc xưa trị nào.
IS
143 Sông sâu cá lội thấy đâu,
155 Thoát qua như ngọn tên bay,
156 Đêm ngày mù mịt tối tăm,
157 Mở mang xoay lại lập đời,
IM
158 Còn người Phật thánh tiên thần,
159 Tóm thâu thế giái một bầu,
160 Nay đã gặp Phật giáng sanh,
M
161 Sự đời xem thấy cũng gần,
162 Trở ăn trở mặc bằng nay,
163 Trở non trở núi trở vườn,
164 Trở thời trở tiết những là,
165 Trở bậu trở bạn cố tri,
166 Trở lòng ăn nói đẩy đưa,
35
36
37
38
39
40
Hầu: minh.
Hầu: hầu.
Hầu: nội.
There is a redundant Sinograph here for giác覺.
Hầu: cạn.
Hầu: nay.
Q. Huyền - Esoteric Tradition of Master Buddha of Western Peace
168
169
170
171
Làm người chớ cậy tài năng,
Có khi hơi thở ra vô,
Sanh tiền mình chẳng biết sao,
Nhứt nhựt tam đả oan hồn,
172 Nhãn tiền sao chẳng biết lo,
173 Để cho khát nước quá trưa,
174
175
176
177
Thuở còn trai tráng dường bao,
Xưa sanh tánh thiện làm đầu,
Thiên sanh nhơn hữu tánh linh,
Tội làm một mẻ41 chẳng sai,
178 Để cho mình buộc lấy mình,
ES
179 Ta bà là chốn thảnh thơi,
180 [7a]Đói thời nhờ ruộng Thích Ca,
pháp linh phù thủy cứu nào đặng
chăng?
mai thời thấy đó tối rằng thấy đâu?
đứt hơi nào biết quy mô chốn nào?
tử về âm cảnh hồn vào ngục môn.
oan thâm nghiệt trọng ai hiềm cứu
cho?
sông không cầu bắc mướn đò ai
đưa?
ra công đào giếng cù cưa đặng
nào?
sao không tu tập già nào biết đâu?
lớn khôn tích ác mình âu hại mình.
mê trần mê lẫn tại mình trách ai.
xin người tự hối giồi mài tánh
linh.
thê thằng tử phược linh đinh
không rời.
vui cầu bát nhã gần vời ma ha.
khát thời nhờ nước Phật bà dưỡng
thân.
nương câu thanh tịnh dõi lần
đường mây.
giồi câu tứ trí tánh hằng học khôn.
vùa hương bát nước mai chiều giữ
coi.
màng chi nhiều ít heo đòi không
nên.
chép ghi tội phước tâu lên cho
người.
sá chi phấn thổ vui cười tay trao.
người nay như mộng thấy đâu cho
bền?
ngựa hồng cất chạy xuống lên hai
đường.
khi tròn khi khuyết nở tàn dường
bao.
trẻ không tu tập thời già biết
chi?
IS
167 Đời nay ma quỷ loạn vào,
181 Lời thầy xưa có tỏ42 phân,
IM
182 Mặt trời chênh43 xế bóng cây,
183 Tu hành chi luận giàu nghèo,
184 Hữu tình trời Phật xét soi,
185 Lưỡng thần cầm sổ đôi bên,
M
186 Ngọc nhà44 sao chẳng trau giồi,
187 Chẳng coi trước chẳng nhắm sau,
188 Gương loan sáng tỏ dưới trên,
189 Phất qua như bóng nguyệt quang,
190 Hoa rụng45 hồi lại xuân qua,
41
42
43
44
45
Hầu: tôi làm một mảy.
Hầu: cạn.
Hầu: chinh.
Hầu: lành.
Hầu: đong.
253
254
Asian Philosophical Texts
192 Sanh thân này khổ biết sao,
193 Khá khuyên cải dữ làm lành,
194 Rắn còn tu đặng đặng thành rồng,
195 Để cho thân chịu linh đinh,
196 Dương là cảnh âm là quê,
197 Hữu duyên thần thánh tiếp đưa,
198 Vắn dài lời nói cạn rồi,
199 Lầm rầm miệng niệm Di Đà,
200 Kính dưng minh chúa hưng long,
ES
201 Phù từ tử hiếu trung trinh,
biết đâu phép tắc lễ nghi chuyện
nào?
để cho sa sẩy kiếp nào đặng
sanh?
sùng tu Tam Bửu học hành cho
thông.
làm người sao chẳng xét trong
thân mình?
tai kia họa [7b]nọ biến sanh mọi
bề.
phước mình gánh vác đặng về
cảnh xưa.
vì mình thiện niệm sớm trưa lần
hồi.
lạy thầy trở lại phản hồi bổn gia.
tay lần chuỗi hột lòng ta giữ
lòng.
dân khương vật phụ thiên xuân
thái bình.
hà thanh hải yên an ninh trong
ngoài.
IS
191 Buông lời nói chẳng kính vì,
M
IM
Tuế thứ Quý Sửu niên bát nguyệt nhị thập ngũ nhật Trọng Thu
Thái Văn Ý phụng tả thủ bút
M
IM
ES
IS
Q. Huyền - Esoteric Tradition of Master Buddha of Western Peace
[1a]
255
Asian Philosophical Texts
M
IM
ES
IS
256
[1b]
M
IM
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IS
Q. Huyền - Esoteric Tradition of Master Buddha of Western Peace
[2a]
257
Asian Philosophical Texts
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IS
258
[2b]
M
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IS
Q. Huyền - Esoteric Tradition of Master Buddha of Western Peace
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260
[3b]
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IS
Q. Huyền - Esoteric Tradition of Master Buddha of Western Peace
[4a]
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M
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IS
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[4b]
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IM
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IS
Q. Huyền - Esoteric Tradition of Master Buddha of Western Peace
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[5b]
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