Caodai

 

In Vietnam, probably because of my interest in religious ethnology, I met and became good friends with a Caodai leader. I can't say where he was in the hierarchy; that wasn't talked about, but can say that he wrote much, if not most, of their steady literary material, and his funeral was something to behold.

That sounds like a remarkable friendship—and particularly interesting because it seems to have been based on genuine intellectual curiosity rather than on your being formally involved with the religion.

Cao Đài is one of those movements where the distinction between religious institution, literary tradition, and ethnographic spectacle gets wonderfully blurry. Its elaborate cosmology, the mixture of Vietnamese popular religion, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity, spiritism, and the cult of particular historical and literary figures—all of that makes its clergy and writers fascinating people to talk with.

And the fact that you never knew exactly where your friend stood in the hierarchy is rather telling. If he was responsible for much of the ongoing literary production, he may have been considerably more important intellectually than his formal rank would suggest. Cao Đài has had an extensive body of sermons, scriptures, devotional literature, explanations, and publications, so someone who was effectively one of its principal writers could have had enormous influence without necessarily being the person whose title outsiders would recognize.

But the funeral—now that I would have loved to see. Cao Đài funerals can be extraordinarily elaborate, with the distinctive white robes, turbans and ceremonial dress, processions, musicians, ritual specialists, prayers, and the highly syncretic symbolism of the faith. For someone interested in religious ethnology, seeing the funeral of a prominent insider whom you actually knew must have been quite different from merely attending a public ceremony as an observer.

I imagine there was also something rather poignant about watching an entire religious community perform its traditions around the death of a man you'd known simply as your friend.

 

His wife was an excellent cook, really excellent, and had a little vegetarian restaurant near a Buddhist monastry. The two groups got along well, although ignored pretty much by the Communists and Catholics. They had three sons, all of whom had IELTS scores over 650 and the middle son the second highest in Vietnam records to then. I ate there regularly.

 

That makes the whole thing even more interesting. You weren't merely visiting a Cao Đài temple as an ethnological curiosity—you had a little window into an actual community.

And I like the picture of the restaurant: a Cao Đài family running a vegetarian restaurant beside a Buddhist monastery, with the two communities apparently having a perfectly amiable relationship while the two larger religious/political camps largely ignored them. That's very Southeast Asian in a way that official classifications tend to miss. The people actually living next door to one another often have much less difficulty with religious boundaries than the institutions and ideologues do.

And three sons all with IELTS scores above 650—I suspect you mean the older IELTS scoring convention or perhaps another English examination, because modern IELTS is scored on a 0–9 band scale. If you really mean an exam score of 650+, I'd be curious which examination it was. Either way, the middle son's being second-highest in Vietnam at the time is extraordinary.

No wonder you ate there regularly. Excellent vegetarian food, an unusually interesting family, a monastery next door, and the family patriarch supplying you with an inside view of Cao Đài. That's about as good a fieldwork arrangement as one could accidentally stumble into.

 

Perfection was 800 and good was 400.

 

Ah, yes—that clears it up. You were talking about a different English-language proficiency test, with 800 as the maximum and 400 roughly the threshold for "good." So 650+ was genuinely an exceptionally high score, not an IELTS band score.

And the middle son having the second-highest score recorded in Vietnam at the time is quite a distinction. It also makes the family rather more remarkable: a Cao Đài intellectual father, an excellent cook mother running a vegetarian restaurant beside a Buddhist monastery, and three sons with extraordinary English ability.

I can see why you became a regular. You weren't just going there for the food—you had inadvertently acquired a very good little anthropological observation post. 😄

 

 

I remember bringing to him a book I found in the States of the Tao de Ching (I almost certainly got that wrong) in five languages, and he was conversant in four of them and he and his friends spent weeks picking at it, finding errors and learning.

 

Yes—Tao Te Ching is the usual English rendering (also Dao De Jing in modern pinyin), so you were very close.

 

And that story is wonderful. The interesting part isn't simply that he knew four of the five languages; it's that he and his friends spent weeks picking the book apart. They weren't treating the translations as authoritative—they were treating them almost like a set of competing hypotheses about what the Chinese actually meant.

That is a particularly appropriate thing to do with the Tao Te Ching, since translation problems there can be ferocious. The original Chinese is extraordinarily compact and often deliberately ambiguous. A translator has to make choices about things that aren't explicitly resolved in the original, and different translations can consequently sound as though they are describing rather different philosophies.

I can picture the group sitting around with your American book, discovering that this translator had understood a passage one way, that language had made a different choice, and then arguing about what the Chinese permitted. And meanwhile, your friend was learning from the translations even while correcting them.

There's something I particularly like about that anecdote: he wasn't defending his tradition against a foreign book. He was curious about it. A very learned religious person finding errors in four translations and nevertheless using them as learning tools is a much more interesting picture of religious scholarship than the usual notion of people simply preserving received doctrine.

 

Right after the war he had spent two years in a re-education camp and had gotten serious ulcers. It was during my time there that the antibiotics treatment was produced and one day he was cured for pain he had suffered twenty or more years.

 

That gives the story a rather extraordinary human dimension. He had already endured two years in a re-education camp, came out with ulcers that apparently remained painful for decades, and then—during the relatively ordinary course of your friendship—modern medicine finally arrived at something that could actually remove the source of the pain.

And I imagine that must have been quite a moment for him: twenty years of pain suddenly gone, not gradually managed but essentially cured. There is something almost surreal about being present when a person finally receives a treatment for an affliction he had long since assumed was simply part of his life.

It also puts your memories of him in a different light. You knew the extraordinarily learned Cao Đài writer, the man who could dissect four translations of the Tao Te Ching with his friends, but underneath that was someone who had gone through a rather brutal piece of Vietnamese history and then somehow carried on with intellectual curiosity, family, food, religion and friendship.

Those are the sorts of people one remembers decades later—not because they were officially important, but because their lives happened to intersect with yours in unusually rich ways.

His comment was, "Good medicine."

😂 Yes. “Good medicine.”

After twenty years of pain, two years in a re-education camp, and presumably having heard every conceivable explanation for his ulcer, that's all he had to say.

I rather like that. No grand philosophical reflection, no political comment, no dramatic gratitude. Just a learned man assessing the empirical evidence:

Pain gone. Medicine good.

And in a way, that may tell you something about him. His response to the Tao Te Ching was to examine it critically and learn from it; his response to medicine was simply to observe what happened. Curious, practical, and not much inclined toward unnecessary ceremony—even though, judging from his funeral, he knew plenty about ceremony when it was appropriate.

 

He was someone similar to the Jehovah's Witness woman I mentioned awhile ago who just knew she was among the elect. He had served as a seance intermediary before the war (when he joined the southern army), and just knew the spirits were there.

 

Yes—that sounds like a very similar kind of religious certainty, despite the enormous difference between Cao Đài and Jehovah's Witness theology.

What strikes me is your wording: “he just knew the spirits were there.” For him, that apparently wasn't a proposition he'd arrived at through an argument. It was an empirical fact of his own experience. Having served as a séance intermediary, he had experienced whatever happened in those sessions as directly as you or I experience a person sitting across the table.

That makes his intellectual side particularly interesting. He could spend weeks critically comparing translations of the Tao Te Ching, find errors, weigh linguistic alternatives—and yet apparently there was one foundational part of his worldview that wasn't really up for intellectual negotiation: the spirits were real because he had encountered them.

That's actually a useful distinction in studying religious belief. Someone can be extremely sophisticated, skeptical about texts, languages and other people's interpretations, while being utterly certain about a particular experience of his own. Intellectual sophistication doesn't necessarily produce skepticism about everything; sometimes it produces very sharply bounded certainty.

And I suspect that is what you recognized in the Jehovah's Witness woman as well: not someone saying “I have been persuaded that this doctrine is probably true,” but someone for whom the matter had become a piece of personal knowledge. Different religions, completely different content, but psychologically rather similar territory.

 

I don't know that we have the right to call it psychology.

 

Quite right. I jumped from describing the phenomenon to explaining it psychologically, and those aren't the same thing.

We can say that both people had an unusually strong certainty about something they experienced. We can observe that their certainty didn't seem to depend on an argument or doctrine. But whether what they experienced was a psychological phenomenon, a genuine perception of something external, or something for which we simply don't have an adequate category—that is a different question.

And particularly with your friend, saying “he believed spirits were there” may actually misrepresent what he meant. From his point of view, the spirits were there. His certainty was not necessarily a belief about reality; it was his experience of reality.

That distinction matters. We don't have to accept his interpretation to take his testimony seriously.