Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [87]
Tourists are welcome to wander through the nave of the cathedral, as long as they remain in the aisles, and don’t stray between the rows of pink pillars, entwined by green dragons, that march up the chamber. Cut-away windows punctuate the outer walls, their grillework consisting of the Divine Eye, surrounded by bright pink lotus blooms. Walk up the shallow steps that lend the nave its litheness, and you’ll reach an altar that groans under the weight of assorted vases, fruit, paintings and slender statues of storks. The papal chair stands at the head of the chamber, its arms carved into dragons. Below it are six more chairs, three with eagle arms, and three with lion arms, for the cardinals. Dominating the chamber, though, and guarded by eight scary silver dragons, a vast, duck-egg-blue sphere, speckled with stars, rests on a polished, eight-sided dais. The ubiquitous Divine Eye peers through clouds painted on the front. You’ll see more spangly stars and fluffy clouds if you look up at the sky-blue ceiling, with mouldings of lions and turtles.
* * *
Ho Chi Minh City and around | Around Ho Chi Minh City | The Cao Dai Holy See at Tay Ninh | The Great Temple |
Cao Dai
The basic tenets of Cao Dai were first revealed to Ngo Van Chieu, a civil servant working in the criminal investigation department of the French administration on Phu Quoc Island, at the beginning of the 1920s. A spiritualist, Ngo was contacted during a seance by a superior spirit calling itself Cao Dai, or “high place”. This spirit communicated to him the basics of the Cao Dai creed, and instructed him to adopt the Divine Eye as a tangible representation of its existence. Posted back to Saigon soon afterwards, Ngo set about evangelizing, though according to French convert and chronicler Gabriel Gobron the religion didn’t gather steam until late in 1925, when Ngo was contacted by a group of mediums sent his way by the Cao Dai.
At this stage, revelations from the Cao Dai began to add further meat to the bones of the religion. Twice already, it informed its mediums, it had revealed itself to mankind, using such vehicles as Lao-tzu, Christ, Mohammed, Moses, Sakyamuni and Confucius to propagate systems of belief tailored to suit localized cultures. Such religious intolerance had resulted from this multiplicity, that for the third alliance it would do away with earthly messengers and convey a universal religion via spirit intermediaries, including Louis Pasteur, William Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, Sir Winston Churchill and Napoleon Bonaparte. The revelations of these “saints” were received using a planchette (a pencil secured to a wooden board on castors, on which the medium rests his hand, sometimes known as a corbeille à bec).
Though a fusion of Oriental and occidental religions, propounding the concept of a universal god, Cao Dai is primarily entrenched in Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, to which cause-and-effect creeds, elements of Christianity, Islam and spirituality are added. By following its five commandments – Cao Dai followers must avoid killing living beings, high living, covetousness, verbal deceit and the temptations of the flesh – adherents look to hasten the evolution of the soul through reincarnation.
The religion was effectively founded in October 1926, when it was also officially recognized by the French colonial administration. Borrowing the structure and terminology of the Catholic Church, Cao Dai began to grow rapidly, its emphasis upon simplicity appealing to disaffected peasants, and by 1930 there were 500,000 followers. In 1927, Tay Ninh became the religion’s Holy See; Ngo opted out of the papacy, and the first pope was Le Van Trung, a decadent