IN LIEU OF
A CONCLUSION
A CONCLUSION
From the Caodai history perspective, the Caodai legal entity
establishment ended the latent years of the new faith, started off its
Cochinchina-wide diffusion, and simultaneously paved the way for its
Inauguration in November 1926.([1]) In other words, Caodai history began
a new page with its landmark, namely the Caodai legal entity establishment.
Only three or four years subsequent to the said event, the fledgling religion
expanded at a phenomenal rate, and this fact is affirmed by Professor Jayne
Susan Werner as she writes, “Caodaism was
the first large mass movement to appear in Cochinchina...” ([2])
Western and Vietnamese writers are apt
to interpret the emergence of Caodai faith as a political movement under the
guise of a religious form. Tracing Caodaism back to its latent years, the
reader realises that Caodaism is simply and purely a religion, a path of
self-cultivation. If any political colour has been added to this faith, it
entirely results from worldly desires of humans, and it itself is a catastrophe
for Caodaism.
Mistaken notions about Caodaism have
existed ever since its dawn. So, at the very beginning of the 1970s, Professor
Ralph Bernard Smith (1939-2000), University of London, remarked:
“Few phenomena in the modern history
of Asia can have been so completely
misunderstood by Westerners as the Vietnamese religious (and political)
movement known in European languages as ‘Caodaism’. Based upon a syncretic
approach to religion, in which a key role is played by spirit-seances, it has
inevitably been regarded by Christian writers with the same suspicion (if not
contempt) as occidental ‘spiritualism’; and this initial lack of sympathy is
compounded by the fact that the spirits who have revealed themselves at
Caodaist seances include such familiar figures as Victor Hugo
and Jeanne d’Arc. Then there is the show-piece temple of the Caodaists at Tây
Ninh, which drew forth Mr. Graham Greene’s description of ‘Christ and Buddha
looking down from the roof of the Cathedral on a Walt Disney fantasia of the
East, dragons and snakes in Technicolor’.([3]) This superficial notion of the religious element in Caodaism fitted in
very well with the cynicism of political observers, notably Bernard Fall, who
saw in Caodaism no more than a political movement anxious to preserve its
private armies and local power, using its religious ideas merely to dupe a
credulous peasantry.([4]) In these
circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that the real nature and origins of
Caodaism have been lost from view, and even its history has never been
adequately summarized in any Western language.” ([5])
Today, the above eminent British professor’s
words are still worthy of note. Especially in the era of Internet, dishonest
information about Caodaism can be spread more and more easily, which forms a
thick fog discouraging the novices at the threshold of this religion.
Aged twenty-two, I first read Professor
Smith and was deeply influenced by his advice, “To some extent Western ignorance about Caodaism is the responsibility
of the Caodaists themselves.” ([6]) His
hauntingly convincing recommendation has urged me to begin publishing a few
books of mine in mid-1990s. Later, I could publish more than ten
Vietnamese-English booklets on Caodaism, sponsored by the Programme of Joining
Hands for Free Caodai Publications, which has been active since mid-2008.
Although Professor Janet Alison Hoskins, teaching
anthropology and religion at the University
of Southern California , once too
generously called me “the most sophisticated and careful
Caodai historian inside Vietnam
Professor Winfried Löffler, Austrian,
teaching at the Institute for Christian Philosophy (Institut für Christliche Philosophie), Innsbruck University, after
having read the three booklets as my humble gift to him at an end-of-year-2014
international workshop
on religion in Hanoi, sent me an e-mail dated 11 January 2015 from
his homeland. Subsequent to his nicest remarks, he conluded, “In sum: my picture of Caodaism has changed
very much.” ([10])
I do expect that my present pages on the
latent years of Caodaism might help the reader share the same idea as Professor
Löffler. And if so lucky, I am very grateful to you, my dear readers.
Phú Nhuận, 14 January 2017
Huệ Khải
