“What on my first two visits has seemed gay and bizarre (was) now like a game that had gone on too long.”
– Graham Greene, on Vietnam’s Caodai Cul.
It really didn’t make sense. There in front of me outside the smudged bus window was the Great Divine Temple at Tay Ninh, Vietnam – a whacked-out EPCOT architectural hallucination resembling Gaudi on opium. I didn’t really want to go inside. The idea of occult cults creeps me out. I had come all the way to Vietnam to investigate a weird supernatural religion called Caodaism, an attempt to fuse the ideal faith, “a universal religion", from a potboiled spiritual pho centered on Spritism (which swept the Americas in the 19th century with its tarot cards and crystal balls), and just about every other religion on the planet. You name it.
What really attracted me was that their adherents whimsically and wisely worshipped Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables 
Way wacko, but it sounded at least playful, rococo enough to intrigue me into traveling to a former enemy nation that I wasn’t too keen on visiting.
I still imaginatively associated Vietnam with The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Apocalypse Now and Hamburger Hill, one of the messiest war films ever made. I don’t think any of these films would go over well with the communist authorities. A British traveler on my bus, bursting with laughter, swore he saw Rambo, dubbed into Vietnamese, on a long-haul bus between Dalat and Saigon.
Here’s the story. There is this group of dong tu (mediums) who contact the spirit world, querying, say, Charlie Chaplin in his “talkie phase,” via séances – utilizing the usual abracadabra bric-a-brac of ouija boards (the popular game), table tapping (a table jiggled which taps out letters) and corbeilles a bec (long radiating sticks attached to pens). This is the Caodai Calling. Collect.
They also use pneumotographie, where a blank card is sealed in an envelope and hung above an altar. When opened, the paper purportedly has a message on it: “Having a great time. Wish you were here.” Postcards from the edge of the grave.
Tay Ninh Holy See of the Ca Dai faith
A Major Religion
Tay Ninh, less than 60 miles northwest of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) is an ulikely locus for the headquarters of a major religion, the third largest in Vietnam after Buddhism and Catholicism. Bordered by Cambodia on three sides, Tibet-like Tay Ninh is an almost island of upheaval in a communist country, giving babysteps capitalism a go. Our bus passed a scowling teen wearing a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt peddling Pepsis on a roadside stand, as well as a “picturesque” old coot doffing one of the ubiquitous conical hats and plowing rice paddies with his water buffaloes.
Along this road was the site of the famous wartime photo of a young running girl scorched by napalm.
Caodai, which means “high palace", refers to the supreme palace where the Supreme Being dwells (Heaven) and God Himself. But the “palace” rising before us seemed a daring departure from reality. As we got off the autobus and whistled at the Great Divine Temple, the scene became real Indochine, with a sea of lithe bicyclists draped in white ao dais on their way to attend one of four daily religious ceremonies.
We had come to join them.
Featured in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, the temple, built between 1933 to 1955, is a favorite stopping point for Saigon’s Sinh Café bus tours. Mostly yellow on the outside with red roofs, the temple is built on 9 levels representing a Stairway to Heaven. It is 140 meters long and 40 meters high, with four towers. According to Lonely Planet, it is a mix of “a French cathedral, a Chinese pagoda, the Tiger Balm Gardens, and Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.”
But I think Graham Greene described it best: “Christ and Buddha looking down from the roof of the Cathedral on a Walt Disney fantasia of the East, dragons and snakes in Technicolor.” Still: “This is it?” a Vietnam vet named Bill from Brooklyn groused.
“Yeah, I thought it would be more, I don’t know,” a Canadian girl with long black hair and a scent of patchouli dittoed.
“It is very yellow".
It wasn’t until we shucked off our shoes and stepped inside that the architecture revealed itself in its full glory. Immediately, I noticed a cool mural of Saint Victor Hugo and other luminaries writing out the psychic slogans “God and Humanity” and “Love and Justice". Shuffling along a colonnaded hall and sanctuary, I felt like I was literally entering a delusion, since I was slightly buzzing from my antimalarial Larium. All of a sudden my eyes alit like deranged kamikazee mosquitoes upon some windows with arabesques of intertwined flowers and vines bordering uncanny eyes in triangles. By the altar – dressed up with offerings of flowers, fruit, wine, tea, candles, and incense (plus a lamp symbolizing Eternal Light) – was a snaking spiral staircase which seemed to be hissing “Don’t tread on me!”
Up above on the domed ceiling was painted a night sky, divided into 9 parts, filled with Van Gogh-like stars and clouds. Beneath the dome was a blue globe, representing the Earth, with the supreme symbol of the Caodais painted on it: the “Divine Eye", which bears a suspicious resemblance to the eye in a pyramid featured on the back of U.S. dollar bills. I stared at the Eye and waited for one of us to blink.
“You are welcome, Mr. America,” joked one of the white-robed priests with a Shangri-la smile. He had the easy manner and confident smile of one used to dealing with tourists. The elaborately garbed priest was old enough to have witnessed the horrors of the Vietnam War, but didn’t seem the type to hold a grudge.
Probably for good reasons.
The Caodais were never exactly neutral. In fact, despite their prohibition against harming people or animals, they had their own renegade armies, beginning in 1943, as a response to Japanese invaders. In the Franco-Viet Minh War, the Caodai Army, made up of some 25,000 troops, supported the French, and specialized in making mortar tubes out of auto exhaust pipes. During the Vietnam War they were staunch SVA, fighting on the side of the Americans.
n 1975, when NVA troops overran the U.S.-backed South Vietnam, Caodaism was violently repressed and banned by the Viet Cong, who confiscated the church’s lands. There were the usual stageshow executions. But behind the scenes, Caodaism continued, with its prayer meetings and séance rituals, surviving even a series of brutal cross-border raids by the genocidal Khmer Rouge.
I pulled out a dollar bill and showed Les Miz our own version of The Eye, possibly a Masonic symbol, itself maybe derived from eyes on Buddhist stupas.
The Mizter examined the bill with great interest and nodded approvingly. His asterix eyes focused on the hidden footnotes inherent in the symbol itself. After an eternity, his concentrated prune pout relaxed into the palimpsest of a smile. “It was nice meeting you. Now I must go.” He wandered off, still smiling but looking a little shaken.
Founded in 1926 by the French-educated Vietnamese mystic Ngo Minh Chieu, the Caodais claim the “All-Seeing Eye” was first seen on the island of Phu Quoc in 1919. God, or Caodai, appeared and said, “The eye is the principal of the heart from which comes a source of light. Light is the spirit. The spirit itself is God.”
Then on Christmas Eve, 1925, Caodai reintroduced himself rather grandiloquently (and cryptically) as “Jade Emporer, alias Caodai, Immortal, His Honor to the eldest Boddhisattva, the Venerable Saint, Religious Master of the Southern Quarter". The starry-eyed Le Van Trung (the first Caodai pope) and his posse presented their “declaration” to the French governor of Cochinchina in 1926, and Caodaism was officially born.
By the 1950s, one in eight South Vietnamese was a Caodais, carving a sort of feudal state in Tay Ninh Province and the Mekong Delta, filled with thanh (holy houses). Today there are over 8 million Caodais in Vietnam (roughly the population of Sweden), plus some 30,000 members scattered across the world like chess pieces, usually in places inhabited by Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese).
Positioning ourselves on the balcony to view the ceremony, we watched the red-, yellow-, and white-robed faithful wearing conical floppy hats pile in, men from the right, women from the left, making their way in a mincing Mozart-like minuet to kneel before the altar. In the back a group of musicians played atonal tunes and chanted hypnotically. It sounded a little like a group of approvingly purring Siamese cats cuddling, then rutting. I almost fell asleep.
Oddly, the faithful are not permitted to be photographed, except during ceremonies.
After the ceremony we walked to the autobus under a sky with a ghastly pewter pall and a vague threat of rain.
“So what do you think?” I asked Bill from Brooklyn.
“I think it’s a crock,” he responded.
But I wasn’t so sure. As the bus departed I stared out through the streaming strands of rain at all the Vietnamese getting on their bicycles. Then, too good to be true, I saw a Vietnamese guy with thick Elvis sideburns and a bomber jacket kickstarting his moped and showing off popping wheelies. Way out here in otherworldly Tay Ninh, we were a long way from Graceland (certainly as showy as the Caodai Temple), but with all these cuckoo cultists capering around like Psychic Friends Network stars, maybe it’s not as far as we might think.
Stuck in the psychic grooves of my gray matter were the words of the Bard, William Shakespeare, "There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy."
Apropros of nothing at all, I resolved to never ever return to Vietnam.
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