Vietnamese Folk Religion

Vietnamese folk religion is a group of ethnic religions or religious beliefs and practices followed by the Vietnamese people. It is not an organized religious system, but a set of local worship traditions devoted to the thần, a term which can be translated as spirits, gods, or more inclusively as generative powers. These gods can be nature deities, community or kinship tutelary deities, and national ancestral gods or ancestral gods specific to a family. Ancestral gods are often deified heroic persons. Vietnamese mythology relates the activity of many of the cosmic gods and cultural heroes. Đạo Mẫu is a distinct form of Vietnamese shamanism which gives prominence to a mother goddess. Cao Đài is also a form of Vietnamese indigenous religion that brings incorporates the worship of the thần, or local spirits with Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and some elements of Catholicism, Spiritism and Theosophy. The Vietnamese folk religion was suppressed in various ways from 1945 (the end of the dynastic period) until the 1980s. Temples (generically called miếu) were destroyed, or became dilapidated due to neglect. The period between 1975 and 1979 witnessed the most zealous anti-religion campaign and destruction of temples. On the eve of the Đổi Mới reforms, from 1985 onwards, the state gradually returned to a policy of protection of the religious culture. The Vietnamese indigenous religion was championed as the backbone of a progressive culture and promoter of national identity. Both the state and the common people are mutual protagonists in the recent revival of Vietnamese folk religion. In this religion, linh has a meaning equivalent to holy and numen, the power of a deity to affect the world of the living, a concepts derived from Chinese ling. Linh is the mediator between âm and dương, meaning disorder and order, with order (yang in Chinese) preferred over disorder (yin in Chinese). This attribute is often associated with goddesses, animal motifs such as the snake (an amphibious animal), the owl which forgoes day in favour of night, the bat which bears aspects associated with both birds and mammals, the rooster who crows at the crack between night and morning, but also rivers dividing landmasses, and other intermediate, transitional entities. Linh is the logic of symbolic relations. The interplay between opposing forces governs reproduction and change. Linh has also been described as the ability to set up spatial and temporal boundaries, represent and identify metaphors, and the setting apart and linking together of differences. Boundaries are crossed by practices such as sacrifice and inspired intercession of shamans who interpret how acts and events may, or may not, indicate the will of the gods. Vietnamese Gods roughly fall into four categories: heavenly deities, tutelary deities or deified ancestors or progenitors (Thành hoàng refers a tutelary deity that is enshrined in every village's communal temple), hierarchical or court-like pantheons led by the Ngọc Hoàng inherited from the Taoist patterns, headed by the Ngọc Hoàng, and deities of Cham, Khmer, and other Southeast Asian ethnic origin such as Po Yan Inu Nagar (female foundress of the Cham people) and Cá Ông, the Whale God which originated from a Buddhist legend.