I just read a really good article. It is entitled “The Karma of Love: Buddhist Karmic Discourses in Confucian and Daoist Voices in Vietnamese Tales of the Marvelous and Uncanny” (long title!) and it was published in the latest issue of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies.
The article is written by Cuong T. Mai.
I do not know this author, but I feel like I should.
I did some spying on him.
Cuong got an MA from the Department of Religion at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1997, completing a thesis on “The Rituals of Salvation: The Vietnamese Cult of the Dead and its Zen Buddhist Rites.”
I was pursuing a Ph.D. in History at UH at that time. The History Department is in the same building as the Religion Department. So, we must have literally crossed paths.
Then I did some more spying and found that after completing a Ph.D. degree in Religious Studies at Indiana University (diss. = “Visualization Apocrypha and the Making of Buddhist Deity Cults in Early Medieval China,” advisor = John R. McRae), he worked for a while at the University of Vermont.
I’m from Vermont.
And now he works in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.
When I was like 20 or so I drove from Vermont to Florida and back. I remember stopping in Boone because I’ve always had a fascination for Appalachia. I think I was hoping to see some amazing blind banjo player walk out of a holler, but that didn’t happen. I do, however, recall seeing the campus of Appalachian State University.
So, something creepy is going on here. It’s like this guy is stalking my life in reverse! And even weirder, he’s interested in precisely the same obscure scholarly topics that I am. . . This is really messed up!!
But I digress. . . 言歸正傳. . .
So, why is this article so good? It’s good because it does a better job of identifying premodern Vietnamese popular religion than any other study that I am aware of.
Why is that the case? Let me explain.
Have you ever studied a language from a textbook and then gone to that country and discovered that the way people actually speak is really different from what you learned in that textbook?
Go to someplace where Chinese people live and check how often they say “Ni hao ma?” 你好嗎 to each other. The expression exists, but if you sit in an office and listen to what people say when their colleagues arrive in the morning, you’re much more likely to hear a wide variety of statements, including something like the obvious, “Lai le” 來了 “[You]’re here.”
Textbooks don’t teach you that.
The same situation exists with religion. If you turn to writings about religion to learn about religion, you are going to obtain a very artificial construction of knowledge about religion.
Further, just as you have to experience language “in action” in order to see how it is actually spoken, so do you need to see religion “in action” to understand what it is like.
How do you do that for the premodern past? You have to look at religious texts, and this is where we encounter huge problems.
In the case of Vietnam, those texts are in classical Chinese (and to some extent, Nôm), a language that few people read. What is more, the texts that one needs to look at are popular religious texts, like morality books (thiện thư 善書), and in the case of Vietnam, virtually no scholars have looked at those (extremely numerous) texts.
As a result, you can find book after book that provides a modern textbook explanation of religion in the premodern period, that is, volume after volume which tells you that what you need to know is “Ni hao ma?” 你好嗎.
But there is virtually nothing out there which teaches people about “Lai le” 來了 “[You]’re here.”
Cuong Mai’s article is the first that I have read that begins to go beyond the textbook version of Vietnamese religion, and to talk about religion as it was understood in the past.
How does he do this? He does this by looking at four premodern stories, and more specifically, he examines certain concepts that are in these four stories. Those concepts include the following:
goodness (thiện 善)
evil (ác 惡)
doing good (vi thiện 為善)
accumulated goodness (tích thiện 積善)
stimulus response (cảm ứng 感應)
numinous response (linh ứng 靈應)
hidden virtue (âm công 陰功)
hidden merit (âm đức 陰德)
hidden blessings (âm chất 陰)
recompense (báo 報)
manifest recompense (dương báo 陽報)
karma (nghiệp báo 業報, quả báo 果報, nhân quả 因果)
karmic connection (duyên 緣)
past-life karmic connection (túc duyên 夙緣)
former connection (tiền duyên 先緣)
binding karmic connections (kết duyên 結緣)
causal affinity or causal connection (nhân duyên 因緣)
netherworld connection (âm duyên 陰緣)
to tie-up karmic connections (kết duyên 結緣)
to pray for karmic connection (cầu duyên 求緣)
abundance of blessings (dư khánh 餘慶)
disaster (tai họa 災禍)
Some readers will conclude from reading some of these terms that they are “Buddhist.” That, however, is not accurate. The above concepts were shared by each of the “three teachings” (Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism), and they constitute the core ideas of premodern popular religion.
Cuong Mai demonstrates this by examining two stories that have a “Confucian” perspective and two that have a “Daoist” perspective. He then demonstrates that each of these stories relies on the above-shared concepts, but employs them in ways that support the religious perspective (Confucian or Daoist) of the respective author.
This is really, really important because what Cuong is doing here is showing us premodern religion “in action.”
The textbook version of religion talks about “the five relationships” in Confucianism, the “four noble truths” in Buddhism, the “dao” of Daoism, etc. That is “Ni hao ma?” 你好嗎.
Cuong talks about “goodness” (thiện 善), “stimulus response (cảm ứng 感應),” and “former connection” (tiền duyên 先緣). That is “Lai le” 來了 “[You]’re here.”
Scholars of Vietnamese religion have not written about “Lai le” 來了 “[You]’re here” before.
That’s why this article is so good.
So, if no one else has seen this or figured this out before, how did Cuong do it? Well, this is where we reach the limits of my spying skills, so I can’t say for certain, but I can make a guess.
Cuong has a Ph.D. in premodern Chinese religion. The field of premodern Chinese religion is, I would argue, one of the strongest fields in the larger category of Asian Studies.
I was introduced early to this field by one of my professors, Edward (Ned) Davis, who offered a seminar where we read the likes of Terry Kleeman, Stephen F. Teiser, John R. McRae, Robert F. Campany, Sarah M. Allen, Stephen R. Bokenkamp, etc.
These scholars are impressive on two levels. First, they study texts that are often really difficult to understand, and that takes a lot of work. Second, they do an excellent job of “translating” difficult-to-understand religious concepts into English.
One thing I learned from these scholars is that you have to develop your own “internal dictionary,” and you develop that dictionary by gradually gaining a full understanding of a term by seeing how it is used in different contexts.
As such, in order to be able to translate a term like “kết duyên” 結緣 as “binding karmic connections,” as Cuong Mai does, one has to see it in enough contexts to really understand what it means. And for that to happen, one has to read a lot of texts.
And when one does that, one’s knowledge can go far beyond the textbook knowledge about premodern Vietnamese religion.
Cuong Mai definitely goes far beyond the textbook version of premodern Vietnamese religion in this article, and that’s why I love it.
As much as I love this article, I have to confess that I think that it will have less influence than it should, and that is because I think a lot of readers will not be able to fully understand it, and more specifically, will not be able to understand how important it is.
First, readers are going to approach this article with a “knowledge gap.” Because virtually nothing has been written on Vietnamese premodern religion “in action,” many readers will not know about the various terms Cuong discusses and how common they are in popular religious texts.
They will, therefore, probably not fully grasp how thoroughly he is identifying and documenting the core structure of ideas in premodern popular religion.
Second, the field of premodern Chinese religion is very well-developed, so when scholars write for that field, there are a lot of things they have to consider, and their writing reflects this.
Cuong is extremely careful in his word use, and I think that reflects his training in the field of premodern Chinese religion. He makes sure that he uses words that precisely express the points that he is making. While that is very important for good scholarship and is one of Cuong’s many strengths, I can picture that if this article is ever translated into Vietnamese. . . a word-for-word translation is definitely not going to work.
Take this sentence from the conclusion as an example:
Thus, understanding the patterns of correlations and competition among communities of practice and their social positionalities—and being able to describe the self-differentiating assemblages of discourses and practices that were built from elements of shared cultural repertoires—is essential to comprehending the historical phenomena that we label “Buddhist,” “Daoist,” “Confucian,” or “local religion” without reifying or essentializing these categories.
This is not “jargon-filled” writing, but it does use terminology that is specific to the field of premodern Chinese religion. Cuong is being extremely careful and precise here in his choice of words, and this is the perfect way to write for the well-developed world of premodern Chinese religion scholarship.
However, for the extremely under-developed world of scholarship on premodern Vietnamese religion, Cuong’s linguistic precision is going to be somewhat of an obstacle to full comprehension for some readers (at least that is what I predict).
Personally though, this article has inspired me to go back and continue work I started years ago on popular religion, and now I can do so from the fantastic foundation that this article provides.
While I said at the outset that I have this kind of creepy feeling that Cuong has been stalking my life in reverse, upon reflection, maybe it’s just that we have some kind of weird karmic connection (duyên 緣). . .
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I read your introduction, and I have felt very exciting. This article as you said suggests me an interesting method. Should we use tales that are familiar with people to research popular religions rather than using textbooks that were popular with scholars?