Twenty Years After The War -- Vietnam's
Icon Is An Aging Monk
By Andrew Lam
EDITOR'S NOTE: Many observers are convinced that today's Vietnam is an economic
dragon waiting to take off, with Singaporean technocrat Lee Kwan Yew playing the role of
Hanoi's new guru. But this vision ignores the depth of popular yearning for something or
someone that can fill Vietnam's spiritual void. So far the one figure who comes closest to
meeting it is an aging monk named Thich Huyen Quang, who has been imprisoned without
trial since December. PNS editor Andrew Lam, a San Francisco writer and journalist, travels
frequently to his native country of Vietnam.
By many a foreigner's account, Vietnam 20 years after the war has become a quintessential secular
country -- a tangle of billboards, flight times, mini-hotels, factories, high-tech night clubs. The real
icon of the age, Ho Chi Minh's true successor, is Singaporean technocrat Lee Kwan Yew, whose
blend of soft authoritarianism and free market economics has become East Asia's new religion.
But a Vietnamese will tell you that this is far too simplistic a picture for a country that is 3,000 years
old. Vietnamese are too rooted in spirituality, too informed by religious tradition, to accept the
glamor of the cosmopolitan city as a substitute for real religious freedom and civil liberty. If anyone
has replaced the long dead communist Uncle Ho, it is an aged monk named Thich Huyen Quang, the
abbot of the outlawed United Buddhist Church of Vietnam, who has been imprisoned without trial
since last December.
Previously nominated for the Nobel peace prize, Quang is a constant thorn in Hanoi's side as it
struggles with the loss of its own ideological direction following the fall of Communism in the Soviet
Union. While party bureaucrats appear willing to forfeit communism to embrace the free market
economy, millions of Vietnamese, especially the young, are flocking to churches and temples to
rediscover their spiritual roots and fill the ideological vacuum. It is this mass base, and the ability to
wield religion as a nationalist weapon much as Ho Chi Minh wielded nationalism as a religious
weapon, that gives Quang, and the Buddhist and Christian clergy in general, their potential power.
It is why Hanoi, even as it opens it doors to foreign investment and loosens its grip on the society as
a whole, paradoxically continues to crackdown on religious leaders. Hanoi knows only too well the
tumultuous relationship religious leaders have had with the Vietnamese state stretching back for
centuries. Persecute a monk, the history books warn, and the dynasty will fall apart.
It was, in fact, a monk of Quang's religious order whose act of self- immolation in 1963 reverberated
around the world, ultimately toppling the Diem government.
No mere aberration, that fiery act of defiance sets Vietnamese apart from their Chinese neighbors to
the north. While Chinese dissidents brave imprisonment and execution to demand Western-style
political change, Vietnamese Buddhists immolate themselves. Their spiritual reference point lies in a
Hindu-Buddhist south rather than a Confucian north. When authorities moved to arrest Thich Huyen
Quang late last year, a dozen monks and laymen were planning to immolate themselves to protest
religious oppression. The last thing Hanoi could afford was to have pictures of monks going up in
flames flashed across the global media.
Meanwhile no charismatic leader has emerged from the now much distrusted Communist party.
Instead, the thirteen member politburo is driven by internal fighting, with some members reportedly
pushing for a multi-party democratic system. To counter such moves, Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet
and President Le Duan, once barely visible, now appear frequently on TV. Widely viewed as
corrupt, these Marxist- Leninist trained figures light incense sticks and pray in churches at every
opportunity.
It is, after all, a headache to run a country with such a bloody past and a precarious present. If Hanoi
clamps down harder on society, there will be an upheaval. Yet if it allows a new charismatic
leadership to emerge from the ranks of the clergy -- or, for that matter, from Buddhist human rights
activists like imprisoned doctor Nguyen Dan Que or poet Nguyen Chi Thien, who lives under house
arrest -- it could also prove politically fatal.
At 77 the abbot Thich Huyen Quang's time is running out. But from the Buddhist perspective, his
death could prove catalytic. Two years ago in Hue, some 40,000 people turned out in the largest
mass demonstration since the end of the war to protest the arrest of Thich Tri Tuu, abbot of the
Thien Mu Pagoda. Tuu was charged with failing to denounce a layman's self-immolation to protest
religious repression.
What Quang and the Politburo both know is that the bloodless Singaporean model will never satisfy
the Vietnamese soul. At some point real political change is inevitable. And when it comes, the more
the top resists, the fiercer the fires at the bottom will burn.
