Zen in Medieval Vietnam: A Study and Translation of the
Thien Uyen Tap Anh. By Cuong Tu Nguyen. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997,
488 pages, ISBN 0-8248-1948-9, US $55.00
Reviewed by
Peter C. Phan
The Warren-Blanding Professor of Religion and Culture
Department of Religion and Religious Education
The Catholic University of America
phan@cua.edu
The study of Vietnamese Buddhism, often neglected in the scholarly research on Buddhism
in East Asia and Southeast Asia, has long been plagued by the extreme scarcity of source
materials. Among the available historical documents is the Thien Uyen Tap Anh (A
Collection of Outstanding Figures of the Zen Community), a fourteenth-century
Chinese-character text. It was discovered in 1927 by Tran Van Giap, a noted Vietnamese
Buddhist scholar, who used it as his main documentary evidence to produce his historical
account, written in French and published in 1932, of Vietnamese Buddhism from its
beginnings to the thirteenth century. Giap argued that the type of Buddhism that
flourished in Vietnam was Zen and that in Vietnam, from the sixth to the thirteenth
century, Zen Buddhism was divided into three schools: the Vinitaruci, Vo Ngon Thong, and
Thao Duong schools. Since then Giap's historical reconstruction of Vietnamese Buddhism has
become the standard view among Buddhist scholars in Vietnamese, Chinese, and Western
languages.
Cuong Tu Nguyen, who holds a Ph.D. in comparative religion from Harvard and currently
teaches at George Mason University, sets out to challenge this received wisdom. The
fundamental error of Giap and his followers, according to the author of Zen in Medieval
Vietnam, is their uncritical acceptance and use of Thien Uyen as a veridical
history. The key issue at stake then is to determine the exact literary genre of Thien
Uyen.
Nguyen structures his book in three parts. Part I contains three chapters. Chapter one
discusses the date, authorship, and source materials of Thien Uyen and provides a
sketch of the history of Vietnamese Buddhism up to the fourteenth century. Chapter two
offers a textual and historical analysis of the text, noting the influence of Chinese Zen
classic Jingde chuandeng lu (Transmission of the Lamp Composed in the Jingde Era)
on the Vietnamese Buddhist understanding of Buddhist history and the use of the
"transmission of the lamp" paradigm in Vietnamese Buddhism. Having dismissed a
literal reading of Thien Uyen as a veridical history of Vietnamese Buddhism, the
author in chapter three retrieves its historical value as a rich source of information on
medieval Vietnamese Buddhism, especially its relation to literature, to socio-political
life, and to popular religion, and its doctrines and practices. On the basis of available
evidence, the author concludes that "Zen tradition or school in medieval Vietnam was,
more than anything, an imagined community .... Zen in medieval Vietnam was not an
institutionalized entity, but a more diffuse set of attitudes and styles spreading out
among its adherents -- a blend of life attitude and aesthetic taste and intellectual
vocabulary that held considerable appeal for some among the Vietnamese elite, offering a
life-style for today and a more abstract romantic visualization of the past of their
religion and their country" (p. 8).
Part II gives an English translation of Thien Uyen Tap Anh (pp. 103-205). Part
III comprises three appendixes, the first two offering additional supporting data for
chapters one and two of Part I, the third biographies of eminent monks from other sources,
and reproduction of the original Chinese-character text of Thien Uyen Tap Anh.
There is no doubt that Zen in Vietnam is a groundbreaking work. No future
historian of medieval Vietnamese Buddhism will be able to ignore its provocative thesis
regarding the historical value of one of the most important documents of Vietnamese
Buddhism and its reconstruction of Vietnamese Zen as an "imagined community" of
"philosophical attitudes, styles of ethical behavior, and artistic sentiments"
and not "a cohesive system of thought embraced by a recognizable lasting physical
community" (p. 99). If Cuong Nguyen is right in affirming that Thien Uyen is
not a homogenous collection of Zen biographies in the tradition of the "transmission
of the lamp texts" such as Jingde Chuadeng lu but a "polyphonic
pastiche" of biographies of eminent monks from various historical sources which were
recast by Vietnamese writers (mainly by Thong Bien in the eleventh century and Thuong
Chieu in the thirteenth century) into Zen biographies and then grafted onto the
genealogical tree of Chinese Zen (and Nguyen makes his case, persuasively to my mind, with
a formidable scholarly battery of 118 pages of dense notes!), then the common view that
there were three Zen schools in medieval Vietnam (i.e., Vinitaruci, Vo Ngon Thong, and
Thao Duong) must be radically revised.
For Vietnamese scholars of Buddhism, Nguyen's work has an added importance in that it
demonstrates that the historical-critical method must be an indispensable tool of their
craft. As shown in Zen in Medieval Vietnam, when wielded with competence and
intellectual honesty, this tool does not destroy the Buddhist faith but rather strengthens
it. For this methodological achievement as well as for its impeccable scholarship, Zen
in Medieval Vietnam will become a classic among studies on Vietnamese Buddhism.