Cao Dai Temple

Before we reached the delta proper, we made a brief stop at a temple.
The Cao Dai religion is the 3rd most popular in Vietnam after Buddhism and Christianity. In 1919 Ngo Van Chieu received a communication from the supreme deity during a table-moving séance. Chieu became the prophet of the new religion, which was formally established in 1926. A Cao Dai army was established in 1943 during the Japanese occupation of Indochina. After the war the Cao Dai was an effective force in national politics; it first supported, then opposed, Premier Ngo Dinh Diem. In 1955–56 Diem disbanded the Cao Dai army and forced the sect’s pope, Pham Cong Tac, into exile. After the communist takeover in 1975, Cao Dai was reportedly repressed by the government.

Vietnam has a very diverse set of religions, mostly folk religions and ancestor worship, but also Confucianism, Buddhism (several types), Taoism, Christianity, Mother Goddess worship and here found another sect with up to 4% of the population practicing Cao Dai.
“High Tower,” (Taoist for supreme god), is a modern (1929) Vietnamese religious universalist movement with a strongly nationalist political character. Cao Dai draws upon Confucianism, occult practices from Taoism, theories of karma and rebirth from Buddhism, and a hierarchical organization (including a pope) from Roman Catholicism. Its pantheon of saints includes such diverse figures as the Buddha, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Muhammed, Pericles, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo, and Sun Yat-sen. In Cao Dai, God is represented as an eye in a triangle, a symbol that appears on the facades of the sect’s temples.Read more