Vietnam

⚠  Provisional Entry  ⚠ This article provides an overview compiled by the editorial team, but it is explicitly slated for future expansion and revision by a dedicated specialist. See discussion page for further information.

Vietnamese Buddhism is predominantly Mahayana, combining Pure Land (Tịnh Độ) devotionalism with Thiền (Chan/Zen) self-cultivation, alongside popular millenarian offshoots such as the Hòa Hảo and Cao Đài. Its modern history has been shaped by French colonial rule, the Buddhist Revival of the 1920s and 1930s, the wars of 1945–1975, and, after 1975, a socialist state that maintains tight control over religious institutions. Buddhism's most consequential twentieth-century political moment was the 1963 crisis, in which the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức and a nonviolent "struggle movement" helped bring down the Ngô Đình Diệm government. Despite this history of religio-political mobilization, and despite claims by some Vietnamese Marxist historians of a substantive Buddhist–Marxist "dialogue," the available scholarship (chiefly Shawn McHale) indicates that Vietnamese Buddhism and Vietnamese Marxism developed in largely separate, non-overlapping spheres of discourse. Radical Buddhism as an explicit fusion of Buddhist doctrine with left-wing political thought has, at least so far as current research shows, no clear representative in Vietnam.

Buddhism in Vietnam

Buddhism entered Vietnam in the early centuries CE and, by the medieval period, enjoyed sustained royal patronage under the Lý and Trần dynasties. From the fourteenth century, neo-Confucian court literati increasingly criticized the sangha for corruption and incompetence, and Confucianism displaced Buddhism as the dominant elite ideology under the Later Lê and Nguyễn dynasties. Historians have traditionally read this as evidence of a long Buddhist "decline," but Thien Do has argued that this narrative reflects an elite, text-centered bias and understates the religion's continuing vitality among ordinary people, especially in the newly settled southern regions.

The colonial period (from the 1860s) brought a genuine institutional crisis: fewer monks could read the Chinese-language sutras central to Vietnamese Buddhist textual authority, and reformers on all sides — Buddhist and secular alike — diagnosed a religion "filled with superstition." In response, a Buddhist Revival took shape from the 1920s, centered on Saigon's Linh Sơn temple and modeled explicitly on the contemporary Chinese Buddhist Revival associated with Taixu. Revivalists founded study associations, opened monastic schools, and, aided by the new colonial print culture, published hundreds of romanized-script sutras, catechisms, and magazines (e.g., Pháp Âm, Từ Bi Âm) aimed at both a small revivalist readership and a much larger popular Pure Land audience. By the mid-1930s this print-driven renewal, which began in the south, had spread to central and northern Vietnam.

Alongside the textual Revival, the same decades saw popular millenarian Buddhism flourish independently, most importantly in the Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương tradition and its twentieth-century successor, the Hòa Hảo movement founded by Huỳnh Phú Sổ in 1939, which fused Pure Land devotionalism, Zen, and Maitreyan apocalypticism into a mass politico-religious movement that came to control large areas of the Mekong Delta. The syncretic Cao Đài religion emerged from a related milieu.

The Vietnam War brought Buddhism to the center of national politics. In 1963, the Diệm government's discriminatory religious policies provoked mass protest; the self-immolation of the monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon that July, followed by several further self-immolations, galvanized the Unified Buddhist Church's "struggle movement" and contributed directly to Diệm's overthrow. After reunification in 1975, the socialist state subordinated the sangha to a single state-sponsored body (the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha), while the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, which refused to join it, was suppressed; tension between the socialist state and religious institutions has persisted since.

Radical Buddhism in Vietnam

Vietnam presents an unusual case for the RBP: despite a wealth of politically consequential Buddhist activity in the twentieth century, there is little evidence of any sustained fusion of Buddhist doctrine with left-wing political thought of the kind found elsewhere in Buddhist Asia. The historian Trần Văn Giau argued that "progressive" Buddhists of the 1920s–1930s understood their religion within a framework of genuine Buddhist–Marxist dialogue and shared anti-colonial struggle. Shawn McHale's detailed study of the period disputes this claim directly: Marxists and Buddhists, he argues, "had sharply different answers to what may seem like analogous concerns with enlightenment, equality, and liberation from suffering," and virtually no direct debate between the two camps took place. The two currents occupied overlapping but distinct social spheres: Marxist writing circulated mainly among urban male youth, Buddhist print culture mainly among rural women, and the two rarely addressed each other directly.

What Marxist engagement with Buddhism did exist took the form of one-sided critique rather than dialogue. Đào Duy Anh's Tôn giáo [Religion] (1929) and Nguyễn An Ninh's Phê bình Phật giáo [Critique of Buddhism] (1938) both dismissed Buddhism as an idealist, otherworldly doctrine unsuited to a "scientific" modern age, though neither seriously engaged the specifics of contemporary Vietnamese Buddhist practice, and both writers retained a degree of respect for Buddhism's original philosophical content. The reform monk Thiện Chiếu, an important early translator of Taixu's writings into Vietnamese, represents the clearest individual trajectory from Buddhist modernism toward Marxism: he eventually left the sangha, was arrested for Communist Party membership in 1943, but continued to express appreciation for Buddhist doctrine even after his departure. His case illustrates a personal movement from Buddhism to Marxism rather than a synthesis of the two.

The post-1963 "struggle movement" associated with the Unified Buddhist Church was avowedly nationalist and pacifist rather than socialist. Its own 1963 declaration explicitly stated that Vietnamese Buddhism "does not aim to topple the government" and grounded its demands in religious equality and nonviolence rather than a critique of capitalism or class. No figure or organization surveyed in the current literature articulates a program comparable to, for instance, Seno'o Girō's Buddhist socialism in Japan or Buddhadasa's Dhammic socialism in Thailand. Pending further research, this entry treats Vietnam as a country with a rich history of politically engaged, nationalist, and modernizing Buddhism, but with no clearly documented radical Buddhist tradition in the sense defined by the RBP.

Thích Nhất Hạnh's Engaged Buddhism

Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926–2022), who coined the term "engaged Buddhism," is the best-known Vietnamese Buddhist figure of the modern period. Ordained in 1947 and active in the peace movement and refugee relief during the 1960s and '70s, he lived in exile from 1966 until 2018. His central influence was the Chinese reformer Yìnshùn, and the term "engaged Buddhism" itself translates Nhân gian Phật giáo, the Vietnamese rendering of Yìnshùn's (and originally Taixu's) "Buddhism in the human world." Like Yìnshùn, Nhất Hạnh stressed individual bodhisattva practice and explicitly rejected partisan political engagement, writing that "to engage in partisan political action that leads to a power struggle among opposing parties" is not what he meant by Buddhist practice. Sally King has argued that this position leaves no constructive role for Buddhists in shaping political systems, only protest against injustice. James Mark Shields goes further, arguing that Nhất Hạnh's later writings on business and leadership (e.g., The Art of Power) pair "spiritual power" with material success, invoke the Mauryan emperor Aśoka as a model of benevolent hierarchy rather than a challenge to hierarchy as such, and thereby exemplify precisely the kind of domesticated, individualized Buddhist ethics that a radical Buddhist critique of labor and capitalism must reject.

Literature in English

• Do, Thien (1999). "The Quest for Enlightenment and Cultural Identity: Buddhism in Contemporary Vietnam". In: Harris, Ian (Ed.), Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth-Century Asia: 254–283. Cassell. [The most comprehensive English-language survey of modern Vietnamese Buddhist history, covering the Buddhist Revival, millenarian movements, the 1963 crisis, and postwar state–sangha relations; argues against a straightforward decline narrative.]
• McHale, Shawn (1995). "Imagining Human Liberation: Vietnamese Buddhists and the Marxist Critique of Religion, 1920–1939". Social Compass 42.3: 329–344. [The key source for this entry's central claim: a close reading of Marxist critiques of Buddhism (Đào Duy Anh, Nguyễn An Ninh) that argues against Trần Văn Giau's thesis of a genuine interwar Buddhist–Marxist dialogue.]

Literature in Vietnamese

• Nguyễn Lang (1994). Việt Nam Phật giáo sử luận [Essays on the History of Vietnamese Buddhism], Vol. 3 (repub.). Văn Học. [A major Vietnamese-language history of the modern Buddhist Revival, extensively relied upon by Thien Do (1999) for the institutional and biographical detail of the 1920s–1960s. (Not consulted for this page.)]
• Trần Văn Giau (1975). Sự phát triển của tư tưởng ở Việt Nam [The Development of Thought in Vietnam], Vol. II. Nhà xuất bản Khoa học Xã hội. [Advances the thesis, disputed by McHale (1995), that interwar Vietnamese Buddhists and Marxists engaged in substantive ideological dialogue. (Not consulted for this page.)]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Vietnam". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 6 August 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Vietnam.