Cao Dai: The Vietnamese Faith With Victor Hugo as a Saint
Cao Dai is a Vietnamese religion declared at Tây Ninh in 1926. Its scripture arrived through spirit writing, and it took the Catholic vocabulary of pope and cardinal for a hierarchy of its own design. This guide covers the origins, the Divine Eye, the séances that produced the canon, the saints from Li Bai to Victor Hugo, and what ordinary Caodaist practice involves.
What is Cao Dai?
Cao Dai is a monotheistic Vietnamese religion founded in 1926 in the southern province of Tây Ninh, and its formal name, Đại Đạo Tam Kỳ Phổ Độ, means the Great Way of the Third Era of Redemption. Caodaists worship one supreme God, represented in Cao Dai temples by a single left eye ringed with rays, shown at the Tây Ninh Holy See on a blue globe, and they hold that this God has addressed humanity three times: through the sages of antiquity, then through Buddha, Laozi, Confucius, Moses and Jesus, and now directly, with no human prophet standing in between. The teaching that follows is inclusive by design. Buddhist karma and rebirth, Taoist inner cultivation, Confucian social duty, a Catholic-style clergy and French spiritism all sit inside one system, and Caodaists do not describe this as borrowing. They describe the older religions as partial deliveries of a single message now given whole. Cao Dai is often called the third largest religious body in Vietnam after Buddhism and Catholicism, but the ranking depends on whether church rolls or census returns are counted, and recent national censuses have placed it in the same range as Protestantism and Hòa Hảo rather than clearly ahead of them. Its center is the Holy See at Tây Ninh, roughly ninety kilometers northwest of Ho Chi Minh City, and its congregations run through the Mekong Delta and into Vietnamese communities in the United States, Australia, Canada and France.
The name is a deliberate refusal to name. Cao Đài means high tower or high palace, a Taoist-flavored circumlocution for a God the tradition holds to be past description, and the longer liturgical address, Cao Đài Tiên Ông Đại Bồ Tát Ma Ha Tát, stacks a Taoist immortal and a Buddhist mahasattva into one title. Cao Dai is also not one organization. Disputes over authority and revelation in the 1930s produced roughly a dozen denominations, of which Tây Ninh is by far the largest. Ban Chỉnh Đạo, based at Bến Tre and led by Nguyễn Ngọc Tương from 1934, is the second largest; Tiên Thiên, Minh Chơn Lý and Minh Chơn Đạo followed. The Chiếu Minh line, traced back to the first disciple, keeps no clergy at all and concentrates on meditation. Janet Hoskins, whose book The Divine Eye and the Diaspora studies Caodaism in Vietnam and California, works across several of these branches. What holds them together is a shared inheritance: the Divine Eye, the three-era doctrine and most of the same scripture. What separates them is authority rather than creed, which is why a Caodaist from one denomination can usually follow a service in another.
What does the name Cao Dai mean?
Cao Đài means high tower or high palace in Sino-Vietnamese, and Caodaists use it precisely because it names a seat rather than a person. The tradition holds that God has no form a human word can fix, so the revelation arrived under a title borrowed from Taoist usage for the highest heavenly palace. In prayer, followers more often say Đức Chí Tôn, the Most High.
Is Cao Dai a syncretic religion or a new religion?
Both labels fit, and Caodaists prefer the second. Outsiders call Cao Dai syncretic because Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian and Christian figures share one altar. Caodaists answer that a religion holding all earlier revelations to come from the same source is restoring one teaching rather than blending several. The standard scholarly classification is a new religion, founded in 1926, whose content is syncretic.
How many branches of Cao Dai are there?
About a dozen Caodaist denominations exist, though the count shifts depending on how small groups are treated. Tây Ninh, whose Holy See holds the largest following, is the reference point. Ban Chỉnh Đạo at Bến Tre, Tiên Thiên, Minh Chơn Lý and Minh Chơn Đạo all emerged from disputes over authority and competing spirit messages during the 1930s, and the Chiếu Minh line practices esoteric meditation with no hierarchy.
How did Cao Dai begin, and who founded it?
Cao Dai began in two separate circles of French-educated Vietnamese civil servants holding spirit séances in the early 1920s, and it was publicly declared in 1926. The first thread runs through Ngô Văn Chiêu, a district administrator in the colonial service posted to Phú Quốc island, who had been receiving messages from a spirit calling itself Cao Đài and who reported a vision of a single eye in the sky in 1921. He took the vision as instruction on how God wished to be depicted. The second thread runs through three young clerks in Saigon, Cao Quỳnh Cư, Phạm Công Tắc and Cao Hoài Sang, who took up table-turning in 1925 and were answered by a spirit signing itself with the first three letters of the Vietnamese alphabet before identifying himself as the same Cao Đài. The two groups found each other in 1926. On October 7 of that year a declaration of the new religion, carrying hundreds of signatures, was submitted to Le Fol, the French governor of Cochinchina, and the founding ceremonies were held that November at the Gò Kén pagoda in Tây Ninh. Lê Văn Trung, a former member of the Colonial Council of Cochinchina, became the senior human leader and held the office of Quyền Giáo Tông, acting pope, since Tây Ninh doctrine reserves the papacy itself for a spirit.
Ngô Văn Chiêu declined the papacy and withdrew, taking his followers into the contemplative Chiếu Minh line, which practices inner cultivation without ranks or public ceremony. Phạm Công Tắc took the office of Hộ Pháp and became the movement's dominant figure for the next three decades. Growth was fast enough to worry the French administration, which read the movement as nationalism in liturgical dress. Colonial era estimates of how many people had joined within the first few years ran into the hundreds of thousands, but those figures were rough and no reliable count survives. That reading was not baseless. During and after the Japanese occupation Cao Dai raised its own militia, held territory around Tây Ninh, and negotiated in turn with the Japanese, the French and the Việt Minh. Graham Greene set a scene at a Cao Dai festival in Tây Ninh in The Quiet American, published in 1955. That same year Ngô Đình Diệm moved against the armed sects, the Caodaist forces were broken up, and Phạm Công Tắc left for Cambodia in 1956. He died in Phnom Penh in 1959.
Who was Ngô Văn Chiêu?
Ngô Văn Chiêu, born in 1878, was a Vietnamese official in the French colonial administration and the first person to receive messages from the spirit Cao Đài, beginning around 1920. His 1921 vision of a single eye gave the religion its emblem. He refused the papal office offered to him in 1926, led the small esoteric Chiếu Minh branch instead, and died in 1932.
What happened at the Christmas Eve séance of 1925?
At the Christmas Eve séance of 1925 the Saigon circle recorded a message in which the spirit they had known only by three initials declared himself to be God, come under the name Cao Đài to found a religion in the south of Vietnam. Caodaists date the founding revelation to that night, and they read the choice of Christmas Eve as a signal that the God of the Christians and the Cao Đài of the séances are one and the same.
Why did French colonial authorities distrust Cao Dai?
French officials distrusted Cao Dai because it recruited quickly among the very Vietnamese clerks the administration depended on, built a parallel hierarchy with its own territory near the Cambodian border, and drew on Vietnamese messianic expectation. The colonial police kept the movement under surveillance from its earliest years, and the administration later restricted Caodaist preaching outside the southern colony of Cochinchina.
What do Caodaists believe about God, the Divine Eye, and the soul?
Caodaists believe in one God, called Đức Chí Tôn, who brought the universe into being together with a feminine counterpart known as the Mother Goddess, and who is represented in every Cao Dai temple by a single left eye set on a blue globe. That emblem is the Thiên Nhãn, the Divine Eye, and it is the only representation of God used in Caodaist worship. An eye rather than a face keeps God unportrayed while asserting that God sees everything, and the left eye follows the Sino-Vietnamese convention in which the left side carries yang, the active male principle, answered by the yin of the Mother Goddess. Human beings, in Caodaist teaching, carry a spark of that God. A person is made of three parts: the physical body, a spiritual body, the perispirit of French spiritist vocabulary, which outlives death and is strengthened or damaged by conduct, and the soul proper, which is divine in origin. Karma and rebirth work much as they do in Buddhism. The aim of practice is to end the cycle and return to the source, which Caodaists picture as an ascent through nine heavens and a homecoming to the Mother Goddess.
The doctrine that organizes all of this is the three eras. In the first era, Caodaists hold, God's word came through figures of remote antiquity; in the second it came through Sakyamuni, Laozi, Confucius, Moses and Jesus. Each delivery was then distorted by distance, translation and priestly interest. The third era, opened in 1926, is described as a general amnesty in which God teaches directly through the séance so that no human intermediary can corrupt the message again. That single claim drives the whole system. It explains why other religions are honored instead of refuted, why their founders sit on the altar, and why Cao Dai claims to be the last revelation there will be. Two paths run inside it. Phổ độ, the exoteric path, works through ritual, merit and community life. Vô vi, the esoteric path, works through meditation and inner alchemy, and it is what the Chiếu Minh line has practiced since the 1920s.
Why is the Divine Eye a left eye?
The Divine Eye is a left eye because the left side carries yang in Sino-Vietnamese cosmology, the active male principle Caodaists assign to God, answered by the yin of the Mother Goddess. Caodaist accounts also tie the choice to Ngô Văn Chiêu's 1921 vision. He reported seeing a single eye, asked for it to appear again before he would trust it, and took the repetition as his instruction.
Who is the Mother Goddess in Cao Dai?
The Mother Goddess, Diêu Trì Kim Mẫu or Phật Mẫu, is the feminine principle who gives form to the creation that God originates, and she has her own temple beside the Holy See instead of a place on the main altar. Her festival on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month is one of the largest Caodaist gatherings of the year. She is identified with the Queen Mother of the West of Chinese tradition.
What do Caodaists believe happens after death?
Caodaists believe the spiritual body separates from the physical one and travels through a series of heavens, judged by the merit accumulated in life. Funeral practice reflects that itinerary directly: a sequence of nine services held at nine-day intervals accompanies the soul stage by stage, followed by a smaller and then a larger memorial rite in the years afterward. Souls not yet released return to another birth.
How did spirit séances produce Cao Dai's scripture and its hierarchy?
Cao Dai's scripture, its religious law and even its clerical appointments were produced by spirit writing, a practice Caodaists call cơ bút. The main instrument was the ngọc cơ, described in French sources as a corbeille-à-bec: a light basket with a wooden beak or stylus fixed to it, held by two mediums whose combined movement traced characters that one attendant read aloud while another wrote them down. Sessions ran at fixed hours in a consecrated space, with witnesses present, and the transcripts were checked and compiled afterward. Those transcripts are the canon. Thánh Ngôn Hiệp Tuyển, the Collection of Divine Messages, gathers the revelations. The Tân Luật, or New Code, sets religious law. The Pháp Chánh Truyền, the Religious Constitution, defines the clerical offices, their vestments, their fixed numbers and their powers. Individual promotions were handled the same way, which placed a supernatural warrant behind an ordinary administrative act. What distinguishes Cao Dai is that the séance was treated as a legal instrument rather than a private experience. For the general question of what channeled inspiration is said to feel like, see Master Number 11 Meaning: The Intuitive Visionary.
Control over who could hold the basket mattered more than any point of doctrine. The Hiệp Thiên Đài, the body charged with communication between heaven and earth, licensed mediums, set the hours and ruled on whether a message was genuine. Caodaist regulations warn repeatedly about tà quái, deceiving spirits who impersonate saints, and the safeguards were procedural: mediums working in pairs, questions withheld or sealed, transcripts compared against existing scripture. Those safeguards did not settle everything. Rival séances produced rival appointments, and the schisms of the 1930s turned in part on whose transcripts were authentic. Jérémy Jammes, a French scholar who has written at length on Caodaist spirit writing, has traced that history in detail. Read as an institution rather than as a devotional practice, the séance was the movement's administrative machinery: it filled offices, settled disputes and made law. After 1975 the Vietnamese state suppressed the practice, and the Tây Ninh church now treats its canon as closed.
What is a corbeille-à-bec?
A corbeille-à-bec is a small basket whose projecting wooden beak does the writing, held by two people so that neither can claim sole authorship of what comes out. The device reached Vietnam through French spiritist circles in the colonial period. Caodaists call it the ngọc cơ, and Caodaist practice requires two holders, on the reasoning that a message no single person produced is harder to fake.
Who was allowed to conduct a Cao Dai séance?
Only mediums attached to the Hiệp Thiên Đài and authorized by it could conduct a séance, and they worked in appointed pairs at set hours with scribes and witnesses recording the session. Ordinary members were not permitted to hold the basket. The restriction was doctrinal as well as practical, since an unlicensed message that contradicted the canon could not be tested and might come from a deceiving spirit.
Are Cao Dai séances still held today?
Official séances stopped at Tây Ninh after 1975, when Vietnamese authorities banned the practice, and the Tây Ninh church holds that the canon received between 1925 and the mid-twentieth century is complete. Some independent Caodaist groups and diaspora congregations have continued or revived spirit writing privately, which is one of the disputes that keeps the denominations apart.
Why is Victor Hugo a saint in Cao Dai?
Victor Hugo is venerated in Cao Dai because Caodaist mediums received messages signed by him in the 1920s, and the religion appointed his spirit to lead its foreign mission. Hugo carries the religious name Nguyệt Tâm Chơn Nhơn, and he was named the guiding spirit of the Hội Thánh Ngoại Giáo, the overseas missionary church at Phnom Penh, which grew out of the Cambodian mission the religion opened in its first years. Three things made that appointment legible to the first Caodaists. Hugo had been a practicing spiritist himself: during his exile on Jersey between 1853 and 1855 he took part in dozens of table-turning sessions, transcribed at the time and published long afterward as Les Tables tournantes de Jersey. His novels, above all Les Misérables, belonged to the French curriculum that formed the colonial-era Vietnamese middle class, and his politics of mercy toward the poor read easily as a religious message. A French patron for a Vietnamese religion under French rule also solved a practical problem. Hugo now appears on the front wall of the Holy See at Tây Ninh, in academic dress, writing out the covenant of the Third Amnesty.
The mural shows the Tam Thánh, the Three Saints of the third era, signing that covenant on behalf of humanity. Sun Yat-sen holds the inkstone. Hugo writes in French, Dieu et Humanité, Amour et Justice. Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm, the Vietnamese poet and diviner who died in 1585, writes the same sense in Chinese characters. The grouping is a political statement as much as a religious one: a Chinese revolutionary, a French writer of the republican left and a Vietnamese scholar-prophet, standing together for a religion born in a French colony. European visitors of the period rarely took it seriously, and the narrator of The Quiet American describes the Holy See with open condescension. Caodaists give an internal account instead: the appointment came through the séance, Hugo accepted a mission to the West, and the religion regards that mission as unfinished. Janet Hoskins, writing about Caodaists in Vietnam and California, records how communities in both places tell that story.
What is Victor Hugo's name and rank in Cao Dai?
Victor Hugo is known in Cao Dai as Nguyệt Tâm Chơn Nhơn, and his rank is spiritual head of the overseas missionary church, the Hội Thánh Ngoại Giáo, based at Phnom Penh. He holds the office in spirit. That is normal in Cao Dai, where several senior positions belong to beings who issue their instructions through mediums while living clergy carry them out.
Was Victor Hugo really a spiritualist?
Yes. Hugo took part in table-turning sessions at Marine Terrace on Jersey between 1853 and 1855, after the poet Delphine de Girardin introduced the practice to his exiled household, and the family recorded the transcripts. They were published long after his death as Les Tables tournantes de Jersey. Caodaists cite this history as evidence that Hugo was already prepared for the role he was later given.
What does the mural on the Holy See show?
The mural on the front wall of the Tây Ninh Holy See shows three figures signing a covenant between God and humanity: Sun Yat-sen with an inkstone, Victor Hugo writing in French, and the Vietnamese poet Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm writing in Chinese characters. The text they inscribe promises love and justice between God and humankind, and it announces the Third Amnesty on which the whole religion rests.
Who else is venerated in the Cao Dai pantheon?
The Cao Dai pantheon is arranged in ranked tiers on the main altar beneath the Divine Eye, and the figures on it come from four traditions. Directly below the eye sit the founders of the Three Teachings: Sakyamuni Buddha for Buddhism, Laozi for Taoism, Confucius for the Confucian way. Beneath them are the Tam Trấn Oai Nghiêm, the three guardians of the present era, each representing one teaching now: the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai, called Lý Thái Bạch in Vietnamese, for Taoism; the bodhisattva Quan Âm, Guanyin, for Buddhism; and the deified general Quan Thánh Đế Quân, Guan Yu, for the Confucian branch. Below them is Jesus, and below Jesus the Zhou dynasty strategist Khương Thái Công, Jiang Ziya, who represents the cult of spirits and local deities that Caodaists call Thần đạo. The tiers are doctrine rather than decoration. They map the Ngũ Chi Đại Đạo, the five degrees of the Great Way, running upward from the way of humanity through the ways of spirits, saints, immortals and buddhas.
Readers who know the New Age vocabulary of ascended masters will notice a family resemblance, and that framework is set out in Angel Number 333 Meaning: Ascended Masters & Creative Expression. Caodaists do not use it, and the difference is worth keeping. The altar is a constitution, with each tier tied to a rank of the clergy and a stage of spiritual progress, not a gallery of enlightened teachers assembled by preference. Popular accounts of the early séances name a longer cast of correspondents. Jeanne d'Arc turns up in Caodaist sources themselves; journalism and travel writing have added Shakespeare, Descartes, Louis Pasteur and Lenin, and the names change from one telling to the next. A name in a transcript is a different thing from a rank on the altar, and only a handful of spirits hold rank. One figure has a temple to herself: the Mother Goddess is honored at the Báo Ân Từ beside the Holy See, and her festival at the mid-autumn full moon draws crowds larger than most ordinary services.
Who is Li Bai in Cao Dai?
Li Bai, the Tang poet who lived from 701 to 762, is venerated in Cao Dai as Lý Thái Bạch and holds one of the highest offices in the religion. He represents Taoism among the three guardians of the present era, and Tây Ninh Caodaists regard him as the Giáo Tông in spirit, the pope who has governed through mediums since Lê Văn Trung, who held the office in an acting capacity, died in 1934.
Is Jesus worshiped in Cao Dai?
Jesus is venerated in Cao Dai as one of the great messengers of the second era, and he occupies a tier on the main altar, below the guardians and above Jiang Ziya. Caodaists honor him without accepting Christian doctrine about him. He is a divine teacher whose message was distorted in transmission, which is the account they give of Buddha, Laozi and Confucius too.
Who are the Three Saints of the Third Amnesty?
The Three Saints, or Tam Thánh, are Sun Yat-sen, Victor Hugo and Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm, painted on the front wall of the Tây Ninh Holy See signing the covenant between God and humanity. They are not the same group as the three guardians on the altar. The Three Saints witness the third revelation on behalf of humankind, while the guardians each govern one of the three teachings.
What is the Tây Ninh Holy See, and how is the Cao Dai clergy organized?
The Tây Ninh Holy See, Tòa Thánh Tây Ninh, is Cao Dai's mother temple and administrative capital, a pastel-colored building roughly a hundred meters long with twin bell towers, begun in the early 1930s, structurally finished in 1947 and formally inaugurated in 1955. Its nave rises in nine levels toward the sanctuary, one for each rank of the clergy, and worshippers stand at the level their office allows. Columns wrapped in painted dragons run down both sides, and a great blue globe carrying the Divine Eye and a field of stars fills the sanctuary. Governance is divided among three bodies. The Bát Quái Đài is the invisible palace of God and the saints. The Hiệp Thiên Đài, headed by the Hộ Pháp, handles communication with heaven and judicial matters. The Cửu Trùng Đài, the executive body headed by the Giáo Tông, runs the church on earth. Its ranks descend from Giáo Tông through Chưởng Pháp, Đầu Sư, Phối Sư, Giáo Sư, Giáo Hữu and Lễ Sanh, and the Religious Constitution fixes how many people each level may hold.
The Catholic comparison is useful and then misleading. Cao Dai borrowed the vocabulary of pope, cardinal, bishop and priest, and its clergy wear robes in three colors marking three doctrinal branches: yellow for Thái, the Buddhist branch, azure for Thượng, the Taoist branch, and red for Ngọc, the Confucian branch. What has no Catholic parallel is that the senior office has stood empty on earth since 1934. Lê Văn Trung died in 1934, no successor was ever installed, and Tây Ninh holds that Li Bai occupies the post in spirit. Women have their own parallel hierarchy under a female Đầu Sư, wear white, and are barred by the Religious Constitution from the two highest ranks, a restriction some Caodaists defend as revealed and others treat as a product of its time. Below the clergy, village-level lay dignitaries handle everyday parish business.
What ranks exist in the Cao Dai clergy?
The Cao Dai clergy runs from Giáo Tông at the top through Chưởng Pháp, Đầu Sư, Phối Sư, Giáo Sư, Giáo Hữu and Lễ Sanh, with lay dignitaries below that serving local congregations. The Religious Constitution caps most levels at a set number, thirty-six archbishops and seventy-two bishops among them. Promotion therefore waits on a death or a resignation, however fast a congregation grows.
Can women become Cao Dai clergy?
Women can be ordained in Cao Dai and staff a parallel female hierarchy that reaches the rank of Đầu Sư, roughly cardinal, but the Religious Constitution bars them from the two highest offices. Lâm Hương Thanh was among the most prominent early women in the movement. The restriction is contested inside Caodaism, since the same constitution is held to have been received by revelation.
Who leads Cao Dai today?
No human pope has led Cao Dai since Lê Văn Trung died in 1934. The Tây Ninh denomination has been run since 1979 by a Governing Council operating with Vietnamese state approval, an arrangement independent Caodaists dispute on the grounds that it was created by the government rather than by revelation. Other denominations govern themselves separately.
What does everyday Caodaist practice involve?
Everyday Caodaist practice centers on four prayer services a day, kept at six in the morning, noon, six in the evening and midnight, performed either at a temple or at a home altar. A devout follower wears a white áo dài, offers five sticks of incense, and presents flowers, wine and tea, which Caodaists read as the three vital principles of the person: essence, breath and spirit. The liturgy is chanted, often to a small ensemble of Vietnamese instruments, and the texts are in Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese. Members keep five precepts against killing, stealing, sensual excess, intoxication and dishonest speech, and observe vegetarian days on a fixed monthly schedule. Larger services fall on the first and the fifteenth of each lunar month, when a congregation gathers in full vestments and the temple orchestra plays. Readers looking for a personal ritual to mark the same lunar points will find that covered in Full Moon Rituals: Release, Celebrate & Harness Lunar Power, which is a different exercise from a Caodaist ceremony with a fixed liturgy and an assigned place in the nave.
The visible center of community life is the funeral. Caodaist funerary practice is elaborate, runs for months, and calls out members of the congregation to chant the successive services that accompany the soul, which keeps the local temple busy on ordinary weekdays and gives lay members a standing job in it. Alongside the daily services sit four rules of conduct governing obedience, honesty toward fellow members, avoidance of slander and care in how one speaks about the religion to outsiders. Discipline has teeth: a member who wants the full funeral rites is expected to have kept the higher vegetarian schedule. In the diaspora, congregations in California, Texas and Australia have adapted, holding a main service on Sundays for people who cannot attend at noon on a working day, and printing bilingual liturgies for children who read English more easily than Sino-Vietnamese.
How often do Caodaists pray?
Caodaists pray four times a day, at six in the morning, at noon, at six in the evening and at midnight. A follower who cannot reach a temple keeps the same hours at a home altar. Practice varies as it does in any large religion. Many members keep one or two of the four services and save the temple for the ceremonies on the first and fifteenth of the lunar month.
What do the offerings on a Cao Dai altar mean?
A Cao Dai altar carries flowers, wine and tea, standing for the three treasures of the human being in Taoist physiology: essence, breath and spirit. Five sticks of incense are offered, counted as five stages of cultivation. Fruit and a lamp representing the divine light complete the setting. The offerings are read as a diagram of the person, presented back to God. None of it is understood as food for a deity.
What do Caodaists wear?
Lay Caodaists wear a plain white áo dài for services, men adding a black turban-style headpiece. Clergy wear robes in the color of their branch: yellow for the Buddhist branch, azure for the Taoist branch, red for the Confucian branch, with women in white regardless of rank. The uniformity is deliberate, since a Cao Dai congregation is arranged by rank and the vestments make that arrangement legible at a glance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Cao Dai a form of Buddhism?
Cao Dai is not a form of Buddhism, though it takes a great deal from Buddhism and honors Sakyamuni on its main altar. The decisive difference is monotheism. Caodaists worship a personal creator God who speaks to them through mediums, and a creator God of that kind has no place in Buddhist doctrine. The mistake is easy to make, since Cao Dai accepts karma and rebirth, keeps vegetarian days and uses Buddhist vocabulary throughout. Vietnamese religious statistics count the two separately.
How many Cao Dai followers are there today?
Estimates of Cao Dai membership vary widely and depend entirely on who is counting. Vietnam's national census figures put the number in the hundreds of thousands, while Caodaist organizations and the state committee on religious affairs have cited figures ranging from about one million to several million. The gap comes from method: a census asks people to name a religion, while church counts include everyone who has been initiated or whose family is affiliated. Most reference works give a range of two to four million, and any single precise number should be treated with caution.
Can someone who is not Vietnamese join Cao Dai?
Yes. Cao Dai holds a universal mission and appointed a missionary church for the world outside Vietnam within its first decade, so non-Vietnamese converts are doctrinally welcome. In practice, joining means a formal initiation ceremony with a sponsor, a commitment to the five precepts and to the monthly vegetarian schedule, and attendance at services. The obstacle is language. The liturgy is chanted in Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese, and most congregations outside Vietnam serve Vietnamese-speaking communities in the United States, Australia, Canada and France.
Do Caodaists have to be vegetarian?
Caodaists are required to keep vegetarian days rather than a permanently meatless diet, at least until they take on higher obligations. New members observe six vegetarian days each lunar month. Those seeking the full rites of the religion, including the funeral services, are expected to keep ten days a month, and clergy and candidates for ordination keep a full vegetarian diet. The schedule tightens as a member advances, because Cao Dai treats dietary discipline as a measure of progress that has to be earned in stages.
Can tourists visit the Cao Dai temple at Tây Ninh, and what should they wear?
Tourists can visit the Tây Ninh Holy See, and the noon service is the one most day trips from Ho Chi Minh City are timed around. Visitors are asked to dress modestly with shoulders and knees covered, to remove their shoes before entering, and to keep off the central aisle, which is reserved for the clergy. Observation from the upper gallery is normal for outsiders, and quiet photography from there is generally tolerated. Follow the stewards, since men and women are directed to separate sides of the nave.
Is Cao Dai legal in Vietnam today?
Cao Dai is legal in Vietnam, and the Tây Ninh denomination received official state recognition in 1997. Recognition came with conditions. The church has been administered since 1979 by a Governing Council formed under state supervision, spirit writing remains prohibited, and clerical appointments are subject to government approval. Caodaist groups that reject the state-approved council and claim continuity with the pre-1975 church are not recognized, and annual United States government reports on religious freedom have documented pressure on those independent congregations.
What is the difference between Cao Dai and Hòa Hảo?
Cao Dai and Hòa Hảo are separate southern Vietnamese religions founded thirteen years apart, and they are close to opposites in form. Cao Dai, declared in 1926, is monotheistic and syncretic, with elaborate temples, a papal hierarchy and a liturgy received through séances. Hòa Hảo, founded in 1939 by Huỳnh Phú Sổ in the Mekong Delta, is a reformist Buddhist movement that rejects temples, images, clergy and ceremony in favor of simple worship at home before a plain brown cloth. Both fielded armed forces in the 1940s and 1950s, which is why they are often grouped together.
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