On the Shelf @ Vĩnh Nghiêm Pagoda, Ho Chi Minh City
A striking pagoda complex sprawling across some 6,000 square-metres, alongside the Nhieu Loc-Thi Nghe Canal in District Three (read all about this historic canal area on my chronicle, here ) Chùa Vĩnh Nghiêm, or Vinh Nghiem Pagoda, is Ho Chi Minh City's biggest Mahāyāna Buddhist pagoda. Mahāyāna Buddhism is Vietnam’s most predominant religion, rooted in Chinese Mahayana traditions developed with a distinctly Vietnamese twist.
Inaugurated 1971, Vinh Nghiem is also one of the city’s youngest pagodas, apparently the first in Vietnam constructed in traditional architectural style (based on the design of its 11th Century namesake in Bac Giang Province), infused with modern elements - most noticeably, concrete. And with construction funded by the Japan-Vietnam Friendship Association, Vĩnh Nghiêm unusually for Vietnam incorporates Japanese and Zen architectural influences, reminiscent of Buddhist religious sites in Japan.
Like
most pagodas in Vietnam, Chùa Vĩnh Nghiêm is a working religious site and is usually
bustling with worshippers. However, it also stands-out as an important Buddhist learning centre for nuns and monks, central to southern Vietnam's ongoing tradition of dedicated Buddhist beliefs and practices.
All very impressive. However, Vĩnh Nghiêm – translating as ‘ever solemn’ – has personal significance for me. Along with several other pagodas in HCMC, I visited Vĩnh Nghiêm upon my first arrival in Vietnam as an intrepid backpacker in 1998. I've visited here since on numerous occasions and then while living here an expat, brought along one or two friends to share the Vietnamese culture. Two decades later, unexpectedly living in HCMC once again, I live just a short stroll away and now visit often, and can see the pagoda’s highest structure, a seven-storey, 40-metre-high tower, from my apartment (palace) just across the canal- especially when it is stunningly illuminated for full moon Buddhist festivities.
There are numerous components to this pagoda complex, even down to a dedicated vegetarian restaurant, but you'll first pass by the aforementioned seven-storey tower standing beside the entrance gate, which contains a statue of Quan Am (Goddess of Mercy), on each level. On previous visits a while back, I climbed to the top of the tower; nowadays access seems to be prohibited with the stairwell blocked-off.
Also at the entrance gate, there are vendors selling incense, red candles and lotus flowers for prayer offerings, besides cages crammed with dozens of small birds. When departing the complex, set free some of these twittering sparrows and finches for the paltry amount of USD0.65 cents per bird.
This compassionate act of releasing captive animals is supposed to bring the liberator luck and blessings and cleanse any sins, besides earning merit or good karma used towards the next reincarnation. And we all need that.
Here, worshippers pay their respects, make offerings and pray for blessings; invariably there is a Buddhist service in progress, where brown or saffron-robed monks and nuns and devout Buddhist lay-practitioners chant mantras in unison to the hypnotic beat of a coconut drum. In the rear section, more deities are on display and altars consecrated to the dead are crammed with funerary tablets and corresponding photographs, allegedly placed for the first 100 days after their deaths.
Just outside the padoda main hall, past the fierce "entrance guards"....
Open to visitors and devotees year-round, it pays to pick the best time to visit. If you seek the peace and serenity of everyday worship, visit early morning on ‘normal days’ and avoid big celebrations, festivals and tour groups. As like most pagodas, aside from Tet, Lunar New Year - for photos and details about the Tet festivities at this pagoda, please check-out my chronicle
Important and colourful Buddhist festivals held here include Ram Thang Bay, Vietnam’s second most important festival after Tet. Celebrated on the 14th to 15th of the seventh lunar month, locals assist and pardon the destitute, homeless or wandering souls – both living and dead.
Hidden Devotee Relic Tower
For me, the complex’s most memorable component is the 25-metre-tall repository tower, or Devotee Relic Tower (Bao Thap Xa Loi Cong Dong), which stands behind the main pagoda.
To get here, head down the main hall’s outer stairs and along a peaceful inner courtyard, flanked by ground-floor classrooms for Buddhist teachings on the left and an annex wing housing the nun’s and monk’s living and study quarters on the right. Once up the stairs and through the narrow door of the Devotee Relic Tower, you enter another world, literally.
Surrounding a central altar and Goddess statue, hundreds of blue and white ceramic burial urns are neatly stacked on shelves extending up to the ceiling. Placed above an allocated number, each urn is labelled with the deceased’s date of birth and death and a poignant photograph- many of which indicate an unusually high proportion of young, including babies, lost forever in the ravages of the nation’s turbulent and tragic history.
Visiting relatives and loved ones come to pay their respects, sometimes draping mini garlands of fragrant jasmine flowers around the urn, accessing higher placed ones with a stepladder. All urns get regularly dusted down by the caretaker.
On my first visit here, the then caretaker was a grumpy old so-and-so, who continually scowled at me as I carefully trod around this cramped repository. But on recent visits, there’s been a more welcoming ‘gatekeeper’ whom I met on the stairs washing his feet with a hose pipe, even posing uninvited whilst I took a photo of the Relic Tower exterior. It was he who tactfully demonstrated with a rare burst of Vietnamese mime (no one speaks English here), to invert my small backpack while wandering along the narrow aisles in order to prevent me knocking an urn off the shelf and spilling the ‘contents’ all over the floor (the word “mortified” wouldn’t even come close).
Unlike the main pagoda, the Devotee Relic Tower’s opening hours are strictly adhered to, with a mandatory and extensive lunch break (the Vietnamese are obsessed with lunch, both planning and eating it, with almost everywhere closing or halting for lunch time). But then, when I arrived in good time at 8am, there was a private internment ceremony in progress.
I felt I’d not only outstayed my welcome but was consumed with a strong urge to flee to the land of the living, even if that meant back amongst HCMC's traffic chaos. It’s all rather an odd way to end up, ‘on the shelf’ literally.
Still, at least you’ll be in good company. Well hundreds, literally.
PS =
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