Tố Quốc

[Vsg] Tổ sư in the XXIst century

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Mike High <mike.high@earthlink.net>

Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 9:34 AM

For me, the discussion of "Tổ Quốc" immediately brought to mind the Tổ Sư “patriarchs” of the Zen tradition, always a male, and classically part of a lineage that stretches back to Ma-Ha-Ca-Diếp (Kaspaya).

In my travels in the south, I have been very interested to find well-established temples with a patriarchal lineage that now have a female chief. This is not that surprising, giving the much larger number of nuns, compared to monks. 

But it does raise some complex issues that might make for an interesting anthropological study—for instance, what sort of ceremonies are performed to confirm the “Ni Trưởng” as head of a formerly male-led pagoda? How does the tradition of the “transmission of the lamp” from master to disciple work in a “post-patriarchal” world? How does the Ni Trưởng manage the community of monks at the pagoda, if they stay on? On a regional scale, I would also imagine that there have been dramatic changes in the Buddhist hierarchies, educational practices at Buddhist schools, etc. 

I’m also curious as to whether the government, through its provincial Buddhist associations and state-approved religious schools, has encouraged the promotion of nuns and the appointment of abbesses at pagodas that were formerly male monastic communities. I’ve encountered at least two cases where a woman was appointed head of a famous pagoda in the last year or two of the RVN—did the Buddhist leadership make these last-minute appointments because the women were thought to be better able to deal with the revolutionary ideology that was about to be imposed? Or because they had less of a “biography” to be held against them by the new regime? In the cases that I am aware of, the women were able to continue in their positions under the new order, and now are fully “ordained” by the government, with an array of awards and titles that includes membership in the aforementioned Mặt Trận Tổ Quốc Việt Nam.

If anyone has already done some research along these lines, I’d love to hear about it.  

:: Mike High

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