Chua Mia and Chua Thay

The Red River Delta surrounding Hanoi is famous for the stinginess of its soil and the destructiveness of its floods. It is also famous for the extraordinary capacity of its population to survive on the meager offerings of nature. Given floods, people have constructed dikes. Given clay soil, they have made bricks and built villages. Given unpromising land, they have planted rice and turned the red earth green. And given endless hardship, they have erected pagodas and temples, appealing to the Buddha and the ancestors, giving thanks.

The temples and pagodas of the Red River Delta have become architectural symbols of the powerful faith of the people who live here. In Ha Tay Province to the southwest of Hanoi, two very different pagodas and a hidden grotto shrine provide a window onto this faith and its role in the religious life and cultural heritage of Vietnam. One day several friends and I rented a car and went to visit them.

Chua Mia (Mia Pagoda) lies in the village of Mong Phu, which means "Dream of Wealth" in Vietnamese. Just outside the front gate of the pagoda, that dream of wealth took a living form in a village market. Local women sat at stalls selling the sundries of daily life: dried noodles, cabbage, eggs, plastic shoes and bright knit sweaters for children. Nearer to the entrance of the pagoda, another merchant dealt in the necessities of worship: the incense, sugar candies, fruit and flowers that devotees use as offerings at the altars inside.

Entering the gates of the pagoda, we left behind the world of commerce and entered the realm of the spiritual. We walked down a tree-shaded path past a newly built tower, constructed in recent years by devotees of the pagoda. The path led to an inner courtyard, with a garden full of flowering plants and poinsettias, where craftsmen using hand tools were working sweet-smelling red mahogany into new beams for the pagoda's roof. Although its history dates back centuries, Chua Mia has undergone frequent change, including five major building renovations since 1632. Regular renovation is part of Vietnamese religious tradition, not only in order to enhance the structural soundness of places of worship but also to insure that local people, who contribute to these renovations, remain involved in the spiritual life of the community.

Before entering the pagoda itself, I wandered around the grounds of the courtyard. At one corner of the yard, the brown robes of the nuns who live at the pagoda were drying on a clothesline. At another end, smoke floated out of the open door to a kitchen. I walked inside, and said hello to a young girl squatting over the flames preparing lunch for the workers and the nuns of the pagoda. The walls were soot-colored from years of cooking fires, and the room itself smelled as if it had been smoked. I heard an odd sound coming from an adjoining room and followed it. The room was stuffed with firewood and in a pen in a corner, a captive pig wandered in circles, alternately squealing at me and digging its snout in the mud.

We gathered again in the courtyard to enter the pagoda. Chua Mia is comprised of three sections: the Ceremony Hall or Lower Pagoda, the Interior Pagoda, and the Higher Pagoda. We entered the Ceremony Hall first, a large dark room full of small altars and statues. Two of the pagoda's four nuns were there. In their long brown robes, they were inseparable from the darkness of the holy sanctuaries, existing as part of it. In the peaceful quiet, a young nun squatted in front of an altar to the Buddha and pounded a beat against a mo, a hollow wooden bell, reciting incantations. An older nun moved quietly from altar to altar, dusting surfaces and collecting the offerings.

After she'd finished praying, the young nun approached us and began to tell the story of the pagoda. Originally a small Confucian temple, the site of Chua Mia was expanded to its current size and converted to a Buddhist pagoda in 1632, thanks to the contributions of Ngo Thi Ngoc Deu, one of the wives of the local mandarin. Besides being a devout Buddhist, Lady Deu was also a poet, the nun told us, taking my notebook to write down one of Lady Deu's poems in Vietnamese. Later, a friend helped me translate it, and explained to me that the poem examines the responsibilities of women in local society:

Tay cam ban nguyet senh sang
hang tham ngon co lai hang tay ta
nua lo viec nuoc, nua toan viec nha.

My hand holds the scythe in a wide arc
Cutting hundreds of rows of grass
Half worrying about the country, half fulfilling my duty to the family.

The nun seemed pleased with the poem, proud that Chua Mia had such a literate benefactress. I could see that the nun's own extensive knowledge of history and Buddhism contributed to a tradition of educated women that Lady Deu had begun so long ago.

Chua Mia has 287 statues, more than any other pagoda in Vietnam, and they are famous not only for their number but for their lifelike grace and beauty. The sculptures inhabit the space of the building like a holy, silent citizenry. Half of the statues are wood and half are clay, lacquered in traditional gold and the deep red that Vietnamese describe as "cockroach color." In one inner courtyard, a row of arhats, the monks who have reached nirvana, line a wall, each one evoking a particular personality through a delicate rendering of facial expression and posture. On one central altar, rows of Buddhas sweep backwards and up, disappearing into the shadows of the pagoda roof like spirits rising toward the heavens. These ascending rows of Buddhas are similar to those in the more well known pagodas of Hanoi. While the altars of urban pagodas are often decorated with constellations of electric lights, however, the Buddhas of Chua Mia exist in shadowy half-darkness, illuminated only by sunlight. Ha Tay Province is known for its limestone rock formations and the grottoes within them. Some of the altars of Chua Mia are built out of this craggy rock, which looks like caverns inhabited by the Buddhas and saints. One such cavern in the Higher Pagoda includes a rare statue of Parinirvana as well as a gentle and serene Avalokitesvara carved as a woman with a child.

A short distance from Chua Mia, the spectacular limestone rock I'd seen imitated in the small shrines of the pagoda became real. Sixteen hills emerged from the flat landscape of farmland. According to Vietnamese legend, the hills represent the humps of a dragon, slithering through the rice fields as if it were rising and falling in the sea. One of the largest hills represents the dragon's head, and nestled in its shadow, by the shore of a small artificial lake, lies Chua Thay, the Master's Pagoda.

Chua Thay is backed by the sheer rock of Thay Hill and set apart from the village by the waters of Long Chieu, the Dragon Lake, and an expanse of tree-covered grounds. Also known as Thien Phuc (Heavenly Blessing) Pagoda, Chua Thay is so serene that it seems to reflect its creators concept of heaven. At the center of the lake sits a stone house-shaped structure which is used as a water puppet theater during the pagoda's annual festival, from the fifth to the seventh day of the third month on the lunar calendar.

The pagoda itself, which was established during the Ly Dynasty in the eleventh century, is divided into three sections. The outer building is called the First Offering House or Lower Temple. The central building, known as the Middle Temple, is devoted to Sakyamuni, the Buddha in his historical form. The third building, which dates from the twelfth century, is dedicated to Tu Dao Hanh, a monk who is "the Master" from whom the pagoda takes its name. Worshippers at Chua Thay pray to Tu Dao Hanh in three forms, all of which are represented on a central altar. At the center, Tu Dao Hanh takes his form as a Buddha seated on a stone lotus-shaped pedestal. To the left is the sandalwood statue of the monk at the time of his retirement to Huong Hai Mountain, where he practiced medicine and taught the art of water puppetry. Finally, the image at the right represents the monk reincarnated as King Ly Than Tong (1128-1138), seated on a golden throne. Like the statues of Chua Mia, these statues at Chua Thay exist in muted darkness, a quiet, sun-spotted shelter from the world outside.

Worshippers at Chua Thay often make a pilgrims' circuit of the mountain that towers above the pagoda. Before beginning their journey up the hill, they cross a pair of covered bridges built in 1602. The Nhat Tien bridge leads to a small island at one end of the Dragon Lake. Here, they light incense and make offerings at the Tam Phu Temple, introducing themselves to the holy spirits before beginning their journey up the mountain. After leaving the Tam Phu temple, pilgrims walk around the pagoda itself, cross the Nguyet Tien bridge and enter the stone gate which serves as the entrance to the rocky path leading to the shrines above.

A boy accompanied us up the hill, telling us the history of the area. Chua Thay is not only known for its holy shrines, he explained, but also for its caves. With a grin on his face, the boy told us of the caves' miraculous capacity in the realms of love. An unmarried woman who ventures into the caves alone must take the hand of a man so that she won't slide down the slippery slopes inside. All this hand-holding has its effect, he told us, and, as legend has it, a single woman who walks into the cave alone will come out with a fiance. An infertile woman who ventures inside will soon find herself pregnant.

The sixteen humps of the dragon have yielded other caves as well. We had a few hours of sunlight left, and so on the way back to Hanoi we stopped to visit Hoang Xa cave, only a few kilometers from Chua Thay. Sitting within a lovely park, Hoang Xa cave and its gardens are a favorite spot for Vietnamese couples taking their wedding pictures. On the day we visited, two schoolgirls were sitting on the rocks overlooking a lily pond, turning this quiet garden into a picturesque place for doing homework. Outside a small pagoda, nuns were watering their vegetable patch. A path led up to the mouth of the large grotto, where a series of small altars jutted out of the jagged rock. At the back of this grotto, sunlight poured through another opening in the rock and a series of stone steps descended to more gardens at the other side of the mountain. Farmers pulled irrigation water out of a large and ancient stone-lined well, and a mud red canal meandered past before disappearing into the flat green fields of the Red River Delta.

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Published on 10/1/95