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Textbook Ebook Gods Heroes and Ancestors An Interreligious Encounter in Eighteenth Century Vietnam Anh Q Tran All Chapter PDF
Textbook Ebook Gods Heroes and Ancestors An Interreligious Encounter in Eighteenth Century Vietnam Anh Q Tran All Chapter PDF
Interreligious Encounter in
Eighteenth-Century Vietnam Anh Q
Tran
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Gods, Heroes, and Ancestors
RELIGION IN TRANSLATION
Series Editor
John Nemec, University of Virginia
A Publication Series of The American Academy of Religion and Oxford University Press
ANH Q. TRAN
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Ân Cha như núi cao vời vợi
Nghĩa Mẹ tựa biển cả mênh mông
High as a mountain is your merit, Dad
Vast as an ocean is your love, Mom
For my parents
To whom I am forever indebted for my Vietnamese heritage
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
Abbreviations xvii
Introduction 1
1. When the Cross Met the Lotus: Catholic Mission in Tonkin During
the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 21
Tonkin of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century 21
The Development of Catholicism in Tonkin 25
Reception of Christianity in Tonkin 30
The Rites Controversy and Its Impact in Vietnam 36
2. Text and Context: Errors of the Three Religions 47
Defending the True Faith 48
The Text: History, Content, and Method 62
3. Of Gods and Heroes: Worship in Traditional Vietnam 76
An Overview of Traditional Vietnamese Worship 77
A Christian Evaluation of Traditional Worship 106
viii Contents
4. In the Realm of the Dead: Filial Piety and Ancestral Worship 108
Vietnamese Anthropology and Ancestral Worship 108
The Ancestral Rites in Practice 113
A Christian Interpretation of the Cult of the Ancestors 126
5. Refutation and Dialogue: Christianity vis-à-vis the Three Religions 133
The Theological Message of Errors 136
The Legacy of Errors of the Three Religions 140
Meeting the Religious Others 145
Conclusion 156
Preface 161
also want to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Su-chi Lin for the cover
illustration, the Chinese texts and the index.
I would like to express my gratitude to all who have accompanied me on my
academic pursuit. Your generosity, encouragement, support, and prayer have
made this project possible. They include my colleagues at Santa Clara University’s
Jesuit School of Theology whose constant presence has lifted me up on occasional
blue days of writing and revising. Thanks to the generosity of the former dean of
the school, Tom Massaro, I had a semester off to work on this project while jug-
gling other academic duties, and thanks to the Santa Clara Jesuit Community for
offering material support during my revision of this project.
I am also honored to work with my editors at Oxford University Press, in
particular, Cynthia Reed and John Nemec, as well as the anonymous reviewers
of this book, who provided critical comments and feedback to sharpen the argu-
ments and clarify the ideas. Thanks too, to Drew Anderla, Rajakumari Ganessin,
Henry Southgate, and their team for their patience and care as production and
copy editors.
Finally, many thanks for my family, friends, and my Jesuit brothers for their
moral support and practical help.
Preface
1. Both were canonized on June 19, 1988 by Pope John Paul II as two of the 117 holy martyrs
of Vietnam.
2. In this study, the word “Christian” will be used to refer to the whole Christian tradition,
whereas “Catholic” is restricted to the Catholic Church, its doctrines, and practices. Before the
twentieth century, Christianity in Vietnam was identified with Catholicism.
3. The text, also known as Hội Đồng Tứ Giáo Danh Sư (Conferences of the Representatives of
the Four Religions) appeared in at least twenty-three editions between 1864 and 1959, both
in demotic script (nôm) and romanized characters (quốc ngữ). For an introduction to this
text, see Anh Q. Tran, “Inculturation, Mission, and Dialogue in Vietnam: The ‘Conference of
xii Preface
Catholicism has been a minor but significant religion in Vietnam since its
arrival during the sixteenth century. During its first three centuries of existence,
however, the Catholic community was largely shaped by the experience of being
marginalized and persecuted. More than the result of a concern for national secu-
rity, the suppression of Catholicism by various Vietnamese rulers between the
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries represented a clash of culture and ideology
between the converts and their fellow citizens, especially on religious worship.
A study of Vietnamese religions of this period is thus essential to understand
the nature of such conflict. Yet, the scholarly study of the Christian mission in
Vietnam has generally neglected the religious and cultural context from which
Vietnamese Christianity emerged. Compared to the scholarly attention given to
the Christian encounters with the religious cultures of China and Japan, little has
been written on similar encounters and interactions in Vietnam.
Scholars who want to study the Vietnamese traditions have to rely on the
description about the social, cultural, and religious life of Tonkin found in mis-
sionary reports and merchant’s travelogues of earlier centuries. Jesuit mission-
aries to Tonkin in the seventeenth century were pioneers in giving Europeans
information about the little-known kingdom south of China. Besides the annual
reports given to their superiors in Macau and Rome and in addition to their occa-
sional letters, a few missionaries published their traveling accounts—often called
“relations” in later collections. Travelogues by the Jesuit missionaries Giuliano
Baldinotti, Alexandre de Rhodes, Giovanni Filippo de Marini, and Joseph
Tissanier were influential eye-witness accounts that provide a general picture
of the situation in Tonkin.4 Missionary accounts of Tonkin were translated into
many European languages, and the information therein was often summarized in
later dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Traders and merchants who visited or settled in Tonkin also composed their
own accounts of what was going on. Among these, we can count the work of
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Samuel Baron, William Dampier, and others.5 These
traveling reports about a fascinating kingdom of two kings (a vua and a chuá)
the Representatives of the Four Religions,’ ” in Beyond Conversion and Syncretism: Indigenous
Encounters with Missionary Christianity, 1800–2000, ed. D. Lindenfeld and M. Richardson
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 167–94.
4. See the bibliography for full reference of their works. Rhodes had lived for a total of seven
years in Tonkin and Cochinchina (1627–30, 1640–45), Marini for twelve years; Tissanier came
to Tonkin in 1658 and lived through a chaotic time there. Another missionary description of
Tonkin is also found in the report by Cristoforro Borri (1631), although he was never in Tonkin.
5. Again, see the bibliography for full reference of their work. Tavernier’s account must be used
with care, since he never set foot in Tonkin. His information mainly came from his brother,
Daniel Tavernier, who worked briefly for the Dutch in Tonkin between 1639 and 1645, and the
Preface xiii
were collected, translated, and reprinted in later collections. They were combina-
tions of geographical reports, notes on fauna and flora, descriptions of people and
customs, and any information that was deemed useful to other missionaries and
traders. Until the mid-nineteenth century, these accounts were valuable sources
of information on Tonkin.
Unearthing a Treasure
This book intends to contribute to the historical study of traditional Vietnamese
religions by introducing, translating, and evaluating a never-before-published
eighteenth-century manuscript entitled Tam Giáo Chư Vọng (Errors of the Three
Religions). How I found this text is purely coincidental. Back in 2004, while
doing research in the archives of the Foreign Mission Society of Paris (AMEP),
particularly to trace the sources of the Conference of the Four Religions, I encoun-
tered a 1750 Latin treatise on Vietnamese religions entitled Opusculum de sectis
apud Sinenses et Tunkinenses (A Small Treatise on the Sects among the Chinese
and Tonkinese), (henceforth, Opusculum). The archivist informed me that a
translation of this work was published in English in 2002.6 As I read the treatise,
I noticed similarities among many arguments and issues raised by the Conference
and Opusculum. Their descriptions of Vietnamese religious beliefs and practices
are almost identical at places. However, the language and writing styles are dif-
ferent. The Conference was written in a dialogical manner and in the demotic
Vietnamese script (chữ Nôm), and Opusculum is a series of essays in Latin with
Sino-Vietnamese phrases inserted here and there. In its defense of Christianity
and refutation of the tam giao, the Conference cites many Sino-Vietnamese
phrases and expressions from the classics that did not appear in Opusculum.
The similarity and yet difference between the two texts led me to believe that
the anonymous author of Conference might have relied on written source(s) other
than Opusculum for his citation of the classics. Furthermore, upon reading the
preface of the Opusculum, I realized that its author, the Augustinian missionary
Adriano di Santa Thecla, claimed that his work relied on other written sources for
his information on Vietnamese religions. He mentioned in particular two books
written in Vietnamese: the Dị Đoan Chi Giáo (The Teaching of Hereterodoxy) and
Tonkinese who traded with him. In fact, Samuel Baron wrote about his experience in Tonkin
partly to refute some of Tavernier’s claims.
6. Adriano di Santa Thecla, Opusculum de sectis apud Sinenses et Tonkinenses /A Small Treatise
on the Sects among the Chinese and Tonkinese, trans. Olga Dror as A Study of Religion in
China and North Vietnam in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press /
SEAP, 2002).
xiv Preface
the Đại Học Chi Đạo (The Way of Great Learning) of Hilario Costa, bishop of
East Tonkin.7 Adriano di Santa Thecla’s remark piqued my interest in searching
for the lost Vietnamese text(s) that could be the source(s) of the Conference.
With the help of the late professor Antoine Trần Văn Toàn of the Catholic
University of Lille, I discovered a Vietnamese text entitled Tam Giáo Chư
Vọng from the same archive that houses the Opusculum. The text is written in
the Romanized Vietnamese script (chữ quốc-ngữ) and described the “errors” of
the traditional religious practices from a missionary’s perspective. The literary
affinity between Opusculum and Tam Giáo Chư Vọng is remarkable. Both texts
identify their authors as Italian missionaries evangelizing in Tonkin, and their
contents are so similar, even mirroring each other at places, that they could be
considered works drawn from the same source of information.8 After carefully
comparing the two texts (see Appendix A), I believe that my discovery is related
to the missing text that Adriano refers to in his treatise of Vietnamese religions.
A close reading of this particular Christian text in its historical and cultural
contexts will present a valuable case study of Vietnamese religious practices as
missionaries and converts encountered them. My study portrays the religious
challenges that converts had to face as they sought to establish their Christian
identity within their social interactions. To understand the history of Christian
missions within its cultural and religious context, the descriptions of religious
beliefs and rituals provided by Errors of the Three Religions are a valuable source
to complement standard accounts of Vietnamese religious culture.
In the absence of other comparable works, Errors (and Opusculum) are the
most informative source on traditional Vietnamese religious customs. Taken
together, they are the first extant treatments of the Vietnam’s religious heritage.
Whereas the discussion of Vietnamese beliefs, rituals, and worship in other
missionary reports or travelogues are, for the most part, cursory and dismissive,
Errors and Opusculum elaborate and supply the details that other descriptions
of Vietnamese religions glossed over. In the aftermath of the Chinese Rites
Controversy, they serve as handbooks to explain to Christian converts why cer-
tain beliefs and practices of their fellow Vietnamese were incompatible with
the Christian faith. The translation, annotation, analysis, and evaluation of an
important, hitherto neglected manuscript—Tam Giáo Chư Vọng—will be a valu-
able addition to the corpus of important texts that describe the Christian percep-
tion of Vietnamese religious traditions from first-hand observations. By making
available an annotated translation of a rare, complex, and important manuscript
of the history of Vietnamese Christianity, I hope to encourage the readers to do
further studies on similar subjects.
Abbreviations