Sources of Vietnamese Tradition by George Dutton

Author:George Dutton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS048000, History/Asia/Southeast Asia, HIS003000, History/Asia/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

POKING FUN AT A BONZE

No Chinaman nor one of us is he:

a head without one hair, an unhemmed frock.

Under his nose lie three or five rice cakes;

behind his back lurk six or seven nuns.

Now he claps cymbals, now he clangs the gong;

he hees, he haws, he hee-haws all the time.

Keeping that up, he’ll rise to be top bonze:

he’ll mount the lotus throne and sit in state.

[Huynh Sanh Thong, Anthology of Vietnamese Poems, 214, 217–18, 220]

MINH MANG EMPEROR

TEN MORAL PRECEPTS (1834)

Minh Mang, the strongest of the Nguyen monarchs, ruled from 1820 to 1840, his reign marking the high point of Confucian influence on Vietnamese governance and political philosophy. This influence contained a strong element of state-sponsored paternalism, which is nowhere better demonstrated than in Minh Mang’s edict “Ten Moral Precepts.” Issued in 1834, shortly after his centralization of power in Hue, the edict was an attempt to impose social order and proper behavior on his subjects throughout the realm. This practice was in keeping with Chinese precedent, exemplified in similar precepts issued by the Ming dynasty’s Hungwu emperor (r. 1368–1398) and the Qing dynasty’s Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722). In a general sense, however, the edict reflects the Vietnamese state’s long-standing involvement in dictating morality and behavior, a role whose apogee may have been in the fifteenth-century Le Code, which criminalized a wide range of moral misdeeds.27 Minh Mang’s moral precepts and explications of their importance were widely disseminated throughout the kingdom. Village leaders were to ensure that they were publicly recited each year. Popular attitudes toward this practice can be summed up in the village saying “To go to the theater, what joy! A swimming contest is a poor second. A procession? We might go and have a look. And even a burial passes the time if there is nothing better. But to go and listen to the ten precepts—one must have lost all sense and reason!”28

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