Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Vietnamese folk religion
Summary
Vietnamese folk religion (tín ngưỡng dân gian Việt Nam, sometimes just called Đạo Lương, Chữ Hán: 道良) is the ethnic religion of the Vietnamese people. About 86% of the population in Vietnam are associated with this religion.
Vietnamese folk religion is not an organized religious system, but a set of local worship traditions devoted to the "thần", a term which can be translated as "spirits", "gods" or with the more exhaustive locution "generative powers". These gods can be nature deities or national, community or kinship tutelary deities or ancestral gods and the ancestral gods of a specific family. Ancestral gods are often deified heroic persons. Vietnamese mythology preserves narratives telling of the actions of many of the cosmic gods and cultural heroes.
Đạo Mẫu is a distinct form of Vietnamese shamanism, giving prominence to some mother goddesses into its pantheon. The government of Vietnam also categorises Cao Đài as a form of Vietnamese indigenous religion, since it brings together the worship of the thần or local spirits with Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, as well as elements of Catholicism, Spiritism and Theosophy.
The Vietnamese folk religion was suppressed in different times and ways from 1945, the end of the dynastic period, to the 1980s. The destruction, neglect, or dilapidation of temples was particularly extensive in North Vietnam during the land reform (1953–1955), and in reunified Vietnam during the period of collectivisation (1975–1986).
Debate and criticism of cultural destruction and loss began in the 1960s. However, the period between 1975 and 1979 saw the most zealous anti-religion campaign and destruction of temples. On the eve of the Đổi Mới reforms, from 1985 onwards, the state gradually returned to a policy of protection of the religious culture, and the Vietnamese indigenous religion was soon promoted as the backbone of "a progressive culture, imbued with national identity".
In the project of nation-building, the public discourse encourages the worship of ancient heroes of the Vietnamese identity, and gods and spirits with a long-standing presence in folk religion.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.