South Vietnam

MUCH of the calamitous situation in South Vietnam had its beginnings under President Ngo Dinh Diem. Yet, though it is easy to catalogue the blunders and errors of his nine-year rule, this dogmatic statement needs to be carefully qualified. It may be a contradiction in terms to say that South Vietnam is falling, because it never really existed; but this is truly the crux of the problem.

To an American, the struggle in South Vietnam between Communist and anti-Communist is the one paramount concern. To lose the war is to lose all. But to many Vietnamese the war even today remains a backdrop to much older, and seemingly more vital, interests and antagonisms. During the Indochina war many Vietnamese nationalists with unquestionable political antecedents put the eradication of colonialism ahead of the defeat of the Viet Minh. In the same myopic way, men of unquestioned goodwill have been sidetracked today by vendettas which will be meaningless if the Viet Cong should prevail.

Under such circumstances, and with or without Ngo Dinh Diem, if every dollar of American aid had been gainfully spent, if every underprivileged farmer had seen the achievement of his own private revolution of rising expectations, it is improbable that events in this tragic land would have followed a basically different course.

General Maxwell Taylor arrived in Saigon as U.S. ambassador in July, 1964, well briefed in the agonizing military situation, but unprepared, as he now admits quite frankly, for the political and social weaknesses that existed in and beyond the government. Behind Saigon’s sophisticated facade he found primitive and deeply engrained superstitions based on necromancy and astrology. Private soldiers and government clerks consulted soothsayers, and so did generals and cabinet ministers. Worse, politician was against politician, even in the same party. General was against general, Buddhist against Catholic.

These divisions were overt and obvious, but the tactics of their confrontation were usually clandestine and devious. The Vietnamese love to plot. For the past ten years there has rarely been a moment when at least one coup d’etat has not been in the making, and it was characteristic that Diem and Nhu, his brother and chief adviser, were finally overthrown only when General Ton That Dinh, handpicked in complete confidence to lead a counter coup, joined the generals he was supposed to crush. The coup was all but over before Diem and Nhu learned that they had been betrayed.

The Buddhist origins

For more than two thousand years imported religious and political concepts have infiltrated the Vietnamese framework of basic family loyalties and deeply rooted superstitious beliefs, including animism, ancestor worship, and the worship of village spirits. The mainstream came from China and included Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, the mandarin system, and, much later, the secret societies.

From the West, beginning early in the seventeenth century, came Catholicism and colonialism (perhaps inevitably the two tended to become equated), and the knowledge, if rarely the practice, of liberal democracy, justice, and law. During the colonial era, Vietnamese parliamentary members were not allowed to represent political parties. Yet savage repression, including imprisonment and execution, did not prevent parties from forming. It merely drove them underground, or into allegiance with the secret organizations, the most important of which was the Triad, or Heaven and Earth Society.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, on orders from the Emperor K’ang-hsi, Chinese troops set fire to and destroyed the Shao Lin Buddhist monastery in Foochow. Only eighteen of its 128 monks survived. Twelve of them lost their lives in the ensuing fighting, and the thirteenth committed suicide rather than fall into the emperor’s hands. While they were looking for his grave, the five survivors were attacked by government troops. Their fate seemed sealed when out of the earth came a sword, its hilt decorated by two dragons contending for a pearl. Seizing the sword, the monks set about the soldiers, made their escape, and with the assistance of a former high minister of state, formed a secret organization, the Triad, pledged to overthrow the Ch’ing dynasty. Two centuries later the society counted Dr. Sun Yat-sen among its members. Its branches spread to Southeast Asia, serving as a substitute for government for millions of overseas Chinese.

The striking similarity between the legendary origins and subsequent activity of the Triad Society and what has happened in Vietnam since the late Ngo Dinh Nhu’s special forces broke into the Xa Loi pagoda with submachine guns and grenades on August 21, 1963, is much more than a coincidence. The monks who made Xa Loi headquarters for their spectacularly successful campaign against the Diem regime have launched a powerful Buddhist-based political movement that draws quite naturally on Triad organization and techniques.

Hinayana Buddhism came to Vietnam from China about the third century A.D. Because its written language until recent years was Chinese, the Buddha’s teachings were familiar to relatively few highly literate scholars, mostly monks, and a few devout laymen.

Yet the religion, which is more a way of life than a faith and allows broad freedom of thought, spread widely among the masses, who had only a superficial knowledge of its tenets. Except for two brief periods, the Confucian emperors in Hué regarded it with distaste. Because religion upset society and the mandarinate, it had to be discouraged, and even suppressed. The more it was suppressed and restricted, the more it entwined itself in the countryside with astrology and spirit worship, leaving the monasteries as isolated centers of learning and fertile fields for Triad endeavor.

Vietnamese Christians

The history of Christian proselytization in Vietnam is similar. To avoid attention and persecution, French Catholic missionaries used lay preachers to spread the Word of God. They went cautiously, but too fast for the emperors. In 1847 Emperor Tu Duc described the missionaries as running like goats and barking like dogs. He ordered them all to be thrown into the sea with stones around their necks. It was an incautious edict, which brought in the French to protect the Church and to colonize the country.

For the Catholics this began a period of preference which ended only with the death of Ngo Dinh Diem. The Church became institutionalized and powerful, though in rural areas it sometimes failed to shake off the influence of native customs and beliefs. Much of the fear that caused Catholics to cling together clandestinely during the days of imperial persecution also remained.

In primarily Buddhist villages along the coast of central Vietnam tiny Catholic communities nestled in their own little ghettoes, praying, intermarrying, and living together, making scarcely any contact with their Buddhist neighbors. Tensions began to rise early in the 1960s when Catholic militiamen, usually under the guiding force of the local priest, got military training and guns which were denied to the Buddhists.

It was a difficult problem. Since Catholics were ready and willing to light, and others often were not, theirparticipation in the war was out of proportion to their numbers. This in turn tended to add credibility to the ill-informed but quite widespread Buddhist view that Diem was in fact only the leader of another sect and that the war was a private quarrel between opposing sects and ideologies — the Marxist Communists, represented by the Viet Cong, and the Catholic Personalists, represented by the secret Can Lao (revolutionary workers) Party. It also increased the resentment against restrictions placed on the Buddhists.

Militant Buddhism

Under the French, the number of Buddhist pagodas and the number of monks in the pagodas had been limited, and limitations were also placed on the pagodas’ right to accept gifts. Buddhism had become depressed and fallen more and more under the control of ill-educated monks, a situation which caused a withdrawal from active participation in Buddhist affairs by the more scholarly and devout.

Aware of these shortcomings, Buddhist laymen and monks in 1931 initiated a reform movement. An Association for Buddhist Studies sought to strengthen discipline and improve training in the monasteries and to propagate Buddhism in Vietnamese rather than in Chinese. These reforms continued after the Second World War, though hampered by the widespread fighting in the Indochina war.

Fifty clerical and lay delegates, including some of those most bitterly opposed to the recent changes, met in Hué in 1951 to reorganize the Community of Monks and to codify the rites. “Up to then,” one of the participants recently pointed out, “if there had been Buddhist repressions, the monks would not have been able to organize a demonstration of thirty old women.”

In Saigon today when the monks boast that they can put five thousand demonstrators into the streets in an hour, they do not exaggerate. Buddhist university students, and even schoolchildren, have abandoned their studies to become the monks’ striking arm.

In vain, elder Buddhist laymen have complained that the monks “are trying to lead innocent followers into practices that are contrary to the Eightfold Noble Path, which is the only Buddhist path,” and that the Lord Buddha, who forbade monks to hold gold, silver, and precious metals, would be outraged by the expensive tastes that these far from humble clergy have acquired.

Real Buddhist power is shared, or disputed, by two of the leaders of the campaign against the Diem regime: Venerable Tri Quang, xenophobic, anti-American, who was inspired to seek refuge in the U.S. Embassy in September of last year; and Venerable Tam Chau, who outmaneuvered Tri Quang for the chairmanship of the newly formed Institute for the Propagation of the Faith. Both are North Vietnamese. Both are in their early forties. Both are dedicated, militant Buddhists. Both are determined to make up for lost centuries in organizing the religion and its followers.

Tri Quang is strong and neutralist, perhaps Communist; Tam Chau is weak, pro-American, and antiCommunist. Tri Quang wants to end the war by negotiation; Tam Chau is also anxious to see an end to the fighting, but citing Laos as an example, he fears that only a Communist takeover will emerge from negotiations now. Yet on one vital point the two leaders are united: they are determined to ensure that the Buddhists have a major voice in government.

It is on this rock that all attempts since the end of the Diem regime to create effective government in South Vietnam have foundered. Mob demonstrations, largely Buddhist inspired, have precipitated crisis after crisis.

Yet General Nguyen Khunh’s own ambitions and Buddhist dissatisfaction with the general composition of the civil government led by Prime Minister Tran Van Huong, an earnest but undistinguished ex-schoolteacher, brought General Khanh and the monks together again in an army move that put Huong out of office. It led perilously close not only to the parting of the ways between South Vietnam and the United States but also to the collapse of organized, coordinated resistance to the Viet Cong.

In conventional military terms the situation is not nearly as bad as it sometimes seems. The main battle corps of the Vietnamese Army has not been beaten and remains incomparably larger and better equipped than the Viet Cong. In fact, there has not been a single major action in the entire war; nothing in any way compares with actions that were part of the daily routine in Korea, for instance. While North Vietnam is on the brink of starvation, South Vietnam, with almost every farm a battlefield, manages not only to feed its population but to export rice and rubber. United, South Vietnam would surely stand. Divided, it seems certain to fall.