Word: cao
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...visitors tried to describe the Guru and explain the growth of his following in the United States, the Vietnamese grew increasingly confused. But then one of the activists had a brainstorm. "Cao Dai," he said, and the North Vietnamese instantly beamed with understanding and sympathetic smiles...
...Cao Dai was a religious sect which was born in colonial southern Vietnam in the middle 1920s, and extended its influence deeply into Vietnamese politics. Cao Daism was a bizarre blend of various elements in Eastern and Western religions, with a healthy measure of Western-style hero-worship thrown in. The Cao Dai, whose temples were adorned with the Masonic eye, considered as major deities Buddha, Christ, and Mohammed. They harbored in their pantheon of lesser deities such people as Marcus Aurelius, Georges Clemenceau, Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo, and Thomas Jefferson. Winston Churchill was enshrined after 1945, but Charlie...
...Both the Cao Dai and the new gurus are attempts to respond to this growing erosion of consistency. Cao Daism attempted to synthesize the experience of a frightening clash between the Eastern and Western world that was taking place in colonial Vietnam. With its Joan of Arcs and its Buddhas, it attempted to provide for its followers a new, relevant sense of order to replace the one that had shattered...
There are more than accidental similarities between the Cao Dai and various popular movements in America such as Divine Light, the Jesus movement, and the followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the mentor of meditation. Both the Cao Dai and the American gurus are initially arresting because they are so incongruous: the images of Vietnamese civil servants worshipping Victor Hugo and young people from America's suburbs genuflecting before a 15-year-old Indian Guru are strangely symmetrical. But the similarities run much deeper than this curious congruence of the odd: the popularity of both the Cao Dai in Vietnam...
...SOME truths can mark the route out of confusion, while others merely add to it. Cao Daism in Vietnam did not talk about the real sources of the problems tearing Vietnam apart. It did not deal with colonialism, other than to appropriate French heroes for its own purposes, nor did it talk about landholding patterns or the need to unionize the rubber workers. It had no vision of national independence and no call for political struggle. Ho Chi Minh and the first Vietnamese socialists who worked with him at the same time also lived in the same dissolving Vietnamese society...