Word: dai
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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...
...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 Chaplin...
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...
...HEARD ABOUT IT, NOW GO SEE IT, reads the slogan on an Air Vietnam tourist poster showing a fetching maiden in a pink ao-dai. For any American who feels he has not seen enough of the place, about $2,000 will buy him round-trip transportation, a room in the best hotels and a generous sampling of Viet Nam's cuisine...