Word: daism
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...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 was considered...
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...
...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...
Thus tersely, in his bestselling The Quiet American, Novelist Graham Greene described Cao Daism, a gaudy gallimaufry of Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity whose followers number at least one million and play a significant part in the confused politics of South Viet...
...surprise action split Cao Daism wide open. Rival factions began feuding with each other in nightly sprees of shooting, kidnaping and plundering. The imprisoned pope often interrupted his daily mandolin strumming and xylophone banging to pray for the dead. Meanwhile, rivalry between the pope and his disaffected general to win the favor of the faithful went on apace. Last week General Phuong tipped the scales by collecting certified letters from 19 vestal virgins of Cao Dai complaining that the pope had raped them. He then called a congress of the Cao Dai hierarchy to consider the complaints. Three days before...