While in Saigon, we joined a trip to Tay Ninh in order to see the Cao Dai temple and watch their midday mass. Officially established in 1926, Caodaiism is a colorful mixture of religions. The religion combines elements of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity, and animism, and one of their three main saints is Victor Hugo, whose picture occupies a prestigious place in the temple.
The temple itself is equally colorful in every sense. From the outside, the windows are made of the All-Seeing Eye surrounded by flowers. While inside, a massive orb with the Divine Eye sits center stage. Green dragons spiral around pink pillars, sporting colorful faces and displaying striped tongues. And the ceiling is covered in stars and clouds.
Mass is led by a handful of musicians and practitioners singing hymns. The men and women sit separately, cross-legged on the floor in evenly spaced rows, their traditional robes always seeming to make perfect rectangles about them. The higher-ups don red, yellow, and blue, each representing one of the three main belief systems, while the women and those lower on the totem pole dress in all white.
The music reigns, all else is silent save for the occasional bell, which reverberates throughout the temple, causing those gathered to cascade into bows. The bells resonate rich and pure, bouncing from the walls, tumbling over the room. You can feel it in your chest. It drowns out the murmur of the tourists watching from the balcony. The onlookers cease to matter; they are enveloped in prayer, overtaken by the music. The scene becomes nearly hypnotic as a sense of tranquility settles over the temple.
