var working_url = 'http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/'; USC College News January 2005 Caodai
On her trip to Vietnam last summer, Hoskins
met with Nguyen Van Tho, head priest
of the Caodai temple in Saigon.
Photo credit: Vy-Uyen Judy Cao Finding a New Religion A College professor and student trace the roots of a global religion from suburban Pomona to the outskirts of Saigon By Eva Emerson
January 2005
In many ways, the little known religion of Caodai seems the ultimate product of Californias New Age movement: In a painting of the official pantheon, Buddha hovers over Lao Tse, Jesus Christ, Confucius, with the Chinese goddess of mercy, Quan Am, sitting to the left. Caodai espouses vegetarianism, meditation, gender equality and tolerance of all the worlds religions. Its teachings come from divine messages, often written in verse, received in séances by spiritual mediums.
But this inclusive religion is actually a product of a completely different cultural and historical milieuthat of 1920s French Indochina. And while Caodai wasnt born in California, like the Vietnamese immigrants who first brought its teachings to the U.S., it is starting to prosper.
USC Colleges Janet Hoskins, a professor of anthropology and South East Asian scholar, and her former student Vy-Uyen Judy Cao (04) have studied Caodai, its growth in California and the contrasts in how its practiced here and in Vietnam. The research project has literally has taken them around the world, from suburban Pomona and the Silicon Valley to southern Vietnam. | |
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