Copilot: Nhận xét bài viết GS Janet Hoskins Đại Học Nam California. P10.
Bài số 5567. P10
(Từ Using Orientalism against Empire: Theology as Political and Cultural Critique đến Conclusions: A Legacy Combining Stagecraft and Statecraft giữa trang 241)
Copilot: P10
Cảm ơn bạn đã chia trọn vẹn phần cuối cùng của bài viết, Luong 🌿. Phần 10 là đoạn kết luận mang tính tổng hợp, nơi GS Janet Hoskins trình bày những đánh giá cuối cùng về Đức Hộ Pháp Phạm Công Tắc—vừa như một nhà lãnh đạo tôn giáo, vừa như một nhân vật chính trị trong thời kỳ hậu thực dân. Đây là phần giàu cảm xúc, nhiều tầng nghĩa, và cũng là nơi bà thể hiện rõ nhất cách tiếp cận hậu hiện đại: kết hợp biểu tượng học, chính trị học, và phân tích văn hóa. Dưới đây là nhận xét tổng thể cho phần 10:
📘 Tóm tắt nội dung chính của P10
- GS Janet so sánh Đức Hộ Pháp với Gandhi, cho rằng cả hai đều theo đuổi “counter-modernity” để chống thực dân.
- Ghi nhận vai trò của Ngài trong việc xây dựng cộng đồng tự túc, tổ chức truyền thông, và tham gia các hội nghị quốc tế như Geneva.
- Trích dẫn Bernard Fall để khẳng định trí tuệ và ảnh hưởng của Đức Hộ Pháp, nhưng cũng ghi nhận sự hoài nghi về khả năng hòa giải chính trị.
- Mô tả sự kiện năm 1955 khi Ngô Đình Diệm tấn công Tòa Thánh Tây Ninh, khiến Đức Hộ Pháp phải sống lưu vong tại Campuchia.
- Phân tích sự mâu thuẫn giữa lý tưởng “hòa bình chung sống” và thực tế quân sự hóa đạo, coi đây là điểm gây tranh cãi nhất trong sự nghiệp của Ngài.
- Ghi nhận rằng Đức Hộ Pháp vẫn giữ vững lý tưởng độc lập, không theo Pháp hay Việt Minh, và cố gắng duy trì đạo như một cộng đồng tự trị.
- Kết luận bằng việc trích dẫn Romain Rolland: “Chiến thắng luôn thảm họa hơn cho kẻ thắng cuộc,” để khẳng định giá trị đạo đức của người bị áp bức.
🧭 Nhận xét tổng thể từ góc nhìn nội đạo
✅ Những điểm có giá trị học thuật
- Ghi nhận đúng sự kiện lịch sử và vai trò của Đức Hộ Pháp trong giai đoạn 1946–1956, đặc biệt là việc xây dựng cộng đồng tự trị tại Tây Ninh.
- Trích dẫn chính xác các bài giảng và lời nói cuối đời của Ngài, thể hiện chiều sâu đạo đức và tâm linh.
- Phân tích mâu thuẫn giữa lý tưởng và thực tế, đặc biệt là vấn đề quân sự hóa đạo, một chủ đề cần được thảo luận công bằng.
- Ghi nhận sự chuyển hóa của Đức Hộ Pháp từ trí thức Tây học sang người lãnh đạo tâm linh, phù hợp với tiến trình tu hành trong nội đạo.
⚠️ Những điểm cần phản biện
1. Diễn giải đạo như một “dự án chính trị thất bại”
- GS Janet cho rằng nỗ lực hòa giải của Đức Hộ Pháp là “doomed to defeat,” và rằng đạo trở thành “mini-theocracy” nhờ sự bảo trợ của thực dân.
- Trong nội đạo, sự tồn tại của Hội Thánh là thiên ý, không phải là “sản phẩm chính trị tạm thời.”
👉 Việc này giảm nhẹ tính thiêng liêng và pháp lý của tổ chức đạo, và dễ khiến người đọc hiểu sai rằng đạo chỉ tồn tại nhờ thế lực chính trị.
2. So sánh với Gandhi để làm nổi bật mâu thuẫn cá nhân
- Bà cho rằng Đức Hộ Pháp “ít thuần khiết hơn Gandhi,” và rằng việc dùng biểu tượng võ trang là “tìm kiếm quyền lực cá nhân.”
- Trong nội đạo, phục trang và biểu tượng võ trang là biểu hiện của chức vụ thiêng liêng, không phải là “biểu tượng cá nhân.”
👉 Việc so sánh như vậy làm lệch vai trò thiêng liêng của Ngài, và dễ dẫn đến hiểu sai về bản chất nghi lễ đạo pháp.
3. Diễn giải đạo như một “sân khấu chính trị”
- Bà gọi truyền thông của Đức Hộ Pháp là “society of spectacle,” và mô tả đạo như một “diễn trình quyền lực.”
- Trong nội đạo, mọi hoạt động của Ngài đều nhằm thi hành thiên ý và phổ độ nhân loại, không phải là “trình diễn chính trị.”
👉 Diễn giải như vậy thế tục hóa giáo lý, và biến đạo thành một “phong trào xã hội cải trang tôn giáo.”
🌱 Kết luận tổng thể cho P10
Phần 10 là đoạn kết luận giàu tư liệu, cảm xúc và chiều sâu, nhưng cũng là nơi GS Janet Hoskins thế tục hóa sâu nhất bản chất thiêng liêng của Đạo Cao Đài. Dù bà ghi nhận đúng nhiều sự kiện và biểu tượng, nhưng cách diễn giải:
- Biến đạo thành dự án chính trị thất bại.
- Biến Đức Hộ Pháp thành nhân vật biểu tượng thay vì chức sắc thiêng liêng.
- Biến giáo lý thành công cụ phản kháng chính trị.
👉 Những điều này cần được phản biện rõ ràng để giữ gìn sự trong lành của giáo lý và lịch sử nội đạo, nhất là khi các biểu tượng tâm linh dễ bị hiểu sai qua lăng kính thế tục.
Nếu bạn muốn, mình có thể giúp bạn tổng hợp phản biện học thuật cho toàn bộ bài viết, hoặc xây dựng một chuyên đề đối chiếu giữa “diễn giải học thuật” và “giáo lý nội đạo.” Bạn đang làm một công việc rất quan trọng, và mình vinh hạnh được đồng hành cùng bạn trong hành trình bảo vệ ánh sáng của đạo.
P10
Using Orientalism against Empire: Theology as Political and Cultural Critique.
When the American scholar Virginia Thompson visited French Indochina in the 1930s, she found Caodaism to be “the one constructive indigenous movement among the Annamites” (1937, 475) and was particularly full of praise for what the Hộ Pháp had done with Tây Ninh, building schools, printing presses and weaver’s looms with a “Gandhiesque flavor about creating a community which is self-sufficient” (ibid., 474). Both Gandhi and Phạm Công Tắc foregrounded cultural nationalism as a major strategy of anti-colonial resistance. The notion of a return to pure, indigenous traditions with emphasis on certain forms of moral and ethical strength, was important in preparing people to resist an appar ently overwhelming colonial power. Influenced by Social Darwinism, Gandhi argued that Indians had brought on the degeneracy of India by their own moral faults and complicity by following foreign consumer fashions. Phạm Công Tắc drew on an earlier tradition of prophecies that the Vietnamese brought colonialism on themselves as a punishment for their sins, but had now paid their karmic debts and would be rewarded for their suffering under the colonial yoke by becoming the “spiritual masters of mankind.” Paul Mus, in trying to explain why the “mysticism” of the Caodaists tended to detach itself from the colonial project, argued that the French misunderstood the religious con tent of Vietnamese supernaturalism: “We mistook divinatory magic for instrumental magic” (1952, 292). Diviners in the East Asian tradition seek to discern cosmic patterns rather than to change them through some sort of supernatural agency. So the philo sophical and religious ideas of the great teachers were used to diagnose the Western malaise rather than to act directly against it. Mus explains: “Human ideas, and the means and efforts that they are part of, are nothing if they do not translate an idea of cosmic harmony, celestial order which is strong enough to make them successful. Assistance must fall from the sky and come out of the land. To build a religious restoration of a mystical Vietnam, rooted in the popular beliefs of the masses still steeped in the past, it is necessary first to prove that this is efficacious” (ibid., 292–293). He was critical of
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French efforts to “prove” their superior power with technology, which were, as his stu dents like Francis Fitzgerald have later added, even more accentuated by American military forces (Fitzgerald 1972). In arguing that Vietnamese “patriotism, like their religion, is divinatory” (Mus 1952, 293) Mus argued that it was linked to efforts to discern the wider elements at work in the universe. Defending the land of their ancestors from foreign intrusions came to appear as a spiritual mission. Since ancestor worship is “the only religion without skep tics,” Mus argues that airplanes are powerless against guerilla warriors defending their native soil, who believe that their own ancestors empower them by remaining within the bodies of their descendants and being visualized at each incense offering in front of the family altar. But he failed to take into account the innovations in Vietnamese patriotism intro duced by Phạm Công Tắc’s exoteric Caodaism. The Hộ Pháp established a more instru mental form of séance, which sought not only to understand the world but (in Marx’s words) also to change it. At the same time that these religious teachings were rooted in tradition and presented themselves as revivals, they introduced a different system of weighting cultural strains and placed many practices of the cultural periphery back in the center. The central doctrine of Caodaism was the millenarian claim that the end of the Age of Empire was also the end of a cosmic cycle, and it would be the formerly colonized peoples (and especially the Vietnamese) who would emerge as the new spiritual leaders of the world. Drawing on the “recessive elements of Christianity” which were also important in Gandhi’s message (Nandy 2005, 74), they argued that the meek would not only inherit the earth but they could use a sense of the moral supremacy of the oppressed as one of their most important weapons. Far from being a “cargo cult” which worshipped the sources of foreign power and wealth and praised them, Caodaist doctrines preached that resistance to colonial ideology and material practices would allow the Vietnamese to detach themselves and experience a rebirth in which they could reincarnate East Asian cultural values restored to their pristine state. Gandhi had been quick to see that Theosophy, and an idealized notion of the spiritual values of the East, could have great political potential, and he used that potential both by allying himself with Annie Besant’s Home Rule for India League and by focusing not so much on colonialism itself as on the moral and cultural superiority of Indian civilization. Phạm Công Tắc also appropriated what we could anachronistically call “counter culture discourses” from “Annamophiles” in French spiritist and Theosophy circles, and mounted a concerted long distance public relations campaign to force the French to permit the expansion of Caodaism. Phạm Công Tắc used his facility in French and his wish to draw on the colonial
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arsenal to chart a pathway in which a westernized young man full of anti-colonial senti ment is gradually instructed by the spirits in Asian verities, and moves from being the “hand” or the “pen” of the gods to becoming their conversation partner and even—in his later visions—an active combatant, driving out demonic forces.17) The older, more mature Phạm Công Tắc no longer gets lessons from the French literary figures he studied in colonial schools. He no longer seeks to reform to colonialism by reconciling the ideals of the French enlightenment with the actions of narrow-minded administrators. Instead, he inserts himself into his own journey to the east, moving away from a nativist search for heritage to a more cosmopolitan vision of a syncretic, unifying faith. Paul Mus described Caodaism as a “religion of reversal” (religion de remplacement) in which the colonial subjects would come to replace their masters: “In trying to revive
17) Phạm Công Tắc’s sermons culminate with a narrative of his voyages to the upperworld, traveling in a plane-like “dharma vehicle” which moves from cloud to cloud, where he encounters Lucifer (Kim Quang Sứ), described as a “great Immortal” who is “almost at the level of a Buddha” but was frustrated because his immense ambitions and striving for personal power undermined his sanctity. Phạm Công Tắc’s exegesis directs us to read this passage as a comment on his own struggles to maintain control of Caodaism. At the time of the inauguration of the Great Way of the Third Age of Redemption, Lucifer was also granted an “amnesty” (the possibility of redemption) and the gates of hell were formally closed. So Lucifer was present when the first temple was erected at Gò Kén, and “he attended the first séances, held the beaked phoenix basket and signed his name” (Sermon #33, Apr 19, 1949, 115), but he has always been a force of divisiveness, leaving behind a poem at the time when “we had no bad intentions against each there; there was not even a whisper of rebel lion” (Sermon #33, 114), and suggesting an ultimatum: All nine immortals fear my face I may bow to Sakyamuni, but chaos thunders in my wake You see how I’m received at that Palace of Jade But will truth or heresy usher you into the Pure Land? (Sermon #33, 114) The Supreme God allowed Lucifer to “carry out over 20 years, trick after scheming trick” (Sermon #33, 115) because human beings had to exercise their free will, they had to choose the Tao over alternatives. Lucifer’s temptations provided the field upon which virtuous conduct would be a conscious choice rather than a simple reflex. At the gates to Paradise, Lê Văn Trung fights Lucifer off with a stick, but each time he strikes, the blow only divides his enemy into two. Aided by another Caodai dignitary, he leads a great battle, which the Hộ Pháp himself is finally forced to join. He puts on his golden armor, takes up his golden whip and his exorcist’s staff, and casts his whip like a giant net to isolate his enemy and finally drive him off, vaporizing him into an aura (Sermon #33, 117). Inscribing himself as the hero in a Journey to the West-like epic, Phạm Công Tắc in this passage moves out of his habitual role as Tripitaka (Tam Tạng, “This is why I pray to the Supreme Being as Tripitaka did on his journeys to India seeking Buddhist scriptures” Sermon #28, Mar 21, 1949, 92), the bearer of scripture for a new faith, and acts much more like the Monkey Saint (Tề Thiên Đại Thánh), jumping into the fray. Intriguingly, several recent scholars (Seaman 1986, 488; Yu 1983) have speculated that popular Chinese religious accounts of supernatural voyages (Tây Du Ký, Bắc Du Ký) may themselves have developed out of spirit writing séances, in which the medium was—as we see in this passage—“playing all the parts” or at least narrating them for his audience.
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a Vietnamese empire, these theocratic sects do not only go beyond our ideas, they anni hilate them” (Mus 1952, 248). He argued, on that basis, that their vision of change was in many ways more radical than that of the communists, who “remain within the lines of our own worldview”: “The more ‘conservative’ anti-colonial forces, and especially those with a mystical bent, may fight with us against communism, but they see our own cultural influence as similar to that of the communists, who are the ungrateful heirs of western materialism” (ibid., 249). While Phạm Công Tắc (like Gandhi) was usually seen as preaching a “counter modernity,” and spoke of restoring traditional values, it is also true that “his counter modernity proved to be the most modern of all those of anti-colonial activists” (Young 2001, 334). In the final decade of his life, the Hộ Pháp began to operate in a media war, using the society of spectacle as his secret weapon. He gave a series of press confer ences, met with foreign reporters, traveled to Geneva and to Japan, Taiwan and Hanoi as a “spirit medium diplomat,” desperately opposing partition. Bernard Fall visited Phạm Công Tắc in August 1953 to ask for his perspective on the decolonization process. The Caodist leader impressed him deeply, as noted in a letter to his wife not published until recently: “The man had a piercing intelligence and his approach to things is very realistic. I learned more about Indochina than I’d learned before in three and half months. To think that he was sitting there with me telling me about the need for French help after he’d spent five years in French banishment in Madagascar. The man was fascinating and I can see why two million people think he’s the next thing to God himself—and that includes a lot of educated Europeans” (Dorothy Fall 2004, 77–78). Fall famously described Phạm Công Tắc as “the shrewdest Vietnamese politi cian,” but remained skeptical about whether he could use his religious base to reconcile the increasingly polarized forces of what became the DRV and RVN (Bernard Fall 1955, 249, republished in 1966, 148). In 1953–54, Phạm Công Tắc gave a series of press conferences praising both Bảo Đại and Hồ Chí Minh and calling for national union. When the French were defeated at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, he called for a reconciliation of the southern nationalists with the ủ northern communists. Phạm Công Tắc believed that his religion of unity would provide the ideal setting for negotiations to bring Vietnam’s different political groups together, and he hoped for French and American backing for this to proceed. He attended the Geneva Conventions and tried to work behind the scenes to convince others, but this proposal was doomed to defeat when the French and Việt Minh agreed to the “temporary t measure” of a partition at the 17th parallel. Phạm Công Tắc and many other Caodaists had been willing to work with Bảo Đại, but as Ngô Đình Diệm moved to consolidate his own power with US backing, the non
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aligned nationalists were forcibly dissolved. In October 1955, Ngô Đình Diệm ordered Caodai General Phương to invade the Holy See and strip Phạm Công Tắc of all his tem poral powers. Three hundred of his papal guardsmen were disarmed and Phạm Công Tắc became a virtual prisoner of his own troops. On February 19, 1956, Phạm Công Tắc’s daughters and a number of other religious leaders were arrested, but he himself managed to slip away. He made contact with his followers several weeks later from Phnom Penh, and lived out the last three years of his life in exile in Cambodia. The non-violence that Phạm Công Tắc consistently preached in his final years and his much-touted concept of “peaceful coexistence” (hòa bình chung sống) never had, of course, the purity of Gandhi’s doctrine of passive resistance. Although he did not know about the formation of the Caodai Army during his over five years of exile in French colonial prisons in Madagascar and the Comores Islands, Phạm Công Tắc’s acceptance of the militarization of Caodaism is, for other Caodaists as well as for many outsiders, the most controversial aspect of his career. The Hộ Pháp called the Caodai militia “the fire inside the heart which may burn and destroy it” (tâm nuôi hỏa) (Bùi and Beck 2000, 85) and immediately moved its military headquarters out of the Holy See, but he did see the political expediency of having a “defense force” to protect his followers and give him leverage in a precarious balancing act, suspended between the French and the Việt Minh. Phạm Công Tắc insisted that Caodaism needed to remain “independent” (độc lập), refusing to align with either side and seeking a peaceful path through the decolonization process. Caodaists had long nourished a utopian vision of living as an autonomous com munity, owing deference neither to the French colonial government nor to the Việt Minh. t During the period 1946–54, they came close to realizing that dream, because the French agreed to create a “state within a state,” where Caodaists had their own administration, collected their own taxes, enjoyed religious freedom, and received French weapons and funding for their troops. Caodai soldiers served under their own commanders, as a peace keeping force, but were not sent to fight the Việt Minh in the north. This created a t mini-theocracy within the province of Tây Ninh, whose dramatic performance of power could be interpreted as an effort to demonstrate the nationalist dream of autonomy, even as it was made possible by the embattled French colonial administration. A number of other Caodaists, associated with branches like Minh Chơn Lý, Minh Chơn Đạo, Ban Chỉnh Đạo, and Tiên Thiên, joined the Việt Minh against the French. The t “Franco-Caodai Pact” negotiated with the Tây Ninh Church did not provide for the release y of other Caodai leaders from prison or exile, and for this reason it served to divide rather than unite the religion. Phạm Công Tắc’s efforts to play the peacemaker were ultimately unsuccessful, and his praise for the principle of “peaceful co-existence” put him out of
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favor with more strongly anti-communist leaders. Although Phạm Công Tắc described himself as following “the same path as Gandhi” (Sermon #20, Jan 16, 1949), even those sympathetic to his political goals found his choice of a martial idiom showed “more ego and a greater search for personal power” than the Indian independence leader. Gandhi considered the partition of India on one level a personal failure, and Phạm Công Tắc’s final writings sound a similar note, suggesting that Caodaists, and all Viet namese, should seek expiation for their divisiveness.18) His deathbed request to King Sihanouk was that he would not be returned to Vietnam until the country was “unified, or pursuing the policy of peace and neutrality to which I gave my life.” But even as he saw many his hopes crushed, the Hộ Pháp still knew how to use man’s sense of guilt creatively: He promised his followers a moral victory by drawing on the non-martial self of the apparent victors to create doubts about their victory in them. On an ethical plane, his final words echoed Romain Rolland’s formula “Victory is always more catastrophic for the vanquishers than for the vanquished” (Nandy 2005). The suffering of the defeated can enhance their moral character and make them strong, while the triumphant celebra tions of their opponents open the way for corruption and decadence.
Conclusions: A Legacy Combining Stagecraft and Statecraft
