Vietnamese Buddhist encounters with South Asia in the 1950s

Abstract

This article presents a comparison of two Vietnamese Buddhist monks who travelled to and spent time in South Asia in the 1950s. The first, Thích Tố Liên (1903–1977), travelled to Calcutta and then on to Sri Lanka in May 1950 to participate in the First General Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists. Though his encounter was relatively brief, it left a lasting impression. Tố Liên returned as an ardent advocate for the World Fellowship and for an internationalist view of Buddhism more generally. The second, Thích Minh Chàu (1918–2012), had a very different encounter with Sri Lanka and India. He spent most of the 1950s studying Pali manuscripts and earning his doctoral degree from the Nalanda Institute (then a part of the University of Bihar, now Nalanda University). During this time, he became an important popularizer of contemporary Indian ideas. While in South Asia, he contributed many articles to Buddhist journals back in Vietnam. He recounted his pilgrimage to major Buddhist sites, considered the contemporary influence of Buddhism in India, and analysed the works of everyone from Tagore to the Dalai Lama. This article will compare the South Asian experiences of these two Vietnamese Buddhist monks and analyse their impact on Buddhist unification and the Vietnamese Buddhist movement in the 1960s.