A Vietnamese Family Chronicle

by Nguyen Trieu Dan

  Secondly, are those who practice it in the market place.

  Thirdly, are those who practice it in a temple.

  One can follow Buddha’s teaching everywhere. To do so in the noise and among the crowd of a market place is more difficult than in the calm atmosphere of a temple. Moreover, to do so in one’s own home, without either support or supervision, requires the highest degree of self-discipline and commitment.

  My Hanh’s commitment to her faith lasted throughout her life. As we know, it was her wish to be buried in temple land instead of family land. She lived to an advanced age and exercised a strong influence over the religious beliefs of both her son and grandson, the next two generations of our family. Like her, Nguyen Luan and Khanh Thien were “religious at home.” The path they chose was Zen. Daily, they recited Buddhist sutras, meditated and sought to understand the Four Noble Truths of Buddha’s teaching. Our family had gone from prosperity to decline, but instead of rebelling against an adverse fate, as the last generation did, their attitude was one of peaceful acceptance. As good Buddhists, they endeavored not to attach themselves to worldly things but to live in the present time, with no regret for a past that was gone and no expectation for a future that was yet to exist. Zen or Meditation was probably the Buddhist discipline best suited to the training of a Confucian scholar. Zen aimed at cultivating one’s mind for the search for Truth. It stood very close to the central Confucian precept of cultivating one’s person by “extending one’s knowledge, keeping one’s thoughts sincere and rectifying one’s heart.” A Confucian scholar must constantly seek to learn and to improve himself. Likewise, a Zen disciple needed to constantly train and develop his mind. Confucius told his students to “make themselves new, each and every day.” This could equally apply to those who followed Zen.

  Our ancestors would not have necessarily belonged to a Zen school. A Zen priest may have given them guidance on the techniques of meditation, but theirs could have been essentially a personal and independent quest. Anyone could choose his or her own way of search for Truth in Zen. There was no requirement to subscribe to a particular dogma or set of rules. Nguyen Luan and Khanh Thien remained Confucian scholars and continued their occupation as teachers, while practicing Zen. They learned by reading Buddhist sermons and, especially, by drawing from the treasure trove of writings left by ancient Zen priests. These were often poets. One does not need to be a Zen follower to appreciate the beauty of Zen poems, such as this one by Van Hanh who died in 1018. Van Hanh was not only a renowned priest. His advice on political matters was eagerly sought by two dynasties of kings. He lived through a change of dynasty, saw the rise and fall of families and witnessed the same kind of upheaval which would befall our own family some centuries later. I think that this poem must find a particular echo in the minds of our Zen ancestors. It was a lesson that Van Hanh gave to his disciples on the subject of impermanence:

  Our life is like a flash of lightning; it is here, it has gone.

  All plants flourish in spring, to dry out with autumn.

  Fate may bring us rise or decline, do not be afraid,

  For rise and decline are dew drops shining on the blade of grass.

  In the Zen tradition, a master taught his disciple not by a long discourse but by engaging into a dialogue with him. The disciple asks questions. The master gave answers. These were usually very short and designed not to explain but to shock the disciple into realising that the real answer to his questions lay within himself. No master could give it to him. Truth dwelt in everyone of us and in everything that we could see. Many Zen dialogues are famous and have been pondered by generations of followers, in particular “religious at home” who, like our ancestors, were engaged in a long and lonely quest to reach for an “insight” into the nature of things. A story is told of King Ly Thai Tong (1028-1054) who visited a temple one day. He met an old priest whose name was not known and who was only remembered as The Old Zen Man. The king asked him where he came from and how did he become a Zen priest. The old man replied with two verses:

  Suffice to know the time and day of now

  Why recall past springs and autumns!

  The king was puzzled. Seeing this, the old man continued with a few more verses:

  The green bamboo and yellow chrysanthemums,

  Their reality is not outside me.

  The silver clouds and bright full moon,

  Reveal to me the whole Truth.

  As the king still did not seem to understand, the old man ended the conversation by exclaiming: “What is the point of using words!” Suddenly, the king understood and was enlightened, so the story says.

  Our ancestors were recalled to be writers but none of their writings survived the wars and upheavals in our country. I believe that they were not major writers, but only members of a small literary group. Being followers of Zen, they would get inspiration from Zen masters and, I imagine, take their style as a model. Vietnamese Zen writers came into prominence under the Ly dynasty (1010-1225), which saw the first blossoming of our literature and poetry. Many Zen poems of that early period could rival in melody and beauty of expression the best poems written during the Tang dynasty, the golden age of Chinese poetry. In addition, Zen poems have that indefinable quality which is called “Zen spirit.” A discerning reader can recognize it at once. Zen masters were people who, after years of meditation and rigorous training, had conquered their doubts and come to terms with themselves and the world. Their spirit shone through their works. Among the best-loved poems of the Ly period was the following from Man Giac, a Zen priest living in the eleventh century. He died at forty-five. He wrote this poem to let his disciples know that he was ill and had not much longer to live:

  When spring leaves, a hundred flowers will fall,

  When spring arrives, a hundred flowers will bloom.

  Life rushes past before our eyes,

  Old age comes, starting from the top of our head.

  But do not say that all flowers will fall when spring fades away,

  For last night, in my front yard, I saw a branch of apricot flowers.

  Zen spirit sustained our people when their fortunes were down, and set to stay down. Nguyen Luan and Khanh Thien were condemned to be scholars without titles. With examinations and public office out of bounds for them, there was no way that they could move up in society. One would expect them to be affected by a mood of despondency, even despair. Yet, these two generations were remembered as a period of calm and contentment. Our ancestors found happiness and peace of mind in the pursuit of religion. Thus, in the aftermath of the change of dynasty, two women played decisive roles in our family. Trinh Khiet, the wife of our third ancestor, led the way back to our roots in Kim Bai and recovered our land. Her daughter-in-law My Hanh armed her descendants with a strong Buddhist faith and helped them cope with a long period of decline.

  It has been so in our history. The men won diplomas and mandarinal positions. A phase of prosperity was started. As the family moved up, the women stayed in their husband’s shadow. But when fortunes turned and rise gave way to decline, often our rigid scholars failed to adapt to changing circumstances. Then, our foremothers rose to the occasion and were instrumental in guiding the family through difficult times. Their leadership role did not fit in with Confucian teaching, which said that a woman must “defer to” or “follow” her father when a daughter at home, her husband when married and her son when a widow. But it was in character with the ancient culture existing in Vietnam before our country fell under Chinese domination in 111 B.C. Then, men and women had equal rights. Their responsibilities were also equal, a situation which showed itself most clearly in the army where soldiers and commanders came from both sexes. The Trung sisters, who died in the Hat River near our village, led our first national movement of resistance against the Chinese. They were not the only women to do so. In A.D. 248, Trieu Au sought to break the foreign yoke at the head of an army she raised herself. Family members tried to dissuade her from going into a peril
ous campaign, but she said: “I want to ride the big storm, break the angry waves, kill the mighty whales in the eastern sea, sweep our country clean to save the people from the quagmire. I do not wish to imitate others who stooped to become a man’s concubine and servant.” Confucianism spread to Vietnam during the thousand years of Chinese rule, along with Taoism and Buddhism. Eventually, it became the dominant “teaching,” in particular among the scholars. However, it never succeeded in eradicating the ancient equality from our society and the role of the Vietnamese woman has never been just “to follow.”

  Our scholars were strict Confucians who ruled their family in a rigid and authoritarian manner, in conformity with precepts laid down a long time ago by the Master and his disciples. Discipline was strict, especially for sons, for upon their success would depend the family’s future. Relations between father and son were formal and rather similar to those between a stern teacher and his pupil. In fact, many generations of our family used the term thay, or teacher, as an appellation for father. Fortunately, our foremothers had a more understanding attitude and were more responsive to the needs of the young. Often, their influence over the latter was the dominant one. In our chronicle, the women remained in the background. Unlike the men’s diplomas and careers, their activities were hardly mentioned. But interestingly, later generations would continue to talk about the roles played by Trinh Khiet and My Hanh, while most of the achievements of the mandarins of the first generations came to be forgotten. Even the existence of Nguyen Tue and Nguyen Hoang was lost to their descendants, for a very long time.

  Nguyen Luan and his son were said to have written important chapters of the old family chronicle which was destroyed by bandits in the eighteenth century. All generations of our family had a duty to add a chapter to the chronicle which was deposited in the Ancestral Shrine. As a rule, a generation did not write about itself, but about the ones that preceded it. A scholar must not record his own life and career, however successful they may be. He should leave that task to his son. As for him, his responsibility was to make sure that the achievements of his father, and those of more distant ancestors, would be known to his descendants. He must search into his ancestry and “throw light on the past,” as my grandfather wrote in the chronicle. In normal circumstances, our second ancestor Nguyen Uyen would write about his father Nguyen Tue and his son Nguyen Hoang would write about him. Then, it would be the turn of Phuc Thien to do so for Nguyen Hoang, Nguyen Luan for Phuc Thien and Khanh Thien for Nguyen Luan. However following the collapse of the Mac, it was probable that neither Nguyen Hoang before he died nor Phuc Thien in his troubled existence contributed much to the chronicle. Nguyen Luan and his son would have to fill the gap left by them and put on record the times and lives of Nguyen Hoang and Phuc Thien. Apparently, they also wrote about our first two generations, for family tradition recalls that they were the chroniclers of our “golden period” of doctor-mandarins. Whatever the case, they must have been able to give a fairly complete account of that period, being close to it. With their writing talents, this must also have been a very readable account, for later generations would keep talking about it long after it had been destroyed and its contents mostly forgotten.

  Nguyen Luan’s wife came from a family whose name could be either Le or Nguyen. The chronicle is not clear on this point. She was one of the very few among our foremothers to have left a personal name. The chronicle recorded it as Thang, which is an unusual and rather interesting name for a woman. Thang means “to win” in the common language and is more often chosen as a name for a male. It has also an archaic and little-known sense of hair ornament. In ancient times, women made artificial flowers out of colored papers to put on their hair, those flowers were called thang. Some scholarly families gave that name to their daughters, for that reason. Finally, Buddhist vocabulary has an important expression thang nghia, which means “the right and winning path.” Our foremother’s name may have come from there, in which case it would denote a strong Buddhist faith in her family. The meaning of names is a fascinating field of study. Vietnamese parents, especially scholars in the old times, used to take great care in choosing their children’s names. These could reveal much of a family’s background, its attitudes and beliefs. It is such a pity that so many of our ancestors’ names have been lost. By her name, we can surmise that Nguyen Luan’s wife came from a scholarly family following the path of Buddhism; in other words, a family very much like our own. Probably, she was also a “religious at home,” like her husband and mother-in-law.

  As with the four generations before it, this one had only one male descendant. An added source of anxiety for Nguyen Luan and his wife was that their son was not born until many years after their marriage. For a time, there was real fear that the line might end with them. Our foremother went to numerous temples, pagodas and shrines to pray for a son. She was a regular worshipper at Kim Bai’s own Snake Temple, whose Spirit had been kind to many a childless couple. Her husband sought the help of geomancers. On their advice, our ancestral home was given a new orientation. Such a change of orientation had happened before and for the same reason. Our men did not go to temples in search for a descendant. They considered what the women did as popular superstition, but were ready to listen to practitioners of geomancy. This was a field of knowledge which, like astrology, enjoyed the respect of scholars. The practitioners were themselves scholars who specialized in the difficult study of the Book of Changes and other learned treatises on the configuration of the land and the way it influenced human affairs. Those acclaimed as master geomancers were said to have gained an insight into mysterious forces that ruled people’s lives. It may have been in this generation that the episode of the Chinese geomancer called in to move our ancestral tombs which has been recounted earlier, took place. Finally, a son was born when Nguyen Luan was in his forties. The danger had passed, but the underlying fear remained. For more than a century our lineage had been preserved by a single branch. Without new branches appearing, how much longer could it last?

  Our sixth ancestor Khanh Thien was married to a woman of the Nguyen family. Here again, we know very little about her except that being a Nguyen, she was probably not from our village. There were in Kim Bai several Nguyen families which were not related to one another. But village customs frowned upon marriages between people with the same family name, perhaps on the premise that they belonged to the same original stock. Unlike his father, Khanh Thien had an heir at an early age. That was a good omen and hopes were raised that this generation would see the end of the “drought” in male descendants. But then no other son came, or if they did, they could not survive their infancy. The years passed by. It looked as if the one-son pattern was there to stay. Khanh Thien and his wife were in their middle age when another son was born. A full twenty years separated him from his elder brother. The parents’ joy could be imagined. At last, the old pattern was broken. Nearly a century had passed since the trauma of the change of dynasty. Difficult times had been with our family long enough; indeed as long as the three generations mentioned in the proverb. It was time for the wheel of fortune to turn and this could be the signal.

  18. The Great Calamity

  Khanh Thien’s first son was named Nguyen Duc Y. His younger brother’s name is not recorded in the chronicle. We only know his pseudonym Thuan Can. As we can see, Nguyen Duc Y is a three-word name. Until the last generation, all our people had names composed of only two words, the family name Nguyen followed by a personal name, as for instance Nguyen Tue in the case of our first ancestor and Nguyen Uyen in the case of the second. The three-word name that Khanh Thien gave to his son was a departure from family tradition. He would not have taken such a decision lightly. The name transmitted down the generations by our ancestors had a symbolic, almost sacred, character. I think that Khanh Thien acted in the hope that a new name would usher in a new phase in the life of our family. That may have been his way to conjure Fate, so that the things that had kept us down would be done away with: the ban
from the civil service examinations and the scarcity of male descendants. Besides, he was following a general trend in the country. From the early periods until about the seventeenth century, most scholars listed in the registers of high graduates had names of only two words. Then, as the population increased and it became difficult to avoid having the same combinations of words, especially for people sharing prevalent family names such as Nguyen, Tran or Le, more and more families opted for the longer name. Eventually, the majority of graduates in the registers had three-word names. The movement was gradual and operated over a great many generations. Our family opted for the change early on, which was surprising, for we have always been conservative. Khanh Thien must have felt a pressing need to do something to change our luck.

  Soon enough, things started to look up. Duc Y, who was born sometime in the 1670s, showed good promise as a student. A younger brother was born. Then, the interdiction with regard to the examinations was lifted, probably under the rule of overlord Trinh Can (1682-1709). Prior to that, our relations with local authorities had improved, through the good offices of former students of Nguyen Luan and Khanh Thien. Under Trinh Tac, Trinh Can’s predecessor, hostilities with the Nguyen in the south abated and the regime could devote more attention to education and the training of talents to serve in the administration. Scholarship was encouraged. In 1662, Trinh Tac ordered the renovation of the national university, which had fallen into disrepair. Fortnightly meetings were again held there for students to receive tuition. Civil service examinations had been taking place, but malpractices were common. People brought their textbooks with them into the examination enclosure, some hired others to sit for them. The standard of graduates fell well below that at the time of the Mac. The situation became so bad that, in 1664, all those made bachelors during the past ten years were ordered to sit again. More than half of them were failed. In the same year, doctorate examinations were reorganized. In 1678, a new system of regional examinations was put in place. Local authorities were instructed to list all persons with learning, so that no one would be passed over when examinations were held. In these circumstances, it was perhaps only natural that families like ours, which were kept out for political reasons going back to many generations ago, would have their situation revised. Duc Y was allowed to take part in the examinations.