The Sinification and Localization of Daoist Cosmology in the Philosophical Structure of Caodaism in Southern Vietnam
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Caodaism (Đại Đạo Tam Kỳ Phổ Độ), founded in Tây Ninh province in 1926, is usually read by historians of religion as a case of Vietnamese syncretism: a local blend of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism assembled under French colonial rule. The article raises a narrower and more philosophical issue. Rather than treating the Three Teachings as three roughly equal ingredients, it isolates the Daoist component and traces two distinct operations through which Chinese Daoist cosmology entered and then settled into the Caodaist system: sinification, the transmission of a determinate metaphysical vocabulary (Wuji, Taiji, Yin-Yang, the Eight Trigrams, the Five Agents, the jing-qi-shen triad) from Chinese religious literature into Vietnamese scripture, and localization, the subsequent reworking of that vocabulary to answer needs the vocabulary was not originally built for. Drawing on a comparative reading of the two principal Caodaist scriptural collections, the Đại Thừa Chân Giáo and the Thiên Đạo và Thế Đạo, against the Daode jing, the Zhuangzi, and the Chinese-language scholarship of Kong Linghong, Sun Yiping, and Zhan Shichuang, the article argues that Daoist cosmology supplies the generative grammar of Caodaist metaphysics while Confucian ethics and Buddhist soteriology occupy positions that this grammar itself assigns them. The analysis is placed within the broader theoretical literature on religious syncretism and on the East Asian “redemptive societies” of the early twentieth century, a comparison that clarifies what is generic and what is specifically Vietnamese in the Caodaist synthesis. The article concludes that Caodaism is best understood neither as a disguised form of Daoism nor as an eclectic borrowing from it, but as a philosophically coherent transposition of Daoist cosmological categories into a theistic, colonial-era soteriology that no single Chinese tradition had previously produced.
Source: The World of the Orient
Authors: Phuoc Tai Nguyen, Thanh Hung Nguyen
Institution: Can Tho University of Medicine and Pharmacy
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7221023698