twist of fait accomplis

PBS' Religion & Ethics aired a piece on Cao Dai this past weekend (it's replaying several times this week, as well). It was kind of neat to see such an obscure religion given this amount of attention. A few people I know (Dr. Hum Bui and Ngasha Beck) were interviewed and one woman featured was even filmed while she was communicating with the spirits of her dead parents. It provides a good overview of the religion and all its interesting little quirks.

I had first dug into this neat religion after reading a single sentence about it in my Asian Civilization textbook. I visited the main temple in Tay Ninh in 1998 (man, I still need to post those pictures and the audio) and have talked with quite a few Caodaiists, including one man in Vietnam who basically told me he was co-writing a book with God. Over the years, I've accumulated most of the books published in English about Cao Dai (including some rare out-of-print texts, unsanctioned by the Vietnamese government, illegally photocopied for me in Vietnam), and even now, I'm still as intrigued by it as I was back in 1997. The general gist of the religion can be summed up with the phrase: "All are one," meaning that all religions come from the same place to serve the same purpose, and Cao Dai is an order of God to unify the people of these religions without unifying the religions themselves. Elements of Christianity/Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Shintoism, and spiritism are all included.

To find out more about Cao Dai, I point you to "CaoDai: Religion of Many Spirits," a paper I wrote in 1997. The aforementioned PBS link also contains a number of interesting links, including an NPR piece and an extensive 10-page 2002 article from the Dallas Observer titled "The Spirits Move Them." The two books I'd recommend checking out are CaoDai: Faith of Unity and Conversations with Eternity, a book that chronicles Victor Hugo's spiritism sessions.