Revival in Viet Nam

Last week South Vietnamese celebrated the 2.508th anniversary of the birth of Due Khong Tu, better known as Confucius, by watching schoolgirls in ivory-colored costumes perform ceremonial dances, cheering wildly at basketball games, and listening with hushed attention to speeches by black-turbaned, silk-robed village scholars. Throughout the country citizens were urged to pay even more attention to the ancient Confucian code of ethics. Heads of families were told to shun frivolous entertainments (chess games and orchid exhibitions are permissible), and soldiers were warned that nightclubs and cabarets are morally off-limits to them. Girls were forbidden to wear tight blue jeans. Everyone was exhorted to seek more knowledge, aspire to greater integrity.

In the two-year-old Republic of South Viet Nam, Confucianism is a matter of government policy. Soon after fighting stopped in French Indo-China and Viet Nam was split officially from the Communist north, leaders of the new republic began searching for a doctrine to shore up their nation of Taoists, Buddhists and Christians against surrounding Communism. To Vietnamese officials, Buddhism and Taoism seemed too vague and personal to combat Marxism, and the Western ethos was still too alien. The teachings of Confucius (551-479 B.C.) looked like the answer. With its adoration of knowledge, its rigid pattern of family life, its elaborate ritual for such everyday acts as pouring tea and laying place-mats, Confucianism still has strong practical appeal in chaotic Asia. And because it is not a religion but a philosophy--it does not deal with theology or speculation--it can be followed without conflict by people of many religions.

Vietnamese intellectuals are aware that Confucianism's extreme reverence for the past helped delay the modernization of Asia until it was disastrously late, but Viet Nam's Confucian revivalists are not worried. The government has issued a Confucian handbook, and officials hold biweekly staff meetings at which government employees are drilled in the master's tenets. The Van-mieu "temple of literature"--with its array of tablets containing the life stories of Confucius and other sages--will be rebuilt in Saigon (the original is in now-Communist Hanoi). A' highbrow Confucian monthly will continue to expound ethics, and the literary contests begun in the sage's time will be revived. The Confucian Ballet of the Imperial City of Hue, which has rehearsed for ten years without a public performance, patiently continues, behind closed doors, to seek perfection. Boasted one scholar on last week's feast day: "Confucius will remain the model of perfection for 10,000 generations to come."

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