Darkness into Light

Darkness and Light 03.01.10

As we travel I thought it might be interesting to use the Tao te Ching as a sort of lens through which to examine each day of travel and experience. The Tao te Ching is considered to be ‘The wisest book ever written’. I will often mention a piece of the days reading if it seems particularly meaningful or help contextualize the writing.

The unnameable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
Of all particular things.

Free from desire you realize the mystery
Caught in desire you see only the manifestations

Yet mystery and manifestations
Arise from the same source
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness
The gateway to all understanding.

Tao te Ching #1

A particularly Buddhistic thought to begin the book. I liken this thought to the idea of clinging to form. All reality is illusion. Want and attachment to form creates pain, we get caught up in the illusion that what we see, what we have, what we want will provide us with happiness but in truth it will only further our suffering.

Sophie and I arranged for a two-part tour from Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). Again, the traffic is a major part of every experience here in Vietnam. Schools of motorized scooters and such weave and unskein all around. The bus driver is continually honking in the vernacular of the horn. Tootles and blasts and repeated notes all represent different types of commands and alerts. Mostly the message is ‘Get out of my way small thing or you will be crushed’.

Our first visit is to a temple several dozens of klicks from HCMC. Cao Dai temple covers something like 200 square k of area. All religions seems to be represented and prayer is conducted with all factions participating. I don’t really understand the premise at all - in fact Victor Hugo, the French poet is one of the deities who is worshipped. Photo to be provided.

Hundreds of devotees file into a massive temple, all except for the highest ranking are dressed in white. A haunting and dissonant music begins and soon the worshippers begin to sing. With clouds of incense billowing from a table near the center, symbols and elements from many of the world religion (glossy green dragons twined like rattan vines coil up massive pink and white pillars, the window has the motif of an eye within a triangle – the same Masonic symbol we see on the pyramid on the US $1 bill, ceiling medallions have figures of tortoise and lions) it is haunting and sort of confounding. I should write no more because I am so ignorant of the ceremony and the particulars of the religion. But the experience was very rich and soulful.

The second leg of our journey took us to the Cu Chi Tunnels north and west of HCMC. The Vietnamese built many of these tunnels then they were appropriated by the Viet Cong.
Cu Chi, only about 65 km from Saigon, was a staging point for guerrillas and soldiers who were attacking the Americans during the war. The VC built around 200km(!) of tunnels during the war.

The entrance to the Centre (attached) was a wide pedestrian tunnel that immersed one in near blackness, meant, I am sure, as a metaphor. And spectacularly useful for my Tao te Ching – darkness into light. Upon emerging one is introduced to the plight of the soldiers on both sides of the conflict. The place has an oppressive air. Death, darkness and claustrophobia are constantly present. Man’s inventiveness in killing and torturing and destroying each other is the theme of the experience we had there; it hurt like a bruise. At the end of the demonstrations (indoctrination) we were taken as a group to a small subterranean room to watch stories told of glorious war heroes from Cu Chi. Both the visuals and the ham-fisted narrative somehow made the experience more awful. While I was watching the agit-prop I felt someone tap me on the left shoulder, I turned thinking that someone wanted to pass in front of me to sit in my row. I looked up and there was no one there. Undoubtedly a ghost.

Our guide for the day was an older gentleman named Minh (Ming) a very interesting fellow who would have experienced some pretty disturbing events in his life. He worked as an interpreter for the US for the purposes of interrogating captured soldiers. He had some very clear precepts for his life that he shared with us: mankind is doomed and one shouldn’t have children, and that he regrets not being a woman because ’women are the flower of the world’. He wants to come back to earth as a woman (whether he will bear children wasn't related). He constantly came back to his major thesis – we should be happy because life is very good to us (much better than it was to the ‘heroes’(=dead) of the American war).

Cu Chi - Enmity, hatred, territory, dogma – all the stuff of an object-oriented world view.
Cao Dai - Harmony, integration, selflessness, sharing – a promise.