Great Divine Temple
Interesting facts
- Near the entrance a painting shows the faith's 'Three Saints': the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, the French writer Victor Hugo and the Vietnamese poet-sage Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm.
- According to Caodaist accounts, no architect drew plans: the dimensions were received through spirit-writing séances, and volunteer builders worked unpaid, ate vegetarian food and vowed celibacy until it was done.
- The design originally called for a temple 135 metres long and 27 metres wide, but the young church could not afford it and shrank the plan.
- In 1941 the French colonial authorities exiled the church's leader Phạm Công Tắc to Madagascar and turned the half-built temple into barracks; work resumed only after his release in 1946.
- Although finished in 1947, the temple was formally inaugurated only on 1 February 1955, because war had delayed the ceremony for eight years.
- The whole building is conceived as a dragon-horse bowing to its master: the twin towers are its horns, the nave its body and the octagonal sanctuary its tail.
- Eighteen columns wrapped in coiling dragons line the nave, and each of its nine levels sits 18 centimetres higher than the one before.
- Statues of three founding dignitaries stand on a throne formed by a seven-headed serpent, each head labelled with one of the seven human emotions.
- A lamp kept burning day and night sits inside the great cosmic globe in the sanctuary, symbolising the source of the universe.
- A Bodhi tree in the forecourt grew from a cutting of the tree at Bodh Gaya, presented in 1953 by the Sri Lankan monk Narada.
Why it is worth it
The Great Divine Temple at Tây Ninh is the mother church of Caodaism, a faith established in southern Vietnam in 1926 that joins Confucian ethics, Taoist practice, Buddhist ideas of karma and rebirth and a hierarchy modelled on the Catholic Church, and its architecture is as syncretic as its beliefs. Behind a twin-towered façade lies a long columned nave rising in steps toward an octagonal sanctuary where a huge globe painted with the Divine Eye — the faith's central symbol — sits on a tiered platform.
Soon after the religion was established, land at Bau Ca Na near Tây Ninh was acquired for a Holy See. Ground was broken in 1931, but shortage of money delayed real construction until 1936, and the temple was completed in 1947. It stands at the heart of the Holy See, a walled precinct of about one square kilometre with twelve gates, containing the faith's administrative offices and residences for its dignitaries and adepts. The temple itself is 97.5 metres long and 22 metres wide, with its two-towered entrance facing west.
The building is divided into three parts. At the front is Hiệp Thiên Đài, flanked by 27-metre towers — a bell tower on one side and a drum tower on the other — each of six storeys of differing heights. The central nave, Cửu Trùng Đài, rises over nine levels that correspond to the nine ranks of the Caodaist hierarchy, with a tower over the fifth level, where the bishops sit. At the rear the octagonal Bát Quái Đài, whose eight sides refer to the eight trigrams, is regarded as the soul of the temple. At its centre a sphere 3.3 metres across, representing the universe of the supreme deity, crowns a twelve-tiered platform; by tradition no other Caodaist temple may have one.
Getting there
The Holy See lies about 5 km east of Tây Ninh city and roughly 2 km from the centre of Hòa Thành town, around 100 km northwest of Ho Chi Minh City. The nearest airport is Tan Son Nhat International Airport (SGN) in Ho Chi Minh City, about 78 km away in a straight line.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Great Divine Temple, also known as the Cao Dai Cathedral or the Tay Ninh Holy See, is a religious building in the Cao Dai Holy See complex in Tây Ninh province, Southeast Vietnam. It is the first and most important temple of Caodaism in Vietnam.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
11.30386, 106.13353per Wikidata