Pagodas in Vietnam, and the three words on the gate

Almost every visitor ends up in one of the pagodas in Vietnam, and almost every visitor calls three different buildings by the same word. The sign on the gate says which one you are standing in front of, and knowing the difference changes what you are looking at.

The hours are the other practical thing. A pagoda on an ordinary Tuesday morning and the same pagoda on the first of the lunar month are two separate places.

What are the three words?

Chua, den and dinh. A chua is the Buddhist pagoda proper: monks, a Buddha hall, and usually a garden of stupas holding the ashes of past abbots. A den is a shrine to a person or a spirit, most often a general, an emperor or a mother goddess. A dinh is the village communal house, part meeting hall and part shrine to the village's founding spirit.

English flattens all three into one word. That is why visitors leave thinking they saw six of the same building.

Which ones are worth an hour?

Five, spread far enough apart that most trips pass 1 or 2 of them.

Thien Mu is the one to prioritise if your route passes it. Its 7 storeys stand on a rise about 5 km upriver from the centre of Hue, and entry costs nothing. Bai Dinh is the opposite case: enormous, built in the 2000s, with a corridor of 500 stone arhats. The Ninh Binh things to do page is honest that it splits visitors down the middle.

What hour should you visit?

Early, on an ordinary day, if you want the building. The first and the fifteenth of the lunar month if you want the practice.

The first and the fifteenth are when Vietnamese families visit. A pagoda that felt like a monument on a Tuesday is a working place of worship on the first: incense thick enough to sting, offerings stacked on the altars, queues at the burner. Nothing is closed to you. The festivals guide sets out the bigger dates, when the same effect runs for a week.

The Perfume Pagoda is the extreme version. Its festival runs from the 1st lunar month into the 3rd, and at the peak it takes tens of thousands of pilgrims a day up a single valley 60 km from Hanoi.

How should you behave?

Cover shoulders and knees, take your shoes off where the threshold tells you to, and copy whoever is in front of you. The etiquette guide covers the six things that are genuinely noticed, and two of them are these.

Three more apply inside a pagoda. Do not point the soles of your feet at an altar, which rules out sitting cross-legged facing one. Light 1 or 3 incense sticks rather than a handful, from the communal flame outside. And ask before photographing anyone praying — the same rule as anywhere, broken here constantly.

What is inside one?

More than Buddhism. Vietnamese practice folds Mahayana Buddhism together with ancestor veneration, Taoist figures and local spirits, and the religions guide covers what else the country believes. One site can hold a Buddha hall, a shrine to a mother goddess and an altar to a general who died 1,000 years ago.

Look for the layers rather than for a single doctrine. The bronze bell, the stele on a stone tortoise, the stupas at the back and the ancestor photographs in a side hall are separate traditions sharing a courtyard. Nobody there experiences that as a contradiction.

Where did Vietnamese Buddhism start?

At Yen Tu, as far as this country's own school is concerned. A 13th-century king abdicated there to become a monk and founded Truc Lam, the first Buddhist tradition native to Vietnam rather than imported, and its monasteries were built across the country from that mountain outwards.

Truc Lam matters when reading a pagoda. A Truc Lam house is usually newer, plainer and more ordered than the village pagodas around it, because most were revived or rebuilt in the twentieth century rather than accumulated over ten.

Are they all old?

Far fewer than the guidebooks imply. The climate, the wars and the timber building tradition mean most pagodas in Vietnam standing today are 19th or 20th century structures on much older sites, rebuilt more than once.

The rebuilding is not a disappointment once you know about it. Tran Quoc's foundation dates to the 6th century and its 11-tier stupa to 1998, and both facts are true at once. The World Heritage guide covers the few sites where the fabric itself is genuinely old.

How many is too many?

Two or 3 across a whole trip, unless the subject grabs you. They repeat, the way churches repeat in Europe, and a 4th on the same itinerary reliably produces the sentence about having seen enough temples.

Better to take one seriously: go early, sit for 20 minutes, and come back on the first of the lunar month if the dates allow. That beats collecting five. The museums guide makes the same argument about the four museums worth an hour.