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Sara Ann Swenson, "Near Light We Shine: Buddhist Charity in Urban Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Welcome to New Books in Buddhist Studies. I am your co host, Juliang from Case Western Reserve University. Today we have the honor of Dr. Sarah Swinson here to discuss her new book, Near Light. We Buddhist Charity in Urban Vietnam. Sarah Swinson is Assistant professor of Religion and affiliate faculty in Asian Societies, Culture and Languages, and Dartmouth College. Her areas of expertise include religions of Southeast Asia, Buddhism in Vietnam, Gender and sexuality, Ethics theory and Ethnography. She received her PhD in religion from Syracuse University in 2021. She also holds an MPhil in religion and a Certificate for Advanced Study in Women's Gender Studies from Syracuse University, an MA in Comparative Religion from Illich School of Theology, and a BA in English from the University of Minnesota. Duluth. She pursues projects that highlight the power and agency of everyday people. Religions are often a vital resource for grassroots social action and community engagement, as exemplified by Buddhism in Vietnam. Her projects have received generous grant support from the American Council of Learning Societies, Charlotte W. Newcomb Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, Farber Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad, and the Robert H N Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies. Sarah's new book, Near Light We Shine Buddhist Charity in Urban Vietnam, published by Oxford University, is one of the first major ethnographic studies on Buddhism in Southern Vietnam. Featuring new histories and interpretations of this rich subject, it shares new contexts for how religious practices affect urban migration, development, and humanitarian concerns, and presents theoretical advancements for understanding grassroots charity. Near Light We Shine offers a diversity of perspectives on grassroots Buddhist practices throughout Vietnam by featuring interviews that have never been published before from marginalized Buddhist practitioners in Vietnam, such as day laborers, queer men, elderly women, and retired communist soldiers. Welcome Sarah. It's great to have you.
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D
Thank you so much for having me. I've benefited so much from the new Books Might Work podcast, so I'm honored to be on one.
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C
Welcome. Since you are a veteran listener, you know the tradition for the channel is to start by asking your intellectual biography. So how did you come to the field of Buddhist studies? Religious studies? How did you go to Vietnam?
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D
My whole journey into religious studies has been a lifelong quest to reconcile with miracles. My dad was a Christian minister, so I grew up move among some of the poorest counties of rural Minnesota and every place that we landed. Christianity was not just a way to see the world, but the way to see the world. So with the communities we joined, it wasn't uncommon for people to talk about miracles or angel sightings or messages from God as just realities of how the world worked. And so that's the environment I grew up in. And that environment was also very much shaped by these church grandmas. They were the people who would set up pews, wash dishes, bring snacks to church, visit other parishioners in the hospital. These church grandmas were the ones who would circulate the stories of miracles, these reassurances of faith, and really bring the community together. And that was something I saw repeated over and over again among all these small towns that we moved among. I grew up in this context where miracles were possible and religion was something that had this strong transformative potential for the world. And part of that transformative potential was also seeing religion as a force that could create social change and could create peace. So in high school, my dad introduced me to the writings of Thai Thich Nhat Hanh, who is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who'd also been advocate for peace during the Vietnam War. So I had this enormous respect for Thich Nhat Hanh as someone who was also using his religious community and worldview in order to try and create social change and advocate for peace, but from a Buddhist perspective, which was distinct from the Christian perspective I'd grown up in. Later, after college, when I moved to Denver, I had just a growing curiosity and interest in Thich Nhat Hanh's life and in Vietnamese Buddhism writ large. Some of the things about his work that I was drawn to after College in my 20s, having moved to a big city after this rural upbringing, were some of the ways that he emphasized Buddhism as a source of rational religion grounded in psychology that could mesh with scientific teachings in a way that was quite different than that miraculous Christian world that I'd grown up in. So I was drawn to this kind of secular form of Zen that I found in his writing. And I started attending Compassionate Dharma Cloud Monastery outside of Denver with this really lovely community of Buddhist converts, first and second generation Vietnamese Americans. And yet again there, I met this magnificent group of temple grandmas who were really holding the community together. And while the broader community would go to Dharma talks or sit and practice Zen meditation, these temple grandmothers were in the kitchen creating food, washing dishes, rearranging the meditation mats, and kind of keeping the community running. So from my church upbringing, I knew that a lot of religion happens through the power of these church and temple grandmas. And I started hanging out in the kitchen with the temple grandmas. And it was there I was staying late one evening, and some of the temple grandmas finally finished washing up and moved into the main temple hall to do some sutra chanting to dedicate merit for healing for a friend of theirs. And I saw here yet again was this miraculous side of Buddhism where merit making and healing were also a really important part of the community work that religion was doing. And I became more and more curious about this element of the miraculous that's also present in some forms of Buddhism. And that really started my journey into starting to understand Buddhism and Vietnamese Buddhism as far more internally diverse and complex than the kind of original Zen view that I come in with just reading some of these books from Thich Nh. And that's not to minimize that role of rational Zen in modern Buddhism, which has also played a major role in the world, but to say that Buddhism has incredible internal complexity, which is also marked by all the different types of people who practice in different ways. And that's really structured my work going forward.
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C
Thank you so much for this rich account. There's a lot of things I could comment on, but, yeah, I definitely resonate with the Temple Grammas and what is happening in any Buddhist institution. After hours or before hours, Religion Happens in the Kitchen. I think that's the title of a book. So it's definitely a scene that people care deeply about. And thank you for offering your contribution to this understanding of how people do religion. And since we are talking about you starting your doctoral study and research a little bit, would you like to say a little bit more how this book and this research project came about?
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D
I started studying Vietnamese through my connections at the temple and then started attending summer language intensives at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. So shout out to the SIASI program. But that meant I hadn't traveled to Vietnam before. I'd studied the language for a long time, and I didn't know anyone who lived in my chosen field site of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. So it was another one of my language classmates that was like, oh, if you don't know anyone in Saigon, I'll use the terms Ho Chi Minh City and Saigon interchangeably because that's how they're used colloquially. I'll set you up with my friend who's a tattoo artist. I went there on my honeymoon and got a full back tattoo and we really hit it off and he was really nice, so he can introduce you to some Tamil. So I sent a Facebook message to this, like, young mid-20s tattoo artist asking, like, hey, where's some major temples that I could visit in Ho Chi Minh City? I would really like to learn more about contemporary Buddhism in Vietnam and how it's been shaped since the. Since the war. And he's like, well, actually, I'm a Buddhist and I happen to be leading this charity group. I didn't know I was landing in time for a major holiday called Bulan, in which lay Buddhists will visit a number of temples and make donations in order to make merit. He's like, well, we're going to Visit, you know, eight to 10 temples. Just tag along and you can meet monastics, you can meet nuns along the way. So I tagged along with him, was really surprised to find after my impression of religion being still so shaped by temple grandmothers, here's this, you know, heavily tattooed guy in the city who was also really dedicated to Buddhism and Buddhism as a force in the world, Buddhism as something that could contribute really actively to society, and Buddhism that was out on the sidewalks and in the streets, as well as in the temple. And through him, I was introduced to a lot of other young volunteers who not only were volunteering with his program, but were leading their own groups to cook food and give it to cancer patients at the local cancer hospital or give meals out to unhoused people living on the street. And every time I was asking, I really want to learn more about Vietnamese Buddhism. Where's a good place to start? They would say, right here. If you want to understand Buddhism today, you have to understand charity. And that's how my book started, is really by this kind of luck and enthusiasm and meeting a lot of people who were just doing this work at the grassroots level. Not something you can just Google. But the minute I struck up a conversation with folks, charity was really there at the forefront of a lot of these conversations. Later, when I did have a meeting with the official Vietnam Buddhist Sangha, the representative I spoke to there, I was trying to get numbers. I was like, how many charities are there? How many charities are registered through the national Sangha? She was like, well, we don't have numbers for that because every single temple does charity. There's this really strong sense of charity being interwoven with Buddhism as it's lived and practiced in Ho Chi Minh City to death.
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C
Thank you. What I have taken away from reading your book is that it is incredibly challenging topic to research. Like you said, there's no numbers. There's nothing you can really Google. There's no archives. But also, it is incredibly intimate and incredibly important in people's everyday lives, and it is very prevalent throughout the urban life aspects as well. And maybe that's a good place for us to start, is how charity is understood. And I think you used part of the axiom as part of your title. It's near ink we darken, near light we shine. And would you like to tell the reader a little bit more about the title and how it relates to the thesis of your book?
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D
Yeah. So just to give a shout out to another scholar who has done some great historical research on these kinds of grassro charities, Ben Wynn Marshall has researched how various forms of volunteerism were part of civic life and everyday urban culture in Vietnam all the way through the Vietnam War and the nation's reconstruction in the years after. And that really set the background for the groups I was working with today. Although many of the groups that I met weren't seeing themselves as continuing a historic legacy of Buddhist volunteerism, but as adapting and responding to immediate needs. So there is a strong history of charity work and Buddhist humanitarianism that's been present in Vietnam since the 1920s through the 1960s. These historic groups had been the ones who built the orphanages and built the elder care centers that people are living in now and that people volunteers come to to continue this volunteer work. But there's kind of an interesting way that history created the infrastructure and shaped the impressions of Buddhism as informed by charity work. Even as the volunteers themselves aren't seeing they're continuing that legacy, so they're constructing a different story about how charity works and what it's doing in the world. Going back to your question about the title, the title comes from the Vietnamese axiom, gun buk ti dan gun dan tsang, which does mean, yeah, near ink we darken, near light we shine. And this was just one of a lot of proverbs and axioms that people use to describe the importance of charity. This one is something like birds of a feather flock together. You're judged by the company you keep. Basically this idea that being around other good people who radiate this light of care, you too, can become brightened and become a source of light and hope in the world. So volunteers saw volunteering not just as something meeting very practical needs, and in some cases, it was meeting those practical needs in other ways it wasn't. We can dig into that if you want in a bit. But there's also this idea that volunteers being around each other was a way to create positive community and to create a sense of belonging that many volunteers felt they were lacking in their own lives. Having come to the city through waves of urban migration, not necessarily having their own social nets, feeling a sense of kind of urban alienation, and struggling with what many described as a feeling of a moral downturn in Vietnamese society and in the world. Finding volunteers of other people who wanted to do good, finding these communities of other people who wanted to do good was also a key part of how people chose to start doing charity work.
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C
Thank you. That is super helpful. And I think it is really also important to highlight that this is less a type of what we were familiar with as organized form of charity. Many of them are grassroot models. And in the book, you actually propose a lot of different theoretical frameworks for us to understand this type of charity work, which we should probably get into. And so we will roughly move chapter by chapter. But it is such a rich book, I feel like there's no way to do it justice in a short interview. So readers, please go out and get the book and Read it cover to enjoy the rich account Aunt Sarah has offered us. So I like to start maybe with your introduction. And for readers who are less familiar with Vietnamese Buddhism, you have this very, very vivid description on page two saying that Vietnamese Buddhism features incredible internal diversity. And you gave a list of many different forms Buddhism could take, many different traditions, many different preferences of practice, textual traditions evident in East Buddhism has. So maybe that's a good place for us to start is what is this diversity and how does it manifest in your own research and in your ethnographic work?
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D
To give some background, contemporary Buddhism in Vietnam has been shaped by a very deep historical presence of Buddhism that itself arrived in the region from a few different directions. So historians estimate that Buddhism arrived in Vietnam between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE with some Buddhist missionaries come down from the region that's now known as China. Some missionaries coming from the region now known as India, bringing both Mahayana threads and Theravada threads that gained influence from different ethnic groups and different kingdoms. And through that really long history also come threads of influence from subsets of Mahayana especially. So you have practices that come from a Pure Land tradition. You have practices that come from styles of Zen that have also been kind of indigenized around the 14th century CE. You have modern groups that broke away and started charismatic new religious movement. Versions of Buddhism like Hua Hao and Kao Dai incorporates some Buddhist influence. Cutsi Buddhism is a modern movement that started in the 1930s or 1940s that says it's re blending Mahayana and Theravada traditions. So there's a lot of this internal diversity that also manifests in the temple spaces that you walk into around the country. Historically, different temples might be known for association with healing practices or might be where you go if you need an exorcism or you need to deal with a ghost that's giving you trouble. Other places might house like an animal deity. So like a turtle king resides at one temple. All of these temples do have their own specialties. People go to them for different reasons. They have different associations. Different statues like Gwanam in the avilokiteshva statue in the courtyard of one place might be especially efficacious for helping fertility or supporting mothers. There's also pilgrimages to people who go to these different temples to meet different spiritual needs. And that diversity has a long standing historical presence. Vietnam is currently consolidated under a communist government that was established across the Nation in 1975, though earlier in the northern part of the region in 1945 that had some contention with religious communities as it was trying to establish kind of an atheistic communism. And those religion policies were in place roughly from 1975 until the mid-90s, when they started to get loosened with some changing policy reforms called Doi moi. And so with Doi moi, we see the reincorporation of Buddhism as the site of cultural heritage, as a resource for civic morality. And there's kind of a reframing, especially in the 2015 laws on religion and original belief, that now says, okay, there's a space for religion in a socialist society. And as part of that space is some more accommodation for Buddhism. With that rapid shift in national religious policies over the past 30, 40 years, there's been a boom back into that diversity of religious practices, especially as people are trying to find their place in a rapidly changing economy. Religion also becomes a resource in navigating these economic transformations.
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C
Thank you so much for the very quick and dirty but also informative overview of Buddhism in Vietnam and past and present. As someone who seeks to understand contemporary Tibetan Buddhism and contemporary Chinese religions, this is a very fascinating example for me to think comparatively as well. And one of the things I particularly was struck by is how do you capture this diversity and how do you capture this complexity? And I think one thing you did really well is to say that there is incredible intersectionality in people's identities. And in the chapters that you unfold after the introduction, you see this intersecting identities, intersecting narratives kind of weave into each other. I feel like it's really unfair to go one by one, but there doesn't seem to be any other way. But maybe we can start with chapter one called Good People and Dangerous Strangers, where you already alluded to this tattoo artist as your entryway into research about charity in Vietnam. So what is this Good People and Dangerous Strangers dichotomy? And how does charity play into this dichotomy?
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D
I'll give a little outline for how the book came to be structured the way that it is, because each Chapter does feature different charity groups that attracted different demographic groups that practice Buddhism in their own unique way. When I started, when I landed in Vietnam for the first time in 2015 to start fieldwork, I had this kind of dreamy vision of wanting my research to support this positive impression of religion as something that really can make a difference in the world, which is something I still hold in value. But in choosing to focus on oh, Buddhist charity organization, the communities that I met at that time, the tattoo artist really did have a strong sense of internal group cohesion. People were really supportive of each other. They talked a lot about belonging. They talked a lot about finding other good people to have community with. I was like, okay, these are values I really want to affirm and amplify through my research is belonging and support and caring for others. And so I came back home, I wrote a bunch of grants to give fieldwork funding, all on this idea that I would focus on this one charity organization that defeats the stereotypes of Vietnamese Buddhism being continued mostly by the Trump Grandmas by incorporating these tattoo artists. And then I came back, I got all the grant funding returned to start my dissertation fieldwork. And I found out that the group had had an internal splintering. One of the co organizers of that original tattoo group had come out as a queer man, married one of the other male volunteers, and was now reformatting, restructuring the group to focus on giving meals out at cancer hospital every, every month. With his coming out, some of the volunteers kind of fell back on some. Some stereotypes about queer men saying, well, you can't possibly make what they saw as a selfish life choice and keep giving and doing charity in an authentic way. So those people, those volunteers went and started different charity groups or they joined different charity groups. And then that original charity, which I call in the book, the Sunshine Volunteer Corps, really buckled down and became this amazing haven of community building for young queer men moving to Ho Chi Minh City who wanted to find partners, find friends, and continue to do some good in the world and to also be able to show their families like, look, I'm a caring, selfless person. I'm a man who happens to love other men. So with this internal splintering of that original group, I decided to follow some of the volunteers that I'd established connections with back in 2015 and see which other charity groups they joined and why. The book is really structured around that original splintering of who was part of the original charity group, where did they go? How did they meet other charity leaders, how did they decide what kinds of projects to Do. In some cases, doing social work to support children with cancer and HIV aids. In other cases, fundraising to build bridges or schools for children in rural areas. In other cases, feeding unhoused people living on the streets for the Sunshine Volunteer Corps that was buckling down and feeding people at the cancer hospital. So each chapter traces how people chose those groups, chose those projects, and what level of formality those organizations also took. Some did become registered as official charity organizations with the government, and others chose to keep a totally low profile, informal organizational structure that each chapter follows those different groups.
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C
Thank you. That is super helpful. And I think it unfolds as each group offers a very useful interpretive framework. And the first one that you introduced is the importance of feeling in giving and merit making, which is, I think, quite different from how we understand charity to be working. Usually we emphasize the recipient of the charity event, but I think in a lot of the volunteers that you work with, it is really their feeling and their intention matters. Would you like to say a little bit more about the importance of feeding?
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D
One of the themes that drew people to different organizations was this search for authentic selflessness, authentic care, both in themselves and among the other volunteers. So this emotional quality was part of the karmic transformation that many volunteers were seeking to create. So all of this took place in Vietnam's fastest growing urban area, Ho Chi Minh City, which has been the center of the country's massive economic boom since those policy reforms, those economic policy reforms in the mid-80s. And that's created this sense that there are some few rare and precious good people in the world who need to support each other. And they're also, you know, dangerous strangers and people who are seeking to use these new economic opportunities, urbanization, the alienation of migrants, in order to take advantage of others for personal gain. Feelings of care, feelings of selflessness were a key way that people demonstrated themselves as people with heart, as good people who wanted to make society better and not take advantage of these conditions of anonymity and growth for personal gain. And so feelings played that moral world and also cosmological role in ensuring that people were making merit by giving to others in a caring way. Giving in a caring way was also seen as a means to foster positive feelings and recipients by helping people feel gratitude and feel happiness as recipients of true gifts. So this quality of feeling was a way that people sought out authenticity, good charity communities, and also then critiqued other groups as doing charity for the wrong reasons or being inauthentic.
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C
Thank you. And I think it is important to note that While many volunteers do agree on feeling being one of the key factors of charity, what is good feeling, what is dangerous people, and what are the best way to give and do vary quite significantly. And one of the. Actually, the splintering of the two charity groups that you mentioned is due to this sense of some people do not feel like they belong in a certain charity group while things have been changing, or different charity groups stereotyping each other. And you talk about this in chapter two, called Belonging Karmic and Queer. You alluded to this story before, but I was wondering if you could give us a little bit more detail of how charity create a sense of belonging, but also have the. Perhaps we'll see the adverse effect of stereotyping and criticism between different groups.
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D
Absolutely. For the Sunshine Volunteer Corps, that was the group with a majority of young queer male volunteers giving food away at the cancer hospital. One of the ways that Bao, the organizer who married his fellow volunteer, really advocating for the group as authentic, was also doing some work to affirm a form of queer Buddhism by arguing that he and his partner had obviously just been in love across multiple lifetimes. They had what's called yuin. And this notion of yin is the idea that we've met multiple times across incarnations, across these rebirths, people are drawn to each other. So if you've ever even. I think it's very common feeling to meet someone on the street, feel like you've known each other for a million years. You strike of a conversation, you have a great sense of humor and great connection. And in local parlance, you'd call that having yin or like, love at first sight can also be explained by this idea of karmic conditions. So the queer couple that led this group said that they had powerful yuin. And as with all people, you can work towards redirecting yuin towards positive ends for yourselves and for others. And so the power of their love could be a positive force in their lives. And they turn it into a positive force in the lives of others by leading this charity organization. So they're doing some philosophical work. Their work had a strong appeal through reshares on Facebook. You know, Bao, the main organizer, had more than 5,000 followers. So he was kind of a lay thinker who had a strong following with other people who were creating a space around queer Buddhism and doing that through charity work as well. On the flip side, some of the people who left the Sunshine Volunteer Corps after this big demographic shift started to critique the group as excluding them on a class basis. So as the group formalized and started doing more and more fundraising at the cancer hospital. They also branched out and started doing some major fundraising organization by building houses for people after flooding or funding eye surgeries. And those kinds of big scale projects required people to have the social mobility and class mobility to, for example, request time off of work or to make major financial donations to be part of the project. So some of the people who left would have layered critiques of saying that as the group was attracting more and more of this urban, operatively mobile and queer male demographic, that they were also excluding people on a class basis for those who couldn't afford to be part of the charity programs. And that leads into chapter three that focuses on another community of mostly single mothers in their 30s who maybe had finished high school, were working as either day laborers or had very contingent jobs. And the type of charity work that they would do was making meals in their own homes to give out to people living on the street. And for them, this idea of feeling was extra essential because they didn't have the resources to give major donations or to build someone a house, but they could give to someone else with a really sincere sense of giving from having very little. So there were class critiques, there were elements of sexual morality, gender critiques, all present in the ways that people talked about what it is to do good and the types of ways that society could be transformed for the better. So part of what I really wanted to emphasize with this book is if you just look at it from the outside, you see these widespread charity movements happening across Vietnam, and it might be easy to say, oh, there's a Buddhist humanitarian effort happening, but actually people are doing very different types of projects for very different reasons. But no matter how you approach it, charity is this flashpoint for people striving to create social change in the midst of rapid urbanization.
- [34:53]
C
Thank you so much. One thing I really appreciate is your portrayal of this internal richness of the different forms charity could take. Since you already alluded to the chapter where we talk about the sexual orientation difference, we talk about class difference. But another thing that I really appreciate you doing in chapter three is to propose this new framework of understanding a different way of doing charity and called Event Network. And I think you kind of describe this as spontaneous altruism. That's less organized, people coming together more on a ad hoc basis. And it's really difficult to understand other than individual events. But you propose that we actually see the significance of it. I was wondering if you could also introduce the reader to what is event Network in your understanding and why should we we understand this in the context of charity in Vietnam?
- [35:53]
D
Thanks for the question. I According to this term, charity event networks. In response to reading up on the broader literature of humanitarianism in Asia, and especially with a focus on Buddhism, there has been some great research on groups like the SUU Kyi foundation that are highly modern, highly organized, systematized, and have helped to create national frameworks all across east and Southeast Asia for incorporating religious charity into things like national disaster relief policies. So there's some great research on these huge, large scale, very modern institutional forms of Buddhist humanitarianism, but there wasn't a lot to draw on to understand these very grassroots styles that I was seeing. So Chapter three focuses on what I called HOMS Event Network and Tiham was a woman who started off giving out meals to people living on the street after work. She worked at a hotel, and the hotel would sometimes have food left over after her work shifts. And she was actually going through a period of intense personal grief because she and her husband had just moved to the city a few years prior, hoping to start a new life together as a young married couple. They found out that they were pregnant with their first child, and very shortly thereafter her husband found out that he had terminal cancer and he actually died before he was able to meet his child. So in this context of profound personal tragedy, Tiham would be driving home from work and see people bedding down to sleep on the streets. And in her report, she was so moved that even in the midst of her hardship, there were people who had even less conditions of comfort than what she had. And so she started bringing food home. And then she started posting about that on Facebook. And then other people started donating food to her or asking if they could help give food out. And this grew with a natural snowballing effect through social media that she would start cooking up to 100 meals every single week. And people who some of her were friends or colleagues would come by to help her distribute meals. And then more and more total strangers would also volunteer seeing her story reposted through Facebook. Or people, even on an international scale, started donating money just straight into her personal bank account for her to buy ingredients and make food and do these meal distributions. We didn't really have language for describing this flow of money through personal bank accounts or these unseen networks of care through people's own kitchens and own homes. So this idea of event networks came about. I included the word network because of the role of kind of social media networks in spreading and sustaining these kinds of movements. That are really hard to trace, they're almost impossible to see, and yet they provide such a strong basis for some forms of volunteerism in the city that I joked someone should make an app because we'd be out giving away meals on a Thursday night and the families that we come to had already received meals from other people doing the same thing. So clearly there were a lot of people giving out meals in this very ad hoc basis and yet no one was able to coordinate because it was so subtle and so personal and so word of mouth.
- [39:25]
C
Thank you. And it is because of the fact of you being there and you were able to observe this kind of spontaneous giving interactions so that we can understand the richer aspect of charity and of giving in the context we're studying. And it's funny that you brought up social media. And the way I see it is actually that kind of grounds the next two chapters where you move on to discuss being involved in charity as a alternative option of youth culture and how young people in Vietnam differentiate themselves from the stereotype of being self centered, materialistic or uncaring by participating in charity groups. And you offer some very interesting data on demographics in Vietnam. I was wondering if you would like to say a little bit more about that.
- [40:17]
D
Yeah. Vietnam is in a unique position because it has both one of the most rapidly aging populations and an incredibly young population. This incredible youth vitality is also part of the movements towards migration to major urban areas. It's part of this boom in entrepreneurship that, you know, it's hard to say recently with the way the US's tariffs have been affecting the global economy, but Vietnam was one of the fastest growing economies in Asia and young people were cued to be the ones who would most benefit from that. But that benefit was also tied to migration to urban areas, which meant major changes in the way structures of family care for elderly people have changed. Another way people strive to care for their families is through urban migration, earning money and sending remittances home. But this has struck up a national conversation on the nature of youth culture that swing, if you read the news, swing between the rays of youth as having amazing opportunities and being the leaders of innovation and deep critiques of young people as selfish and materialistic. I quoted one news article that labeled that said this generation should be renamed the generation of people with their faces plugged into iPhones. So just media conscious, self centered and not caring for tradition, not caring for family members. And in the midst of this, there were young, more college educated, upwardly mobile urban youth that were also part of charity organizations trying to create a counterexample of what it could be to be a young moral person in Ho Chi Minh City, earning money, taking advantage of entrepreneurship and upward mobility, but in order to give back to others and in order to care for one's own family. And part of that was also a growing interest in Buddhism, but especially a style of Buddhism that is more aligned with secular, secular interests, psychology, science. So for some of these youth, this more modernist style of Buddhism that's increasingly been influenced by the return of Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings, which had been banned until the early 2000s and are now widely available on pretty much any bookstore you walk into. That interest in Buddhism has been a way to reconnect with older generations. To say, maybe I don't practice the same style of more pure land, inflected merit making Buddhism that my, my grandparents practice, but I can still connect with them now by practicing this more modern, Zen influenced style of urban Buddhism.
- [43:05]
C
Yeah, thank you very much. And I think this is just the nuanced understanding of again, what Buddhism is and the internal diversity and how different groups, different understanding of Buddhism cohere together in Vietnam. Moving on to chapter five. And I really applaud you for not shining away from the potentially more problematic and probably some of the more issue that is more contentious within charity groups. It's titled Fraud at the Children's Festival and you brought up a lot of interesting cases of how fraud is committed in the process of giving as well as other issues. And also how different charity groups, based on all the different demographics, different intersectional identities that we discussed, responds to the issues of fraud, issues of social media in their different ways. I was wondering if you would like to highlight some of the more important issues, more differing responses in this charity.
- [44:11]
D
Groups, yeah, groups dealt with these questions of who is a deserving recipient. What are the effects of charity work? In a variety of different ways. Some groups were really conscious of seeking out recipients that they saw as being most deserving, as not being able to kind of fend for themselves. So people with disabilities, women, mothers with young children, were some of the groups that people would focus on as being less able to provide for themselves through upward mobility. Other groups insisted that trying to kind of judge and assess and label people was actually just contributing to these problems of alienation and that one needed to kind of trust the processes of karma and trust the processes of merit making to help change that person, regardless of their motives for being a recipient. Through two years of charity work, where I got to tag along with hundreds of different charity events. I was present for some major points of strife at events where someone, for example, stole some charity tickets and tried to go through line twice and another charity recipient turned around and they started a fist fight. People are throwing gravel and the volunteers had to kind of de escalate this and deal with it, which they chose to do by giving extra meals to both women and sending them away. Other groups dealt with these issues of people stealing tickets or stealing portions or being fake recipients by trying very carefully to screen who recipients were, maybe working with local government leaders that they trusted to pre screen and give tickets away to appropriate recipients. And all of this was part of these broader conversations and concerns about the nature of society in the midst of rapid urbanization, in the midst of a lot of political change around how socialism is also integrated in a more privatized economy. And to come back to that, these questions of feelings, of how much can feelings do to help transform oneself and to transform others? But charity was again, not this kind of friendly, happy place of all do good, positive feelings. But it was really a site where people were grappling with these most deep existential questions of how to care for others, even when people were not always being honest or were lying or were turning towards violence in order to have access to the goods that they were giving away.
- [46:54]
C
Thank you very much. And there's no way to summarize this in five minutes, but I think you did. But I appreciate the incredible detail you offer in these chapters. And the way I read it, I think of the last two chapters is more of the heavy hitters where you, you kind of moved away from feelings, at least temporarily, and start talking about the role of other than human or more than human entities in what we might consider as modern infrastructure charity projects. And I like the term you brought up for us to understand how we can reconcile Buddhas, Bodhisattva, spirits and ghosts in a modern society. You mentioned this as contra modern Buddhism, and I was wondering if you would like to share with the reader how this term matters for us in our understanding of charity networks and institutions in Vietnam.
- [47:53]
D
I took the term contra modernism from Casey Collins, who studies new religious movements in Japan. And Collins proposes this term to make sense of the ways that people navigate modern problems through what might be labeled as non modern methods. So the non modern methods would be using magic or turning towards engagements with the supernatural, or relying on interventions that don't necessarily fit into a scientific worldview or aren't provable through rationalization. And yet there's A lot of people in a lot of communities who use these seemingly non modern methods to deal with modern issues like developing infrastructure, managing the pressures of a modern workforce, succeeding in education. And that's very much something that I saw present with this amazing group of women that I called the Bridge of Love Foundation. The Bridge of Love foundation was unique because it was mostly made up of volunteers who were women over the age of 55 who had spent their careers working as communist soldiers, veterans and later government agents. And then when they retired, they found themselves feeling very bored and lacking that sense of purpose and direction that they had felt through their work in the government. And they started volunteering together to continue building and developing the nation. The way they chose to do this was by fundraising for infrastructure throughout the Mekong Delta. With climate change, the Mekong Delta has been experiencing rising sea level issues. There's greater rainfall, there's more issues with flooding that affect crops. And there's also been more and more pressure to develop things like roads and bridges so that people can export crops to major cities and make more money. So these women would fundraise and they've now built nearly 200 bridges all throughout the Mekong Delta. Through and along their journeys, they would really promote this national discourse of continuing the visions of socialism. Yet they were also continuing these visions through their strong sense of a Pure Land influence style of Buddhist practice. So we'd be on the bus together, storm clouds would be rolling in, we're on our way to dedicate a bridge, and I would start to be worried about how the weather was going to affect, you know, are we going to cross these washed out roads? Are we going to be stuck in the rain and the, you know, deep in the delta? And these women didn't worry about it at all. Instead they would start chanting or say a prayer and inevitably it wouldn't rain. And they would credit this as an intervention of Avalokiteshvara Gaunam to support their compassionate work of building bridges and offering that supernatural intervention to support their very modern work of promoting infrastructure. So Casey Collins term of contra modernism was helpful for me to think about how these women are carrying out visions for a communist future of Vietnam that has developmental infrastructure and is also supported by miraculous intervention by supernatural figures like Wa Nam and the Pure Land Buddha.
- [51:19]
C
Thank you. And you also mentioned this towards the end, but it does show us how different cosmologies, competing ones are always at work when we think about the richness of the Buddhist tradition and kind of moving towards the last body chapter in your book entitled Taking a stance through volunteer Social work. I have to admit this is one of the harder to read chapters for me emotionally. So my question for you for this chapter is actually twofold. One is intellectually, I find it really fascinating that you bring up. There's a differentiation between different forms of charity work. One is more focused on a one time giving model and the other is more of a social working form model and how that ties into also a Buddhist understanding of suffering karma as a Buddhist's contribution to doing charity with a social work model. And my second question to you is that actually throughout the book, and you mentioned this at the very beginning, when you talk about your methodology is how that you are always weaving your own presence and not just your positionality into the book. So the book is as much as your understanding, not just your so called objective research of Vietnamese charity, but how you the process of you seeking to understand. I was wondering if you could first talk about this fascinating concept of social work informed charity, but also to talk about how you yourself is not just taking your stance, but also asserting your presence in the work that you have done.
- [53:03]
D
Thanks again for the really rich questions. I'll start with your first one on differentiating social work informed charity from that previously introduced concept of event networks. And these also connect to the very different cosmologies that are present across Buddhist charity groups. For the event networks, giving one time, but with the right feelings was a way to transform your own karma, the karma conditions of someone else, and to benefit both beings and to ultimately benefit society through all these piecemeal one time gifts given with sincerity. Volunteers with the event network style organizations would emphasize not staying to talk with or create relationships with recipients because you don't want to impose a need for gratitude on the recipient. And so by just giving a gift really quickly, showing an act of care, but not trying to collect their name, not trying to make a plan to meet again, you're actually doing a favor on this karmic scale because you're not creating more yin, you're not creating a system of gratitude in which you are now going to meet this person again in future lifetimes. But you're just trying to give a pure gift that can benefit both sides without adding more and more to this cosmology of karmic entanglements. On the flip side, chapter five focuses on a really amazing group I called the Cherished Children Fund, which was founded by two women, a nurse and one of Vietnam's first formally trained social workers who in the midst of the 90s, the HIV AIDS crisis felt incredible compassion for children that were coming into the hospital with HIV AIDS because their parents had been affected and yet were facing the same kinds of stereotypes and stigmas that associated HIV at the time with things like drug use. And so no one would want to touch these children, no one would want to hold these children. And the nurse especially was heartbroken by these conditions. So these two women, who were friends, decided to start fundraising and doing educational campaigns throughout Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta to raise awareness and understanding about hiv. But these women, they are creating long term sustained relationships with the families that they're helping over decades, which is the opposite of that event network understanding of karma, where you. You don't want to create more karmic conditions to entangle people. These women were almost doing as much philosophical work as educational, scientific work by engaging people in conversations about the way Kar karma works and encouraging people to have relationships with these children and their families in order to benefit themselves, to benefit the children, and to again, just raise the level of care in society as a whole with this notion of kind of collective karma. I was really intrigued by the way that they integrated philosophical teachings on Buddhism just as much into their curriculum as scientific information about the spread of HIV aids.
- [56:15]
C
Right.
- [56:16]
D
For your second question on positionality. I come from a white Christian background in rural Minnesota. I come to study Buddhism with what I hope is enormous humility. There's a lot that I have learned. There's a lot I have left to learn, and that comes for readers of this book too. If you pick up this book, I hope you are inspired and moved by stories of people engaging in charity for a lot of different reasons and that you come away with a strong impression of what that charity volunteers in Vietnam are trying to do in creating community and belonging, even through their differences and even through the strife they hold for each other in this moment of pre Covid Vietnam. But readers of the book will not walk away with, you know, intellectual command of Vietnamese Buddhism because this is a story driven learning experience, just as it was and still is for me through several different stages and points of this book. I had to right through what it meant for me to also be present. So a lot of the volunteers I met actually started volunteering in each other's groups after meeting me because I was walking around researching Buddhist charities and I, you know, had this crisis of at one point of like, how can I claim to do any level of objective research if the charity groups I'm supposedly studying are also being created through my own Facebook page? And the networks of people seeking to do good with one another through my social media. So that helped to kind of push back on this erroneous ideal of objective research. We always affect the communities we're a part of. The very types of questions we ask shape the types of answers people give. And so I tried to be very transparent about that in my research process and in my writing.
- [57:58]
C
Thank you very much. I deeply appreciate that. And I think it's also just refreshing to read about your experience. Experience and the reactions I might have as a reader sometimes is answered through your interaction with the groups. And I think to use one of your section titles in the conclusion, it is karma in action. Right? We're all entangled in this interdependent network. And one thing I really think you are already alluding to is that what the readers might take away from the book is not that we should go out on a 10 mile bike ride, making meals and distributing to people, but to rethink charity in new ways and in what you termed as effective politics. So it's not something that happens on an individual level. It's not going to be a major historical event. But you gave the metaphor of like a river carving a canyon. It is the small acts, the small powers, how people with limited resources and power can affect other people's lives. I was wondering throughout the interview, is there anything else you would like to highlight for the reader before they check it out?
- [59:11]
D
Something that guides me as both a teacher and as a researcher is this notion I get from bell hooks that all people are theorists just to get through the day. We are all creating our own theories about who we are, what it means to interact with one another and about our roles in the world. So I hope as you read through this book, you appreciate each of the people interviewed, all the different groups as creating and following their own theories of Buddhism, which are very rich and historically founded and based on their own lived experience and often created in the moment. And I hope that it also inspires you to stop and think about what your own theory is and who you are in the world as a theorist, in response and in relationship to the people that you're reading about.
- [59:59]
C
I love that there's no better way to end the conversation of the book, to invite the reader to be a theorist, as is also part of the new book's network tradition. And I know it is a stressful question that I have to ask is what is the path ahead for you? What are your current work working on and what are you being excited about.
- [60:21]
D
Right now, something that really stood out to me through this first book project is how many people were involved in charity also with a commitment to their own wellness and their own health. And something I didn't mention, but mentioned in the conclusion of the book is how much these grassroots groups were affected by Covid. And so after Covid, there's a strong turn in public discourse and in my conversations with the charity volunteers about how to protect health and well being. And so that's guiding my second book project, which I'm tentatively titling Happy, Healthy and Free well being in Vietnamese Buddhism in thinking about how well being isn't just about sustaining one's physical health, but also social health and caring for the well being of your family, your neighbors, your society, your environment and the well being of supernatural beings like ghosts or well being of animals and what well being is across multiple lifetimes. And so that's the direction I'm moving in for book number two.
- [61:26]
C
Thank you very much. If this book is any indication, I very much look forward to reading your rich account of well being in the context of Vietnam. And for readers, the book is already out as of December 15th in hard copy and I think as well as the ebook Near Light We Shine, Buddhist Charity in Vietnam. Please go check it out. Thank you very much for your time.
- [61:50]
D
Sarah thank you so much for the interview. Jay. This is really meaningful and thanks to all the listeners.