“Dharma in Red”: the adaptation and interpretation of Vietnamese Buddhist doctrine under communist rule (1975–1981)

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on Buddhism under socialist regimes has emphasized state control, institutional co-optation, and religious negotiation, leaving the agency of Buddhist actors less fully examined. This study investigates how Vietnamese Buddhists preserved and reworked religious life during socialist consolidation from 1975 to 1981. “Vietnamese Buddhism” refers here chiefly to the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) in the South and the Unified Buddhist Association of Vietnam (UBAV) in the North, which were incorporated into the unified, state-supervised Vietnam Buddhist Sangha (VBS) in 1981. Drawing on archival materials, state and Buddhist publications, and oral testimony, the analysis traces changes in doctrine, ritual, labor, and organization. Compassion was reframed as socialist solidarity, the Pure Land as a collective moral society, and Nirvana as worldly socialist fulfillment; patriotic liaison committees redirected ritual and institutional activity toward socialist and national priorities. These adjustments produced a vocabulary of Buddhism as patriotic, socially useful, and productive, while restrictions on independent organization sharply reduced institutional autonomy. Together, these patterns constitute what I term “managed sacrality”: the selective preservation, reinterpretation, and constraint of religious life through asymmetrical interaction with state power. Co-optation and negotiation were mechanisms within this broader process, in which Buddhist actors retained interpretive initiative while the state defined the institutional limits of religious continuity. The Vietnamese case shows how socialist consolidation redrew the boundaries of the sacred through doctrinal adaptation, bureaucratic supervision, and unequal negotiation. It thereby identifies a socialist variant of Buddhist modernism and offers a comparative perspective on religious agency under authoritarian rule.