At least four major beliefs have had a profound impact on the people and their culture and are reflected subtly or obviously in behavior and customs. One simplified classification lists 20 per cent as Buddhists, 20 per cent as non-Buddhists and 60 per cent as nominal but non-practicing Buddhists.Īll the world's great religions can be found in Vietnam. Often it is considered a predominantly Buddhist nation, but this classification can be misleading. In Vietnam, then, we can do no less than try to understand and respect the beliefs of the people. To the Vietnamese, and to hundreds of millions of people in Asia, their religious beliefs are sacred, as sacred to them as our beliefs are to us, and perhaps more a part of their lives than ours are of ours. We will find in Vietnam a tradition of religious tolerance inherited from the ancient Buddhists. Religious freedom is one of the principles on which our nation was founded, the right of each person to believe and worship as he pleases. To avoid offending and even alienating a people with traditions just as old or older than ours we must develop understanding and tolerance of their religion, their values, their way of thinking and acting. Therefore we may at first find them strange. In large part, Vietnamese culture and religion differ greatly from what we are accustomed to. Regardless of our individual faiths, we all have been conditioned by the concepts of our Judeo-Christian culture. We come from a different culture than the Vietnamese. Some knowledge of religion in Vietnam is fundamental to an appreciation of every phase of Vietnamese life, because religious beliefs richly color almost every Vietnamese thought and act, and affect the way they react to us and what we do.
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