Ba La Mat Pagoda

One day, an official of the Nguyễn court stepped out of public life. He took off his official hat and robe and became a monk. His wife did not stand in his way. She built him a place to practice, and that place is Ba La Mật Pagoda in Hue.

It was 1886. The wife was Lady Thanh Trất Từ Thiện, and her husband was Nguyễn Khoa Luận. He held the post of Bố chánh, a senior provincial official with real authority in the system that governed the Hue region. He served the Nguyễn dynasty, Vietnam's last royal dynasty, which reigned from 1802 to 1945.

She named the pagoda Ba La Mật. In Buddhist teaching, the words mean crossing over to the shore of enlightenment, also called the other shore, a place free from the ties of this world. The name was her message to him, a wish for peace and release. She set it into the tiles and bricks, into the smoke of incense, into the lines of a roof resting quietly in the land of Phú Thượng.

A man who had once run a province now sat in meditation in a plain brown robe, inside grounds his wife had raised. She stood and watched the work come to an end. She knew she had not held her husband back. She had held him in a different embrace, quieter and wider than any mansion.

The pagoda is not large. But the story behind it has a depth that many grand buildings lack.

The old capital has hundreds of pagodas, communal houses, shrines and royal tombs, spread across many dynasties. In a place so full of memory, Ba La Mật Pagoda stands in a quiet corner of Phú Thượng and asks for no attention. Yet anyone who learns its story will find it hard to walk past without stopping.

Incense drifts through the small pagoda. The tiled roof is covered in moss. A morning bell carries out across a still garden. These are the things an official of the Nguyễn court once heard and lived with, after he chose to let everything go.

It is a story of compassion and letting go: a woman who built a pagoda for her husband, and a man who chose the other shore.