Giac Lam Pagoda

Only a few decades before the pagoda was built, this land had been dense forest and swamp. In the spring of 1744, the year of Giáp Tý, it was still newly cleared, and Saigon was nothing like the city of today. The first people to settle here were migrants from central Vietnam and the Minh Hương community. The Minh Hương were descendants of Chinese emigrants from the time the Ming dynasty fell.

Among the Minh Hương was a Buddhist layman named Lý Thuỵ Long. He gave the land and the money to build a small pagoda in the time of Lord Nguyễn Phúc Khoát. The Nguyễn lords were a noble family who ruled southern Vietnam from the 16th to the 18th century. The layman named his pagoda Cẩm Sơn.

Thirty years later, in 1774, a senior Zen master of the Lâm Tế school, Phật Ý Linh Nhạc, sent his disciple Tổ Tông Viên Quang to serve as abbot. Zen is a school of Buddhism that puts meditation at its heart. The young Zen master gave the pagoda a new name, Giác Lâm. Giác means awakening, and Lâm means forest, the forest of the Buddha's teaching. Under the guidance of Zen Master Viên Quang, the pagoda became the first center for training monks for all of Gia Định and the south of Vietnam. That is why it is honored as a Tổ đình, the ancestral pagoda of the Lâm Tế school in the south.

Buddhism in the south and in the north follows two different Zen lines. In the north it is Trúc Lâm Yên Tử, founded in the 13th century by the Buddha Emperor Trần Nhân Tông, a Zen line made Vietnamese. In the south it is Lâm Tế, which reached the south from China in the 17th century and after, following the Minh Hương community. Giác Lâm is where the Lâm Tế line began in the southern region.

In 1988, the Ministry of Culture ranked Giác Lâm Pagoda a National Historical and Cultural Monument, one of the earliest such rankings after the country was reunified.

Inside is a collection that no other pagoda in the south can match: 113 old statues of the Buddha. Most are wood, carved with great skill over the centuries. Only seven are bronze. There are two sets of the Eighteen Arhats, who stand on either side of the main hall and are considered the finest in the south. Arhats are disciples of the Buddha who reached enlightenment. There are also two sets of the Ten Kings of the Underworld, the ten realms that judge the soul in the Buddhist view of rebirth and karma.

Before the halls, the front courtyard holds a bodhi tree, and it is no ordinary one. On June 18, 1953, the Venerable Narada, a renowned Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka, came to Vietnam and gave the pagoda this tree. It was grown from a cutting of the original bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya in India. There Shakyamuni Buddha sat in meditation and reached enlightenment, more than 2,500 years ago.

Another bodhi tree with the same meaning grows at Trấn Quốc Pagoda in Hanoi. It was given in 1959 by the President of India, Rajendra Prasad. Each tree is a thread tying Vietnam to the cradle of Buddhism in India.

Behind the pagoda stands the Relic Stupa, seven stories and about 32 meters high, built in 1999. It is called the Cẩm Đệm Stupa, after an old name of the pagoda. It keeps relics of the Buddha, and of the Zen masters who passed away at the pagoda over nearly three hundred years.

In the main hall, hundreds of faces of the Buddha look quietly back. This is not only a pagoda. It is the living memory of three hundred years of the southern land.