Legend of the One Pillar Pagoda

At first there was only water.

A flat sheet of water, dark and still, without a single ripple, so wide that no far shore could be seen. The water was cold. Someone was down there, in that still water, not knowing where he was.

Then, in the middle of the water, a lotus seat slowly opened.

Its petals were white, thick and cool, curving around one another, each petal holding up the next, all rising high above the water. On that lotus seat sat a figure, perfectly still. The face was gentle, the eyes looked down, and the robe fell in soft folds over the white petals.

The figure on the lotus seat did not say a single word.

The figure only held out a hand, slowly.

And that hand lifted the one in the water. Up out of the cold water, up out of the darkness, all the way onto the lotus seat.

At that very moment, the dreamer opened his eyes.

He woke in the dark. Above him was the roof of the palace hall. Far off, outside, the night watch drums of a great capital were sounding. This was Thăng Long, the city now called Hanoi. He was Emperor Lý Thái Tông, and the dream was still whole inside him, cool and clear, as if it had only just happened.

The emperor knew at once who had sat on the lotus seat.

It was Quan Âm, the bodhisattva of compassion. Vietnamese people have revered her from those days until now. The hand held out in the dream that night was her hand.

The next morning, the emperor told his court about the dream. He told them that Quan Âm, seated on a lotus seat, had held out a hand and led him up onto it.

That morning, the palace courtyard was still damp with the night's dew. The high officials stood in rows, their robes and caps in perfect order. They listened in silence as the emperor spoke of a lotus seat, and of a hand held out to lead him up onto it.

When he finished, a murmur ran along the rows, very soft.

A hand leading the emperor up onto a lotus seat was hard for some at court to understand. Some even took it as a strange sign, an omen that was not good. No one raised a voice. No one said it outright. It was only a quiet unease, passing from one person to the next, like a draft running along a row of wooden pillars.

The emperor heard all of it.

Then a Zen master spoke up. Later generations have usually called him Thiền Tuệ.

The master did not argue over whether the dream was lucky or unlucky. He did not guess, and he did not read the omen. The whole court was asking one another what the dream foretold. He asked a different question. If the dream was so beautiful, why not make it stand on solid ground?

He advised the emperor to stop guessing and to build it instead. Build it in stone, exactly as the emperor had seen it in his dream.

That meant making a pagoda. Setting one stone pillar into the ground. On top of the pillar, making a lotus seat. And on the lotus seat, placing a statue of Quan Âm, just as the dream had shown it that night.

The whole court fell silent.

To the high officials, a pagoda meant many rooms and many pillars, roof joined to roof, one row of pillars holding up the next. The advice they had just heard had only one pillar. A single pillar, standing alone, holding up everything above it. It was like a roof with only one leg, and that is why the whole court went so quiet.

The emperor listened, and he agreed.

That winter, in the tenth month of the year Kỷ Sửu, which is the year 1049, the pagoda was raised.

The dream of that night was beginning to stand on solid ground.

Then the pagoda was finished.

What happened next is what gave the pagoda its name. Monks came to chant the scriptures there. But they did not sit still in one place. The story goes that they walked around the pagoda as they chanted, circle after circle. As soon as one round ended, another began, and the steady sound of chanting never stopped. Their chanting was a prayer for the emperor's long life.

And the pagoda's name was born from that very prayer. Diên Hựu. The two words mean lasting blessings. Put even more simply, they mean good fortune forever.

Nearly a thousand years have passed since that winter of the year Kỷ Sửu.

Today, in the heart of Hanoi, among the traffic and the voices, that image is still there. A single pillar rises from the water. On top of the pillar sits a lotus seat.

There are no rooms beside it. There is no other row of pillars to help hold it up. There is only one pillar, one lotus seat, and still water at its foot.

People call it by a very short name, one that says exactly what the eye sees: the One Pillar Pagoda. Yet the name given to it in that winter of Kỷ Sửu is still there, in the two words Diên Hựu, lasting blessings.

High on that pillar sits a lotus seat like the one that opened in the middle of the water, in that dream one night, nearly a thousand years ago.