Minh Thanh Pagoda

In the middle of the hill town of Pleiku, on Nguyễn Viết Xuân street, there is a place that steps out of the city's quick rhythm. It is Minh Thành Pagoda.

You may have spotted its nine-story tower before you came close. The tower is called Cửu Trùng. According to the abbot, quoted in the Gia Lai newspaper, its top stands more than 70 meters high. In a highland town that usually has few tall buildings, it works like a compass needle, so Minh Thành can be recognized from far away.

Before going in, a word about its age. Minh Thành is not an old pagoda of hundreds of years. It was founded in 1964 by the late Venerable Thích Giác Đạo, head of the Traditional Buddhist school in Gia Lai. Its appeal lies not in its age but in the scale of its buildings, the inner depth of its space, and a story of rebuilding that stretched over more than 20 years.

From 1999, under the guidance of the abbot, the Venerable Thích Tâm Mãn, the pagoda went through a large-scale rebuilding. Its grounds cover nearly 2 hectares. The front faces the Hội Phú stream, and the back leans against Nguyễn Viết Xuân street. The Gia Lai newspaper calls the complex thất trùng già lam. The words mean seven clusters of halls arranged as one connected whole. This is an architectural and religious term, not a folk tale.

The most striking sight inside the grounds is the Liên Trì pond in front of the main hall. In the middle of the pond stands a stone statue of Amitabha Buddha, 7.5 meters tall and weighing 40 tons, rising straight from the water. Its reflection in the pond, with the row of curved roofs behind it, makes a frame that often appears in travel photos of Pleiku. Before raising a camera, though, it is better to stand still for a moment and simply look.

The main hall has two floors. The lower floor is the Đại Bi hall. The upper floor is the Đại Hùng Bửu Điện. A Buddhist website describes a bronze statue of Tỳ Lô Giá Na Buddha inside, 6 meters tall and weighing 16 tons. It also describes a wooden statue of Quan Âm Thiên Thủ Thiên Nhãn, 7.5 meters tall. Quan Âm is the bodhisattva of compassion. There are also many statues of the Five Buddhas of the Five Directions and of arhats, disciples of the Buddha who reached enlightenment. The wooden statues are described as made of jackfruit wood and finely carved.

Two news outlets, Nhân Dân and Vietnam Plus, mention Japanese influence in the architecture of the Minh Thành complex. This is the view of journalists, not a scholarly conclusion. Still, looking at the curved roofs, the symmetrical axis and the carved details, you can feel a clear East Asian style, both familiar and strange next to the traditional pagodas of northern or central Vietnam.

Two towers stand in front of the main hall, the Bell Tower and the tower of the founding patriarch. Together with the Cửu Trùng tower behind them, these three towers give the whole complex its vertical line, so Minh Thành has a focal point from any angle.

Only about 2 kilometers from the center of Pleiku, Minh Thành does not show off its presence, yet whoever has visited once finds it hard to forget. The hill town often has mist. When morning fog wraps the curved roofs and the pond lies calm, the statue of Amitabha Buddha rises from the still water as if the years had passed it by. A generation of Pleiku people spent more than 20 years building this legacy, not to become famous, but to have a place of stillness in the middle of their mountain town.