Tay Phuong Pagoda

In 1960, the poet Huy Cận climbed a small mountain in what was then Sơn Tây province and stepped into an old pagoda. There he stood stock-still before a row of wooden statues. When he came back down the mountain, he carried a poem with him. It went into the school textbooks, and generations of Vietnamese students have learned it by heart.

The poem is called "The Arhats of Tây Phương Pagoda." Arhats are disciples of the Buddha who reached enlightenment.

Tây Phương Pagoda stands on the summit of Câu Lâu Mountain, about 30 kilometers west of the center of Hanoi. The commune around it shares the name Tây Phương, in the old Thạch Thất district. The pagoda's formal name is Sùng Phúc tự. It is also called Tây Phương cổ tự, the old pagoda of Tây Phương. The name Tây Phương means the West, but not only in the sense of geography. It also calls to mind the Western Paradise of Pure Land Buddhism, the realm of Amitabha Buddha. A single name carries a spiritual dimension too.

To reach the pagoda, people climb more than 230 stone steps. People often say the way up is hard for a reason. It gives pilgrims time to prepare their hearts before they enter a sacred space. On the way up, breath comes harder, legs tire and steps slow, and that is the whole point of this path. The climb is less a test than a threshold.

The pagoda has more than 400 years of recorded history. Some researchers believe that by 1554, in the reign of Emperor Mạc Phúc Nguyên, it had already reached the size it has today. It was built up further in later times, under the Lê emperors and the Trịnh lords, a noble family who dominated northern Vietnam. In 1794, under the Tây Sơn, the pagoda went through a great restoration and was renamed Tây Phương cổ tự. The Tây Sơn were three brothers who led an uprising from 1771 and for a time ruled Vietnam. The buildings that stand today come, for the most part, from that restoration, more than 230 years ago.

The three main halls stand parallel, one behind another, front, middle and back. At the front is the Bái đường, the hall of worship. In the middle is the Chính điện, the main hall. Innermost is the Hậu cung, the rear sanctuary. Each hall has eight sweeping, upturned roof corners, a mark of Vietnamese pagoda building in the 17th and 18th centuries. Seen from the front, the curved roof lines rise one over another like waves, like the wings of a bird in flight.

But what stays longest in memory is not the roofs. It is what waits inside the rear sanctuary.

There stand eighteen arhat statues, carved from jackfruit wood, lacquered red and gilded. They were carved around 1794. The carvers came from Chàng Sơn, a woodworking village in this same Thạch Thất area. The village has long been famous across the old region of xứ Đoài.

In 2015, the Prime Minister of Vietnam recognized the pagoda's set of Buddhist statues from the Tây Sơn era, with these eighteen at its heart, as a National Treasure.

Arhat statues stand in a great many pagodas, but these are different.

The difference lies in the faces. Each statue has its own bearing, its own inner life. One is smiling. Another is lost in thought, head bowed. One has wide eyes and a knitted brow, as if astonished by something. Another has the sinews standing out on his hands and the veins stretched tight, as if he were bearing enormous pain.

It was that feeling that would not let Huy Cận walk away. His poem begins with his visit to the arhats of Tây Phương, and with a heart that stayed with them after he left. Then the poet asks why, in the very land of the Buddha, every face here should carry such sorrow. In another stanza, he sees in each statue its own deeply human face, full of torment, until the wooden figures seem to sweat even though they do not weep.

The poem was taken into the textbooks of Vietnamese literature. Because of it, Tây Phương Pagoda has become a cultural and literary symbol, familiar to many generations of Vietnamese for more than 60 years.

People usually call these eighteen statues arhats. In fact, they are the Indian patriarchs as the Zen school counts them, masters who one after another kept the Buddha's teaching and handed it down through the generations. Under the hands of the Chàng Sơn carvers, they do not appear as images of easy, weightless release. They appear as people who still carry every human feeling, practicing in a world still full of suffering.

From the top of the mountain, the plain spreads wide below. On misty early mornings, the view looks like a painting. It is a very quiet place to take in the view, on the edge of Hanoi.

In 2014, the Prime Minister ranked the pagoda a Special National Monument. Thầy Pagoda, another old pagoda of the xứ Đoài region, was ranked in the same round. And in 2025, the Tây Phương Pagoda festival was recognized as national intangible cultural heritage. Its main day falls on the sixth day of the third lunar month.

The mountain is small. But on it, eighteen people made of wood have stood waiting for more than two centuries. And a great poet once stood stock-still before them and wrote lines that no one could forget. Step into the rear sanctuary, then step back out and look over the plain spread below the mountain. There comes a moment when you understand why people climb more than 230 stone steps to come up here.