The Legend of Lady Lieu Hanh

The notes of a zither fall one by one, clear as drops of water, from the hall of worship at Phủ Giầy.

It is late afternoon. Incense smoke drifts quietly up from the old curved roofs and mingles with the soft, sweet scent of agarwood.

People do not come here only to pray. They come because they remember a story that Vietnamese families have told from one generation to the next. It is the story of a heavenly maiden who loved the human world so much that she could not bear to leave it.

This is an old tale, retold. It is not an event that anyone can dig up and examine. But people have passed it down for many hundreds of years, because it holds something very true about the human heart.

According to the legend, a beautiful and gifted maiden named Giáng Tiên served in the court of Heaven. She worked close to Ngọc Hoàng, the Jade Emperor, the ruler of Heaven in folk belief. The sound of her music and her singing carried through all nine levels of Heaven.

Giáng Tiên lacked nothing in the realm of the immortals. There was only one thing she had never known, and that was the joy and sorrow of a human life.

Then came a banquet in the court of Heaven. The old tale says that Giáng Tiên slipped and broke a precious jade cup. The cup shattered on the palace floor, and the sound of it was sharp and short.

But what followed was long.

The Jade Emperor spoke sternly. He sentenced her to be sent down to earth to live a human life, so that she would learn what sorrow is, what love is, and what loss is.

She was reborn on earth and grew up in an ordinary family in the Vân Cát area, in the old land of Nam Định. She took a human form and lived as people live. She learned to bow her head under the rain and to lift her face to the sun.

She married a man named Đào Lang, and she bore children.

And it was in those ordinary years that Giáng Tiên truly understood something that no one in Heaven could ever have taught her.

A meal shared around one table, the laughter of a child, a husband reaching for his wife's hand in the evening. All of these small things held a whole sky of warmth.

Yet her time on earth came to an end before she could live it to the full. Heaven called her back.

The legend says that Giáng Tiên had to leave her husband behind, and her children while they were still small. Her heart ached as if it had been cut with a knife. She returned to the realm of the immortals in full glory. But in her heart there was an empty corner that nothing in Heaven could ever fill.

She missed Đào Lang. She missed every meal, every night of sleep, every early morning they had spent together.

Giáng Tiên begged the Jade Emperor to let her go back. Moved by pity, he allowed her to go down to earth a second time. Then a third time.

Three human lives.

Three times she loved, three times she lost, and three times she had to part.

The legend goes on to say that after those three human lives, the Jade Emperor was moved by the devotion of Giáng Tiên. He no longer made her choose between Heaven and earth.

He gave her the title of Princess Liễu Hạnh.

And most important of all, he allowed her to travel freely between Heaven and earth, no longer held back by any border.

For the Jade Emperor understood that the love of Giáng Tiên was no crime.

She had only loved. And love is something that even Heaven cannot, and should not, stand in the way of.

From then on, the Holy Mother Liễu Hạnh became a protector of the Vietnamese people.

She is honored as one of the Four Immortals of Vietnamese folk belief. These are four undying deities that Vietnamese people have worshipped for generations. Two of them are Tản Viên Sơn Thánh and Thánh Gióng. The other two are Chử Đồng Tử and the Holy Mother Liễu Hạnh.

Of the four, she is the only woman.

She stands beside the gods of mountain and water and beside a child hero. She stands there not for the power of high mountains or the magic of deep rivers, but for her heart. The heart of a woman who chose love through three human lives is as sacred as anything in the world.

Liễu Hạnh is worshipped in many places, and two of them are especially famous.

The first is Phủ Giầy, her home in the legend, in the Vân Cát area. Today it lies in the commune of Vụ Bản, in Ninh Binh province.

It is a whole complex of old temples and shrines. It is recognized as a national historical and cultural relic.

The second is Phủ Tây Hồ, in Hanoi. But in the legend, it is the Vân Cát area that is truly her land. That is where she lived and loved through her human lives.

Over many centuries, the Vietnamese people slowly shaped a deep and many-sided faith around her. It is called the worship of the Mother Goddesses, or Đạo Mẫu.

On December 1, 2016, UNESCO added the Practices related to the Việt beliefs in the Mother Goddesses of Three Realms to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

It was the first time the world turned to look at the Vietnamese women who stand lighting incense each morning. And the world nodded, honoring what they had kept through so many generations.

Within this faith, the ritual of hầu đồng is the way people connect with the Mother. In this ritual, held with music and dance, a medium is believed to receive the deities. The ritual is the sacred thread that joins earth and Heaven, the same thread that Liễu Hạnh crossed many times in her legendary life.

The legend of Liễu Hạnh is written down in an old book, Vân Cát thần nữ truyện. In the 18th century, Lê Hữu Trác also mentioned it in his account Thượng Kinh ký sự. The legend is not only a story about a goddess.

It is a story about the human heart. It tells of someone who had everything in the realm of the immortals, and who gave up immortality itself to live, to love, to cry and to laugh like an ordinary person.

And when she had lived enough, loved enough and understood enough, she did not turn into something far away. She stayed beside the Vietnamese people. She is there in every stick of incense, in every early-morning note of the zither, and in the golden lamplight that burns all night under the roofs of Phủ Giầy.

In the late afternoon at the gate of Phủ Giầy, the incense smoke rises and the zither begins to play. Behind the old wooden columns and the embroidered curtains lies the journey of a woman who loved the human world so much that she asked to come back, and lived three human lives there.

The lamp glowing in the hall of worship is not only a lamp. It is the sign of a heart that is still there, still staying, between earth and Heaven.