Ton Thanh Pagoda

In the Cần Giuộc area stands a pagoda more than 200 years old. It was never only a place of worship. A great poet of the South once taught school here, made medicine here, and wrote pages that entered history.

Tôn Thạnh Pagoda is a national historic site. Today it lies in Mỹ Lộc commune, in Tây Ninh province. Before the administrative reorganization, it stood in Thanh Ba hamlet of the same commune, in Cần Giuộc. That area was then part of Long An province. It was ranked as a historic site by a decision of the Minister of Culture and Information.

According to the website of the Long An provincial Party committee, the Zen master Viên Ngộ built the pagoda in 1808. At first it was called Lan Nhã. In 1841 the name changed to Tôn Thạnh. Because of the master, local people also use two popular names for it, Tăng Ngộ Pagoda and Ông Ngộ Pagoda. The master was laid to rest in the tower on the western side of the grounds.

What lifts the pagoda above an ordinary old pagoda is the story of Nguyễn Đình Chiểu. He lived in the land of Thanh Ba from 1859 to 1861, and used the pagoda to teach, write poetry and make medicine. That website and the Nhân Dân newspaper both state this. It was a heavy time. The French had just taken Gia Định, in 1859, and the people of the South faced hard choices. Nguyễn Đình Chiểu chose to stay. He taught reading and writing, treated the sick, and wrote pages about the spirit of resistance.

The funeral oration "Văn tế nghĩa sĩ Cần Giuộc" is tied to this pagoda. That is not because it was written in full inside the grounds. It is because the pagoda was where he saw and came to understand the spirit of ordinary people in plain cloth, who rose up against foreign invasion. The oration does not praise professional generals. It remembers common farmers who gave their lives for their villages and their homeland. That is why it lives on in the literary memory of Vietnam.

Two steles stand in the grounds. One, set up in 1973, marks the time Nguyễn Đình Chiểu stayed here. The other, set up in 1998, carries lines from the oration. In front of them, a visitor can read the very words that the elder known as Đồ Chiểu wrote more than 160 years ago.

Three layers of memory meet in this quiet place. There is the sound of Buddhist bells from over 200 years ago. There is the figure of a blind teacher, sitting and teaching letters in a time of turmoil. And there are the lines of the oration, still read today. In the courtyard, the western tower stands in silhouette against the evening sky. This small piece of land in Cần Giuộc has kept the cultural soul of the South through many upheavals.