Truc Lam Bach Ma Monastery

A monastery rises out of the water and the sky like an ink-wash painting. This is Trúc Lâm Bạch Mã Monastery.

Truồi Lake lies in Phú Lộc, at the foot of Mount Bạch Mã, in the city of Hue. It is a wide stretch of open water, with forest, mountains and sky on every side. In the middle of the lake sits a small island. In 2006, people began to build the monastery there.

The monastery belongs to the Trúc Lâm Yên Tử school of Zen. It was the first monastery of this school in central Vietnam. The school began with Emperor Trần Nhân Tông. He gave up his throne and went up Mount Yên Tử to live as a monk, and there he founded a school of Buddhism that is purely Vietnamese. From Yên Tử in the north, this line of Zen traveled through many centuries and found its way to the lake and the mountains of Bạch Mã in the central region.

Here, Zen and the landscape blend into each other naturally.

Mount Bạch Mã rises behind the monastery. Its climate is one of the most unusual in central Vietnam, and clouds cover it all year round. The surface of Truồi Lake in front reflects the clouds, the mountain and the tiled roofs of the monastery. In the early morning, when the mist is thick, the whole island seems to hang in a veil of white vapor. It is hard to tell where the island ends and the lake begins, or where the land ends and the sky begins.

People say that Zen is the art of letting go. Perhaps nowhere is that easier to understand than here. The eye is left with only the lake, the mountains, and the monastery standing quiet in the middle of it all.