Truc Lam Monastery Da Lat

The first thing here is a sound: wind moving through the pines. Once inside, the quiet is deeper than at the other places on a visit to Da Lat. Only a few minutes from the center of the city, the noise has already fallen away.

This is Trúc Lâm Zen Monastery, built by the Venerable Thích Thanh Từ in the early 1990s. The ground-breaking ceremony took place on April 8, 1993. The opening ceremony followed on February 8, 1994, only about ten months after the first stone was laid.

The spirit of the monastery is to restore and practice Vietnamese Zen of the Trần dynasty, which ruled Vietnam from 1225 to 1400. Zen is a school of Buddhism that puts meditation at its heart. This line of Zen is tied to Trần Nhân Tông, the Buddhist emperor of Vietnamese history. In the way it is laid out, built and used for study, this is not a pagoda for seeking fame and gain, or for drawing crowds. It is a place truly meant for practicing Zen.

The grounds cover about 24 to 25 hectares, across Phượng Hoàng Hill beside Tuyền Lâm Lake. It is a wide, deep green compound of pine forest, lawns and modern buildings in the Vietnamese pagoda style. The structures use reinforced concrete, but their form keeps the lines of traditional Vietnamese pagoda architecture, a blend of the old and the modern.

The center of the walking route is the main hall. Inside, it measures 192 square meters. It honors Shakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, seated on a lotus throne. On either side are figures of the bodhisattvas Văn Thù Sư Lợi and Phổ Hiền. A bodhisattva, in Buddhism, is one who seeks awakening, someone on the path to becoming a buddha. Reliefs high on the wall tell episodes from the life of the Buddha.

At the front hangs a horizontal board with four words: Từ Bi Trí Tuệ. They outline the spirit of Buddhism, in which compassion and wisdom go together. Without compassion, wisdom easily turns cold. Without wisdom, compassion easily turns blind.

To the right of the main hall stands the bell tower. The great bell here weighs 1,100 kilograms, and verses of the Zen patriarchs are carved into its body. Its sound carries across the mountain forest and the lake water with a quality very different from the bells of a city. Facing the bell tower is the drum tower. This balanced layout is a familiar beauty in Vietnamese pagoda architecture.

Behind the main hall lies the Patriarch Garden, the stillest space in the whole monastery. There are pines, lawns, a miniature landscape of rock, ornamental plants, a wooden statue of the Patriarch Bodhidharma, and two lotus pedestals holding trees turned to stone. Nothing is showy. The empty space is part of the design, too.

From the monastery, the view turns toward Tuyền Lâm Lake, which lies among the pine forest south of Da Lat. Seen from Phượng Hoàng Hill, the lake, the forest and the plateau sky make a scene in which the monastery seems to belong exactly where it stands.

Trúc Lâm is not a place where people come to ask for favors, or to take a photograph and leave. They come, sit down, and listen: to the pines, to the bell, to the water of the lake rising from below the hill. In that moment, high on the Da Lat plateau, the choice of this place for Zen, more than thirty years ago, makes sense.