‘The Jade Buddha’ and his Heavenly Mediums
Madam Xoan founded Đao Ngo ̣ ̣c Phât Hô ̣ ̀Chí Minh (the Way of HồChí Minh
as the Jade Buddha) also known as Đao Bác Hô ̣ ̀(the Way of Uncle Hồ
) at the đêǹ
Hòa Bình (the Peace Temple) on 1 January 2001. Since the year 2001, hundreds of
spirit texts have been released by Madam Xoan. Here, I will selectively quote from
texts in the Peace Society’s Lời Tâm linh: Hôn Trò ̀ ̛i-Hôn nu ̀ ̛ớc. Quyên 2 ̉ (Words of
spirits: Heavenly soul and soul of the nation. Collection no. 2), self-published in
Hanoi in May 2010. According to Collection no. 2, the year 2000 marked the beginning
of a new era in which spirituality rises and a new world will be formed on thebasis of a perfect and dual combination of this-worldly and other-worldly elements.
A Jade Buddha appears as the main invisible actor in this transformation and is
actually the spirit of HồChí Minh. To complete his mission, he chose a number of
human assistants and Madam Xoan was the first.
Born in 1948, in the countryside of Nam Đinh province in the North, Madam ̣
Xoan had an unfortunate and hard childhood. Her parents were poor and her father
was often away from home. When she was 14, her mother died of an illness. Soon
after, her father remarried a woman who treated Xoan and her younger sister
badly. She sometimes fought back and the relationship only got worse. She had to
move out of the house and live at a cousin’s place. To feed herself and her sister,
she left school and when she was 15 years old she began working. In despair, she
attempted suicide several times. At 16, she left her village to become a factory worker
(đi công nhân) far from home, in Hai Du ̉ ̛ơng province. At the age of 19 she married a
co-worker and they had four children.
Things changed when she began experiencing health problems in her mid-20s.
She fell unconscious on numerous occasions. She even had intense pain in one finger,
which she asked to have amputated. None of the many doctors consulted could
explain what kind of disease she had. One day, while waiting for treatment at a hospital
in Hanoi, she heard a strange voice, not very clear at first, coming out of thin air.
The voice said that she did not have a disease and that what she had endured were
challenges because she had been chosen to undertake duties assigned by spirits
(hâu viê ̀ c thánh ̣ ). Upon being told that she had a ‘spirit root’ (căn), she decided to
retire early and became a small trader at the local market and earned a good income
by selling votive papers and other objects essential for religious rituals. Five years later,
guided by the voice that she could hear clearly by then, Madam Xoan gave up trading
to study the benediction of spirits (hoc phép thánh ̣ ) at home.
In 1989, to her surprise, the voice told her that she had been chosen by the
Heavenly Palace (Tòa Thiên) to perform duties to save the nation. She began building
a small 10-square-metre shrine named the Peace Shrine (điên Hòa Bình ̣ ) on her own
land and started receiving donations from devotees. Over the next ten years, Madam
Xoan devoted all her time to taking different courses at home with the Jade Buddha at
ever more advanced levels. In 2000, the Peace Shrine was upgraded to the Peace
Temple (đên Hòa Bình ̀ ) on the same site. This time, after fifteen years of training,
she could directly communicate with the Jade Buddha whenever she wanted. She
was also required to recruit mediums to work with her and she established the
Peace Society of Heavenly Mediums in the same year. She remembered that: