Cao Dai: Vietnam’s Cathedral of All Religions

There is a building in Tay Ninh Province, about 100 kilometers northwest of Saigon, that looks like someone fed a Catholic basilica, a Buddhist pagoda, a Taoist temple, and a Hindu mandala into the same dream and pressed “build.” Twin bell-and-drum towers rise 27 meters high. Inside, rows of dragon-wrapped pillars march down a nave divided into nine ascending levels. And at the far end, hovering above everything on a massive 3.3-meter celestial globe painted midnight blue and spangled with stars, a single Left Eye stares out at the congregation.

This is the Toa Thanh Tay Ninh — the Holy See of Cao Dai, headquarters of the most audacious religious experiment of the twentieth century. A faith that counts Victor Hugo, Sun Yat-sen, and Joan of Arc among its saints. A church whose hierarchy mirrors the Vatican but whose theology insists every religion on Earth is a petal of the same flower. A movement born in the séance rooms of French colonial Saigon that grew, in less than a generation, to claim between four and six million followers.

And it all started because a mid-level bureaucrat saw an eye.

The Man Who Saw the Eye

Ngo Van Chieu was born in 1878 in the Mekong Delta — a quiet, bookish man who worked as a district chief in the French colonial administration. He was also a mystic. He studied Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, read widely in Western occultism, and was particularly drawn to spiritism — the practice of contacting disembodied intelligences through mediums and planchettes that had swept through Europe since the Fox sisters in 1848 and crossed the ocean to the Francophone colonies.

Around 1921, during a spirit séance on Phu Quoc Island, Chieu reported receiving communications from a supreme being who identified itself as Cao Dai — literally “High Palace” or “Highest Lord,” a Taoist name for the Supreme God. The entity instructed Chieu to use the Left Eye as its symbol. Why the left? In the Taoist cosmological framework that Chieu inhabited, the left side corresponds to yang — the active, creative, celestial principle. God, as the master of yang, the initiator of all creation, manifests through the left. When you see that single eye gazing from the front of every Cao Dai temple, you are looking at the yang eye of the universe — the creative gaze that called everything into being.

For several years, Chieu practiced privately. Then in 1925 and 1926, a larger circle of Vietnamese intellectuals — civil servants, professionals, men educated in both French and Vietnamese traditions — began receiving their own spirit messages. A pharmacist named Pham Cong Tac, a customs official named Cao Quynh Cu, and several others formed a group that received increasingly detailed instructions about founding a new religion. On October 7, 1926, they signed the Declaration of the Founding of the Cao Dai Religion and submitted it to the French colonial governor. The full name they chose was staggering in its ambition: Dai Dao Tam Ky Pho Do — “The Great Faith for the Third Universal Redemption.”

Not a local sect. Not a reform movement. The Third and Final Revelation of God to all humanity.

Three Eras of Revelation

Cao Dai theology rests on a breathtaking claim: God has spoken to humanity in three great epochs. The First Era brought Dipankara Buddha, Moses, and the earliest sages. The Second Era brought Shakyamuni Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Jesus Christ, and Muhammad. But each time, the message was distorted by human weakness — by culture, by politics, by the inevitable entropy of institutions. So God declared a Third Era, this time communicating directly through spirit mediumship (co but) rather than through a single prophet who might be misunderstood.

The logic is elegant, even radical: if every previous religion was a partial transmission of the same truth, then the final revelation does not replace them — it completes them by revealing their unity. Cao Dai does not ask you to abandon Buddhism or Christianity or Islam. It asks you to see them as different faces of one diamond.

This is why the interior of the Great Temple feels like a spiritual library rather than a single tradition’s sanctuary. The nine ascending levels of the Cuu Trung Dai represent the nine stages of spiritual hierarchy. The octagonal Bat Quai Dai at the rear corresponds to the Eight Trigrams of the I Ching. Christian saints, Buddhist bodhisattvas, and Taoist immortals share wall space. And the three principal colors — yellow for Buddhism and virtue, blue for Taoism and tolerance, red for Confucianism and authority — weave through every robe, every banner, every architectural element.

Saints, Séances, and Victor Hugo

Perhaps nothing surprises Westerners more than Cao Dai’s pantheon. The religion recognizes a vast assembly of saints and spiritual guides drawn from every civilization. Among them: Guanyin (the bodhisattva of compassion), Guan Yu (the Chinese god of loyalty), Li Bai (the Tang dynasty poet), Joan of Arc, Louis Pasteur, Shakespeare, Lenin (briefly), Pericles, Julius Caesar, and — most prominently — Victor Hugo and Sun Yat-sen.

Victor Hugo holds a special place. Forty-two years after his death in 1885, Hugo’s spirit reportedly appeared in Cao Dai séances, delivering messages in elegant French verse. He was ordained a saint and designated as the head of the Foreign Mission of the Third Revelation. The choice was not random. Hugo was known in the French colonial world as a champion of the oppressed, an anti-imperialist, and — lesser known — an avid practitioner of séances at his home on the island of Jersey during his exile in the 1850s. The same Hugo who channeled spirits at his dining room table was now, in the Cao Dai understanding, channeling guidance from the other side to a colonized people seeking spiritual sovereignty.

Sun Yat-sen, father of the Chinese Republic, was similarly canonized — representing the principle that political liberation and spiritual liberation are intertwined. During séances, both Hugo and Sun Yat-sen reportedly encouraged Vietnamese resistance against French colonialism, weaving nationalism into mysticism in a way that made the French authorities very nervous.

The séance method itself is called co but — “spirit writing.” Two mediums hold a large beaked basket over a sand-covered tray or a table, and the spirits guide their hands to trace out messages in Chinese characters or French script. This technique was central to the religion’s formation and remained its primary method of receiving divine instruction for decades.

The Divine Mother: Dieu Tri Phat Mau

Cao Dai is not simply monotheistic. Its cosmology recognizes a fundamental duality at the heart of creation. Cao Dai — the Highest Lord — represents the yang principle: formless, creative, the initiating will. But there is also Dieu Tri Phat Mau, the Holy Mother, the Divine Mother of the Jade Pond. She is the yin principle — the one who gives visible form, consciousness, and emotion to all living beings. If Cao Dai is the spark, Dieu Tri Phat Mau is the womb.

This is extraordinary in the context of world religions. While many traditions acknowledge a feminine divine principle — Sophia in Gnosticism, Shakti in Hinduism, the Shekinah in Kabbalah — few institutionalized churches place a Mother Goddess at the cosmological center as co-equal with the Father. In Cao Dai, the Mother has her own temple, the Dien Tho Cung, located within the Tay Ninh Holy See complex. Devotees celebrate the Hoi Yen Dieu Tri — the Mother’s Feast — on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month. She is not a saint. She is not subordinate. She is the other half of God.

This resonates with something deep in Vietnamese spiritual DNA — the tradition of Dao Mau, the worship of Mother Goddesses, that predates every imported religion. Cao Dai, perhaps unconsciously, wove Vietnam’s most ancient spiritual impulse into its most modern creation.

The Hierarchy: A Catholic Skeleton with a Syncretic Soul

The organizational structure of Cao Dai is modeled explicitly on the Roman Catholic Church — but tripled. At the top sits the Giao Tong, the Pope. Below are three Chuong Phap — Legislative Cardinals — one each for the Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist branches. Then 36 Archbishops (Phoi Su), twelve per branch. Then 72 Bishops (Giao Su), twenty-four per branch. Then 3,000 Priests, an order of ritual servers, and the laity.

The three branches are color-coded: yellow robes for Buddhism, blue for Taoism, red for Confucianism. During worship ceremonies — held four times daily at 6 AM, noon, 6 PM, and midnight — the congregation arranges itself by branch, creating a living tricolor as they process through the temple’s nine levels.

One significant feature: women can rise to the rank of Cardinal within the hierarchy. While the papacy remains male, the formal inclusion of women in the upper clergy was progressive for a religion founded in 1926 — more progressive, arguably, than the Catholic institution it modeled itself on.

A Temple Like No Other

The Great Divine Temple (Toa Thanh) took from 1936 to 1955 to complete — groundbreaking had occurred in 1931, but funds and wartime disruptions delayed construction. Built entirely of bamboo-reinforced cement on 96 acres of forest at Long Thanh hamlet, it stretches 97.5 meters long and 22 meters wide. Three towers rise to 36 meters. The two 27-meter flanking towers house a bell and a drum — Buddhist and Confucian elements guarding the entrance.

Inside, the experience is overwhelming. Dragon-entwined pillars in vivid blues, greens, and pinks line the nave. The floor rises in nine steps toward the sanctum. And at the far end, the Bat Quai Dai — the octagonal throne room of God — holds the great celestial globe, painted deep blue and covered with 3,000 stars, bearing the single Divine Eye. During ceremonies, incense fills the space as hundreds of white-robed devotees prostrate in unison, chanting prayers that blend Vietnamese, Chinese classical verse, and French phrases.

It is, simultaneously, the most psychedelic and the most disciplined religious space I have ever read about. Every surface encodes theology. Every color carries meaning. Every architectural proportion maps to a cosmological principle.

Persecution, War, and Resilience

Cao Dai’s history is inseparable from Vietnam’s century of conflict. The French colonial authorities viewed the movement with suspicion — here was a mass organization with its own army (at its peak, around 25,000 troops), its own territory, and a theology that sanctioned anti-colonial resistance through messages from dead French intellectuals. During World War II, the Japanese occupation co-opted the Cao Dai militias. After the war, Cao Dai forces fought both the French and the Viet Minh at various times, navigating the impossible politics of a colonized nation.

After reunification in 1975, the communist government confiscated Cao Dai properties, dissolved the hierarchy, and placed the Holy See under state control. For decades, only a government-approved version of the faith was permitted. Yet the belief persisted. Families kept their home altars. Communities maintained their prayer schedules. And slowly, from the 1990s onward, restrictions eased.

Today, government figures estimate 4.4 million followers affiliated with the Tay Ninh Holy See, with total numbers reaching 6 million when other Cao Dai branches are included. Diaspora communities in North America, Europe, Australia, and Cambodia add tens of thousands more. The Great Temple conducts its four daily ceremonies, and tourists who arrive expecting kitsch often leave shaken by the sincerity and beauty of what they witness.

What Cao Dai Teaches About Consciousness

Step back from the specifics — the dragon pillars, the Victor Hugo séances, the color-coded robes — and ask what Cao Dai is really saying. It is saying that consciousness has been trying to communicate one unified message to humanity across all cultures, all centuries, all languages. That the fragmentation of truth into competing religions is a human error, not a divine intention. That the eye of God is singular — one gaze, one awareness — and it looks at all of us with equal attention.

In an age when neuroscience is discovering that human brains share the same deep structures regardless of culture, when quantum physics suggests a unified field underlying apparent diversity, when the internet connects every tradition’s wisdom into a single searchable library — Cao Dai’s century-old vision feels less eccentric and more prophetic.

A handful of Vietnamese civil servants, sitting in a room in Saigon in 1926, holding a beaked basket over a sand tray, received a message that all religions are one. They built a cathedral to house that message. They were persecuted, co-opted, bombed, suppressed, and scattered. And the message persisted.

What does it say about the nature of truth that the same essential insight — unity beneath diversity, one light refracted through many prisms — keeps arriving independently, in every century, on every continent, in every language?