Entrance, Benedictine Monastery, Thu Duc

A place I spend a lot of my time in Vietnam is the Benedictine monastery in Thu Duc, just outside of Ho Chi Minh City.
It is hidden down a quiet, sandy laneway, and taxis can almost never find it.
It's the perfect place to spend a day, though it can get a little busy - people seem to come from everywhere to visit this place.
I mention the monastry a couple of times in my book, Destination Saigon. It's the place where the monks drag out the big mahogany chairs whenever I come to lunch.

Vegetarian Fundraiser, Vinh Nghiem Vietnamese Buddhist Temple, Cabramatta, Sydney

A major form of fundraising for the multitudinous Vietnamese Buddhist temples in the suburbs of Sydney is the big vegetarian banquet.




These are immensely popular community events, with singers, raffles and legions of bored looking husbands standing out the front of the temple, smoking.
The noise is almost deafening, and you have to shout at everyone you meet, including normally quiet monks and nuns.




These crowded, noisy events are usually not for me. I prefer the temple when it is quiet and when there are fewer people around.
But for those who have less time to visit the temple at irregular hours, these special days provide a welcome opportunity to cultivate some good karma, have some lovely traditional food and kick back with friends while listening to some old tunes.

Monastery Gardens - Thu Duc - Phap Vien Minh Dang Quang

One of my favourite monasteries - and one which is almost completely unknown - is Phap Vien Minh Dang Quang on Hanoi Road in Thu Duc.
It's quite difficult to find because over the years the monastery has sold off its land that faces the road and is now obscured behind a range of genuinely hideous factories and light-industry. Once you enter the monastery gates, however, you are instantly in another world - a world of almost complete quiet, with monks dotted about the park-like gardens in individual huts, dressed in the bright-yellow robes of the Khat Si, Vietnam's indigenous Buddhist order.
There's nothing fancy about the place - the main hall is little more than a rickety tin shed on stilts that actually shakes when I walk about in it.



But it's a semi-rural monastery in the oldest style, the way I imagine many places would have been in a quieter, less overpopulated Vietnam.
These days the gardens are populated with some massive statuary.



There is also a large and surprisingly beautiful statue of the Order's founder, Minh Dang Quang.

Monastery Gardens - Ho Chi Minh City - Vanh Hanh Buddhist University

Van Hanh Buddhist University was once a dusty collection of ramshackle shacks and 60s-era concrete buildings. A few years ago a wealthy Taiwanese Buddhist group came to the rescue and developed it into one of the most beautiful small universities I have seen.
It is also home to a resident monastic community (it is the residence of Vietnam's Buddhist Patriarch), and operates a neighbourhood temple.

Monastery Gardens - Ho Chi Minh City - Chua Giac Lam

One of the suburban temples in Ho Chi Minh City that is well and truly on the tourist beat is Chua Giac Lam.
It is said to be one of the area's earliest extant Mahayana temples (there are, naturally, some much older Theravada temples in the vicinity, including Wat Bodhiwong, a Khmer temple), and there are graves in the temple cemetery dating back 300 years. Despite the occasional crowd of tourists, I quite like Giac Lam. It is spread out, and in the afternoons it is a hangout for students from the neighbourhood who come here to study in the quiet - and do quite a bit of flirting with each other. When I spent a lot of time in Vietnam in 1999 I used to come here quite often to conduct an informal English class with a young monk I knew, and we were allowed special access to a closed-off garden at the side of the temple which grows special medicinal herbs for the monks' use. Unfortunately I have no pics from that time.
The front courtyard boasts a very big and very healthy Bodhi tree.
As it is situated on quite a large parcel of land, the temple has, over the years, established a number of different outdoor shrines on a grand scale.



This shrine to Kwan Yin is a great favourite of elderly Chinese men, who sit in front of it all morning shouting to each other in Teo Chew dialect, smoking and scratching their bare bellies.

Monastery Gardens - Thu Duc - Benedictine Monastery

For something a little different, I thought I would show you the gardens at the Benedictine Monastery in Thu Duc, a satellite city of Ho Chi Minh City.



Once upon a time the monastery would have been in a rural area, but these days it is really just a suburb of the enormous, amorphous metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City. It's about a 30 minute drive from my house in Tan Binh, and the taxi ride comes to about $15. Taxi drivers can NEVER find it.
There are several gardens in the monastery, all serving very different purposes.
These are the front gardens, which are packed for most of the day with Catholic lay-people waiting for confession and to receive the blessings of a monk. The monastery has a reputation for helping women to conceive, so it is quite a popular pilgrimage spot - even for people of other faiths.



There is a large working garden - which includes this fish farm. The monks grow their own food, and they also propagate cash crops - most particularly marigolds for sale during the Lunar New Year.




Out of sight of the public lie the monastery gardens proper. These are spaces for the monks to enjoy, and are normally based around a piece of statuary. These gardens are quite beautiful, and are meant to inspire meditation and prayer.

Monastery Gardens - Quy Nhon - Chua An Long

This was a beautiful little temple in a village outside Quy Nhon City.

Monastery Gardens - Quy Nhon - Chua Hien Nam

Chua Hien Nam is a 300 year-old temple in Quy Nhon City, Binh Dinh province.
Like many temples in Vietnam, it is hemmed in all around by houses and shops, so the only way to reach the temple is by going down an alley. This has happened because over the years the temple has subdivided and sold off its lands, leaving itself stranded in the middle of urban density.
The grounds are still reasonably spacious, and the forecourt garden contains a large shrine to Kwan Yin.




This outdoor shrine is above a water garden, growing some rather fine lotuses.




The area is paved so that it can be used as an extension of worship or other congregational space. It is used all day by people from the surrounding neighbourhood - in this case to release a cage full of birds as an act of good karma.




Looking out from the Abbott's room you can see his prize collection of bonsai in pots. The cultivation of bonsai - along with the cultivation of orchids - is seen as a monkish pasttime in Vietnam.




And though they provide an interesting focal point in front of the main prayer hall, they hardly provide any shade, which is much needed in Quy Nhon's hot climate.

Monastery Gardens - Hue - Tinh Xa Ngoc Huong

Here are some views of the monastery gardens at Tinh Xa Ngoc Huong on Le Van Huu street in the old part of Hue.




The monastery is rather idylically located on one of the old imperial islands, and I believe that it was once the site of the Empress' library.




The Tinh Xa is a temple of the Tang Gia Khat Si, the indigenous order of Vietnamese Buddhism. It is quite small and run-down, and only houses a handful of monks.




On the next street up is another Tinh Xa belonging to the nun's order, and this is much larger, more modern and well-kept.
But I love the down-at-heel charm of Tinh Xa Ngoc Huong, which is frequently closed, and can only be accessed via a long and somewhat perilous concrete footbridge.