Huong Pagoda

Opening ceremony of Huong Pagoda festival in 2001.

As usual, every year when Spring comes round, Huong (Perfume) Pagoda in Huong Son Village, My Duc District, Ha Tay Province, draws thousands of pilgrims from all corners of the land and quite a few foreigners have visited the structure, sightseeing, making offerings to Buddha, attending fetes and festivals. This Buddhist sanctuary is a scenic spot indeed, with spectacular natural landscape, ancient temples and pagodas, miraculous caverns and grottos.

Sightseeing

The Huong Pagoda lies 60 kilometres Southwest of Hanoi, embracing all forms of tourism: ecological, cultural, grotto. Its festival lasts two months, from the 15^th of the 1^st month  to the mid-third month of the Lunar Calendar. Travellers can get to the pagoda in many ways: by road, by river. and Ben Duc wharf is the starting point of the trek. From Ben Duc they can take the road through apricot orchards, along the beaten trails that the woodcutters follow to gather firewood or medicinal herbs. The trip by road gives its own delights for a trekker, who can climb up the mountains, mingle with the natural landscape dotted with pagodas and temples, caverns and grottos or burn incense on the tomb of Tan Da (a renowned poet of Vietnam in the first half of the 20^th century).

However, the travellers usually like to take a slow boat. As soon as the passengers have settled down in the boat, the boat-girl from Yen Village starts rowing and paddling, allowing it to float gently along the Yen Stream while the travellers take a good look at the two banks featuring the mountains lost in a thin shroud of mist in the distance. If one of the passengers sitting next to you likes to talk and tells you about the myth of Huong Son Land, then there will be nothing more interesting. The mountains have their names according to their forms and shapes, ie the 'Ngu Nhac' (the Five Bells), the 'Nui Dui' (the Rice-Barn), the 'Nui Voi' (the Elephant), the 'Nui Lan' (the Unicorn), the 'Nui Quy' (the Tortoise). In addition, you may find the 'Nui Thuyen Rong' (the Dragon-Boat), the 'Phuong Hoang' (the Phoenix) on the two sides of Tuyet Stream - the one that leads to 'Tuyet Son' Pagoda, not to mention some others like the 'Mam Xoi' (the Tray of Glutinous Rice), the 'Nui Trong' (the Drum), the 'Nui Chieng' (the Gong), the 'Nui Ong Su' (the Bonze), the 'Nui Ba Vai' (the Buddhist Nun). The boat stops at the 'Den Trinh Temple' so that the faithful can go and pray, presenting themselves to the Mountain Genie, a brave general of the Hung King, who reigns over this Holy Land. Then the pilgrims board the boat again, continuing on with their trip along the twisting and turning stream that winds through the 'Hang Ba' (the Lady Grotto), with the postcard beauty of the lush vegetation on its two banks, rustling in the spring breeze.

The boat disembarks at the first wharf for the passengers to visit Thien Tru Pagoda, which is believed to be the 'Kitchen of Heaven,' also popularly known as 'Chua Ngoai' (the Outer Pagoda). On its right, you will find Thien Son Grotto with stalactites on its walls and five stone statues. There you can also see a half-moon lake of lotus and fish. Hundreds of towers stand around the pagoda.  

The Huong Pagoda attracts tourists not only for its natural beauty, but also for its cultural relics of various historical periods as well, which are priceless products, crystallizing the wisdom, the intellectual excellence and the sentiments of the working people and reflecting the ideology of the dynasties. One of the antique objects with a very early inscription in the Huong Tich Cavern is a copper bell, with a height of 1.24m, a diameter of 0.63m, and eight knobs in four directions on its trunk, two for each direction. Dots run around the knobs, a salient feature against its contemporaries. The bell has a fairly nice shape, currently hung in the grotto, dated 1766 or the 27^th year of Canh Hung time. You can find another bell, quite smaller, in Thien Tru Pagoda, cast under the Tay Son Dynasty (1793). The pagoda bells are instruments that can catch the sacred national spirit, with their resonance going deep to the hearts of the faithful.

At the Huong Pagoda, stone antiques are found in fairly large numbers, typically stone tablets of various categories: flattish slabs, pier stele (quadragonal or hexagonal), graffiti carved in the cliffs... The one with earliest date, the 7^th year of Chinh Hoa (1688), is the Thien Tru Stele, standing on the road from Thien Tru Wharf to the pagoda. This is a large-size stone slab, with elaborate engravings of high-flown decorations with palpable impulses of the rural life in the engravings of the elephant, the buffalo, the duck and the crab... The stone pedestals on the altars for Buddha in the Huong Tich Cavern are of high artistic styles of the Le-Trinh Dynasties (1533-1788), with engravings in relief of half-naked people in loincloths in sitting positions carrying the pedestals on their heads and shoulders. They may be variants of the Bird Genie Garuda, with human bodies and birds’ heads, popularly found in the stone carvings of the Ly-Tran Dynasties (1010-1400). The most valuable item in the sculptural art, both in the Huong Tich Grotto and in the Huong Son temples and pagodas is the stone statue of the Goddess of Mercy carved under the Tay Son Dynasties (1778-1802). The statue has a well-proportioned body, an oval face, and a three-folded neck. Her bare left foot is placed on a lotus pedestal, her right foot is pulled back a little, and her left hand holds a shining pearl, among the lotus leaves spreading gently as if the breeze were rustling under the statue.

As far as architecture is concerned, due to the harsh weather conditions of the tropical monsoon and the long years of wars, virtually all the ancient architectural structures in the region have been destroyed. The oldest architectural piece still extant is the “Vien Cong Bao Thap”, a priceless tower, standing close to the Dien Stream in the Outer Pagoda, i.e. the Thien Tru Pagoda. Built in the 17^th century, the tower preserves the remains of Senior Bonze Vien Quang, who first restored the pagoda after so many years of desertion. It is built of hard-baked bricks, reddish without any mortar coating, and with well-lined veins that bear proof to a high technical skill. The Vien Cong Tower is really a piece of excellent architecture of the Posterior Le Dynasty.

The Buddhist Trinity of the Thien Tru Pagoda is a large architectural work, with a harmonious combination of the traditional and the modern styles. For this reason, the traveller will find it both exotic and familiar, with a profound philosophical simplicity of the past art among the impressive multi-dimensional shapes and colours of the contemporary art.

Story:  Superior Monk THICH VIEN THANH
(Vietnam Review)