Great Eye Inspires Vietnam Cultists -- Revived Cao Dai Faith Has Cosmic Overview

TAY NINH, Vietnam - The painted lidless eye stares out from a great green globe bespangled with 3,072 stars, sitting on an altar. Gongs clash, horse-hair fiddles drone and a slow noon procession of worshipers flows into the enormous, stepped nave of the Cao Dai Church: the St. Peter's Basilica of one of the youngest, strangest religions in Asia.

"Eye of God, you are the gold and crystal of heaven!" a Cao Dai psalm goes. "Ethereal essence of all things' essence, you behold all things. Spirit without body, expressed by a look; You are Infinite Sight, Total Intelligence, penetrating, enveloping and zodiacal."

The interior of the cathedral is a Technicolor dream: Worshipers in white, blue, yellow and scarlet robes prostrate themselves on the pavement. Green whiskered dragons writhe up pink columns toward a ceiling spangled with gold and particles of mirror-glass twinkling like stars. White lotuses are carved into the trelliswork of the open, unpaned windows.

Among the "superior spirits" worshiped in the Cao Dai church are Victor Hugo and Sun Yat-Sen, the founder of the 1911 Republic of China. It is said that Mark Twain, William Shakespeare and Winston Churchill are also "superior spirits" in the Cao Dai pantheon, but no one at the cathedral seemed to know much about these saints.

FUSION OF RELIGIONS

The cult of Cao Dai, or the "lofty palace" religion, is only a little over 70 years old but has strong roots in Vietnam. As proclaimed by its founder and first high pontiff, Ngoc Hoang Thuong-de, Cao Dai is a fusion of the five religions of Asia - Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, Taoism and Christianity.

Today it counts tens of thousands of adherents, down sharply from the glory days of the 1950s, when nearly a million worshipers thronged Cao Dai cathedrals throughout South Vietnam. The church was so powerful it boasted an army of 25,000 regulars who fought the communists during the Vietnam War. Persecuted after the 1975 communist victory, Cao Dai is reviving today, thanks to Hanoi's more relaxed religious policies.

The enormous cathedral in Tay Ninh was built in 1933 for the religion, which has its own "pope" and seven "cardinals."

The liturgy emphasizes light, sight and crystal transparency, symbolized by the peering eye on the green globe, a symbol of the divine intellect animating the universe. "The eye is the mover of the heart, the sovereign master of visual perception. Visual perception proceeds from the intelligence. The intelligence proceeds from the divine principle. The divine principle is me," declares a Cao Dai sermon published in 1950 in Saigon.

The eye first appeared in 1921 to Ngoc Hoang Thong-de, the first supreme Cao Dai pontiff.

Then, at a seance in mid-1925 on Rue LeGrandiere in old Saigon, several future disciples were assisting at a seance with a ouija board. Suddenly, as though clearing the celestial line, the board tapped out: AAA. Then came the message: NGOC HOANG THONG DE CAO DAI.

They soon got in touch with Ngoc Hoang Thong-de and the religion was formed. By 1937 it would claim 92 temples and several hundred thousand converts. It copied the methods of French Catholic missionaries, aggressively proselytizing with printing presses and seminaries.

HUGO CANONIZED

Cao Dai "calls man to love of family, love of the whole human race," one catechism reads. It also preaches "scorn of honors, riches, luxury - freedom from the enslavement of material things." It calls for adoration of God and of the "superior spirits," like Victor Hugo.

Why Hugo? Because, having written "Les Miserables," he was obviously "filled with compassion for the miserable," the Cao Dai catechism teaches.

It is a cheerful religion, with a hopeful outlook. A Cao Dai prophecy says that in 1996 wars will cease, "doors and windows will open across the world and the new religion will be practiced everywhere."

From 1996-98 the Reign of Nirvana on Earth will follow. From 1998 an era of endless, universal peace will enfold the globe.

The end of the world will be heralded by a sort of separation into vegetarians and carnivores: Those "with pure souls in their bodies thanks to vegetarianism will be filled with the divine ichor of the Holy Spirit and will live in perfect ease. The impious, fattened by the foulnesses of the flesh, will perish at the coming of the Consoler, or the Spirit of Truth," the catechism says.