Our day started with a trip to our beloved UEF building. There, we learned about Buddhism and how it started in Vietnam. Being Indian, I have a very good understanding of Buddhism and Buddhist teachings since some of my friends are Buddhist and Buddhism originated in India. Our lecturer kept asking me questions (I think to help with pronunciation, probably) about Buddhism and its history. I am not Buddhist myself, but I used my prior knowledge from school and my visit to a monastery in the mountains of Japan to answer the questions. Not sure if that was racial profiling, but I guess it worked out anyway.
The lecturer asked us whether Buddhism is a religion or a philosophy, the answer being a religion. However, I answered philosophy. While there are many religions elements to Buddhism (having some sort of deity, customs and practices, rules to follow, etc), I find that Buddhism is not something to practice but a state of mind one must find to achieve enlightenment. No religion is focused so much on oneself in the present; they mostly describe general history and the stories of the gods. Buddhists do not believe in a creator god, making perception of the beginning and end of the world up to interpretation and honestly minuscule in the journey to nirvana. This is what separates Buddhism from other religions to me. By my experience, religions tend to have creator gods, which those belonging to the religion must believe created the universe, and stories that justify the existence of the world. Buddhism lives in one’s mind, not in the mortal world. It is materialistic, not idealistic. These concepts dive deeper than those of religion, to me.
Next we visited a pagoda belonging to several religions. There were sculptures and statues of Buddha as well as figures from Daoism, a religion originating from ancient China. The pagoda had small pools and lots of greenery, even though it was quite small. Inside were temples made of stone with huge statues of gods and guardians that people were praying at. It was very reminiscent of my experience going to the temple back home or in India. Though I am not hugely religious, I find temples to be comforting and safe. They are just a place of worship, which some people can do at home with the same effectiveness, but they were built so meticulously and with such care. This pagoda made me feel that same way.
The Reunification Palace was our next stop after lunch. It was a huge building with very important-looking rooms built for important people. It was nice to walk around, but nothing really caught my eye.
I would say the biggest impact on my day was the War Remnants Museum. It was genuinely a spine-chilling experience I haven’t got anywhere else. The walk through the first exhibit, the “tiger cages,” was an insane way to start the tour. We saw cages and cells used to torture and hold victims of the Vietnam War. There were also lots of images and sculptures showing actual people inside the cages and their expressions and body language were the most miserable I had ever seen. In the actual museum, there were lots of tourists and people from other countries, which was interesting to me. There were three floors of the museum, all with separate rooms for different sections of the war artifacts. One of the first sections we went to was about the war crimes committed by the USA. The images there were horrific and very graphic. I remember having to keep swallowing because my throat would dry up at what I was reading. I did not include pictures here because anyone remotely interested should visit for themselves and take everything in inside the heaviness of the room with no distractions. Having prior knowledge about the Vietnam War, like many wars, I expected it to be a regular museum: guns, uniforms, photographs, etc. but it was so much more. The Vietnam War specifically was one of the most unpopular and controversial wars and seeing the impact that war had on so many people cut deep. Another one of the zones that hit me hard was the section about the impacts of agent orange. The pictures of the deformed and disabled people effected by such harsh chemical warfare, even after generations broke my heart. It was not fair, war never is. Why should it hurt the innocent? The Americans knew the chemicals they were dropping on the cities and villages. Was the return high enough for the risk? To win war, should it be that decimating entire cities of innocents is the only answer? The answer is no and the pictures and description I saw reinforced that.
I left the museum with a heavy heart and some held-back tears for the victims of the war. It was a really impactful experience to walk those halls and read the sacred stories of people trapped in the whirlpool of war. It really makes you wonder how humans can create such destruction dressed as nationalism with no empathy. We learn about history so we don’t repeat it; how is it that it ends up happening anyway?