This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Cao Dai's Charitable Body, the religion's official welfare organ, traces its roots to charitable farming and mutual-aid groups already active among Caodaists in the late 1920s, in the new religion's earliest years. It was given a fixed institutional shape under Decree No. 48/PT of 10 December 1938, part of the wider Cao Dai Religious Law, so the decree formalized a pattern of mutual aid that already existed rather than inventing the work from nothing.
The Body was structured in a twelve-rank hierarchy paralleling the religion's own Executive Council, placing its welfare work inside Cao Dai's governance rather than running it as an independent charity beside the church. Historically it funded and ran nursing homes for widows, orphanages, philanthropic clinics and free schools, work carried out chiefly through the Body's own agricultural and manufacturing enterprises rather than outside donations alone; in 1970 those enterprises comprised 108 separate business activities across Southern Vietnam, by 1971 supporting 6,044 dignitaries in total.
That self-funded, church-integrated model, formal since 1938 but rooted in mutual aid a decade older, is the structure the Charitable Body's later work still builds on today.