Nguyen Binh Khiem (Cao Dai Spirit)

Nguyen Binh Khiem was a Vietnamese scholar official, poet and celebrated prophetic writer of the sixteenth century, known by the honorific Trang Trinh, who resigned his post at the Mac dynasty court to teach and write, and whose prophetic verses are still studied and quoted in Vietnam. In Cao Dai cosmology, he is venerated as the third spirit, alongside Victor Hugo and Sun Yat-sen, who signed the Third Alliance Between God and Man, a covenant depicted in the well known mural at the Cao Dai Holy See in Tay Ninh. The mural shows the three writing on a tablet, in French and Chinese, the words God and Humanity and Love and Justice, and within Cao Dai teaching the trio represents Western, Chinese and Vietnamese civilization jointly recognizing the new revelation, with Nguyen Binh Khiem standing for Vietnamese civilization and continuing his historical reputation as a prophetic figure into the movement's own cosmology.