Vietnamese Folk Religion Prayer Tradition

This entry records that Vietnamese folk religion involves extensive prayer and offering practices addressed to ancestors, village guardian spirits, and a range of other deities and spirits, often practiced alongside and blended with Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism and, for many Vietnamese, Christianity, in a layered religious landscape scholars of Vietnamese religion describe as characteristically syncretic rather than organized around clearly separated, mutually exclusive religious identities, without presenting specific Vietnamese folk-religious prayers or invocations here.

Ancestor veneration in particular occupies a central place in Vietnamese religious and family life, with household altars maintained for deceased family members and specific ritual observances, including on death anniversaries and during Tet, the Lunar New Year, closely paralleling in general structure, though differing in specific language and custom, the ancestor veneration practices documented elsewhere in this atlas for Chinese folk religion and Confucian tradition. Village guardian spirit worship, centered on communal shrines called dinh in many Vietnamese villages, adds a further, more communal layer of prayer and ritual specific to Vietnamese practice beyond household ancestor veneration alone.

Vietnamese folk religion also includes Dao Mau, the Mother Goddess religion, a distinct tradition centered on veneration of mother goddesses associated with different natural realms, heaven, water, mountains and forests, practiced through elaborate ceremonies involving spirit mediumship, ritual costume and music, recognized by UNESCO as part of humanity's intangible cultural heritage specifically because of the richness and specificity of this ceremonial tradition, which involves specialized ritual language and practice transmitted through trained mediums rather than openly published devotional text.

Because Dao Mau ceremony and the wider body of Vietnamese folk-religious prayer varies considerably by region, specific temple lineage and the particular deities or spirits addressed, and because much of this material is properly understood as belonging to specific religious specialists and communities, this entry limits itself to recording the general existence and character of Vietnamese folk religion's prayer tradition rather than presenting specific liturgical content from any of its constituent practices. Vietnamese folk religion continues as an actively practiced part of religious and cultural life in Vietnam and among the Vietnamese diaspora worldwide today, coexisting with Vietnam's other major religious traditions rather than functioning as a separate, clearly bounded institutional religion of its own.