Master Tang Hôi

Book excerpt: Master Tang Hoi presents an overview of the life, work, and thought of Tang Hoi, the earliest known Buddhist meditation master of Vietnam. Tang Hoi was born in the region that is now Vietnam three hundred years before the well-known Indian monk Bodhidharma went to China. He is revered by Vietnamese Buddhists as the first patriarch of the Vietnamese Meditation school, and his life and work tell us much about the roots of Buddhism in Vietnam and southern China. The history of Buddhism in Vietnam spans two thousand years - nearly as long as Buddhism itself has been in existence. Due to Vietnam's geographical location between India and China, Vietnamese culture and religion were enriched by these two great cultures. As the life of Tang Hoi shows, Vietnam was the fertile soil for a unique form of Buddhism that blends the teachings of both the early Buddhist Theravadin tradition and the later Mahayana. In this work two of Tang Hoi's writings are presented, both composed sometime before 229 C.E. The first is an essay, "The Way of Realizing Meditation," which is an extract from his work, The Collection on the Six Paramitas. The second is his Preface to the Anapananusmriti Sutra (Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing). Tang Hoi's writings reveal to us how second- and third-century Vietnamese Buddhists practiced meditation, and how their practice of the teachings contained in the Theravadin sutras was infused with the spirit of Mahayana Buddhism.