Trấn Quốc Pagoda

Picture Thanh Niên ("Youth") Road, the street between West Lake (Hồ Tây) and Trúc Bạch Lake, as it once was: the Cổ Ngư dike, leading out to a small island. On that island stands Trấn Quốc Pagoda, regarded as the oldest pagoda in Hanoi. When the pagoda was first moved here, there was no road, and people had to reach it by boat. Later, the people of two villages, Yên Phụ and Yên Quang, built up the Cổ Ngư dike, then a path from the dike to the pagoda. Today it is wrapped in dense trees and lake water, so even in the busy West Lake area it keeps a quiet, private space of its own.

Three names for guarding a country, at the end of Thanh Niên Road

Legend has it that the pagoda was founded in the time of Lý Nam Đế, in the 6th century, on a bank of the Red River in Yên Hoa village. Its first name was Khai Quốc, meaning "opening the country". Under the Lý and Trần dynasties it was regarded as the centre of Buddhism in Thăng Long, the old name of Hanoi. Under King Lê Thái Tông, after the Lam Sơn uprising, it was renamed An Quốc, "peace for the country". In the early 17th century the riverbank eroded, and the pagoda was moved onto Kim Ngư ("Golden Fish") island in West Lake, on the old foundations of the Lý-dynasty Thúy Hoa palace. During the Later Lê restoration it took the name Trấn Quốc, "guarding the country". Under Emperor Thiệu Trị it was renamed Trấn Bắc, yet people kept calling it Trấn Quốc, as they still do today. Aren't you curious why the court changed the name, but the people of Hanoi never changed what they called it?

You enter through the tam quan, a three-entrance gate that was rebuilt in recent times. Above the door are the words "Phương Tiện môn" (the Gate of Skilful Means), flanked by a couplet in Nôm, the old Vietnamese script: "Carriages and horses ring past on the worldly road / Mountains and rivers open before the Zen gate." From the gate you can already see an 11-storey, reddish-brown stupa rising above the dividing wall. Walk straight along the brick path by the lake and you reach the courtyard of the front hall, shaded by a wide-canopied bodhi tree. In 1959, Indian President Rajendra Prasad gave President Hồ Chí Minh a bodhi tree grown from a cutting of the tree at Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha attained enlightenment. It was planted here, and a stone stele beside it records its history. Across from it, as its counterpart, stands the Lục độ đài sen stupa, inaugurated in 2003 and crowned by a nine-tiered lotus. As the abbot explains, the lotus stands for Buddha-nature and the bodhi tree for awakened wisdom. Inside the pagoda, look for the gilded wooden statue of Shakyamuni entering Nirvana, which locals call the Reclining Buddha. If you turn left just after the gate, you come to a garden of 18th-century stupa tombs.

This heritage doesn't just sit still in stone steles. According to the abbot, hundreds of cuttings taken from the courtyard bodhi tree have been planted at pagodas across the country, including one at a pagoda on the Trường Sa (Spratly) Islands. The site was also once a hành cung, a royal retreat, of the Trịnh lords. The Nôm poem "Chùa Trấn Bắc" (Trấn Bắc Pagoda), often attributed to Bà Huyện Thanh Quan, opens with the line "Trấn Bắc hành cung cỏ dãi dầu", describing grass weathering on the old palace grounds. Soldiers burned only the rooms built around the pagoda, and the pagoda itself survived intact. Next time you pass along Thanh Niên Road, will you drive straight on, or turn in to the pagoda that the old dike once led to?

Enough to decide whether to go

What it is

A pagoda on a small island on the east side of West Lake, regarded as the oldest in Hanoi

How old

Said to date from the time of Lý Nam Đế, 6th century; moved to West Lake in the early 17th century

Its names

Khai Quốc → An Quốc → Trấn Quốc (for a time, Trấn Bắc)

Don't miss

The bodhi tree grown from a Bodh Gaya cutting, the 11-storey stupa, the gilded Reclining Buddha

Getting in

From Thanh Niên Road, between West Lake and Trúc Bạch Lake

Status

Listed as a national relic in the first round of listings, 1962