Thay Pagoda

Picture a small house standing in the middle of a pond, with two tiers of roof and eight upturned eaves, and behind it a low limestone hill full of old trees. If you have ever watched Vietnamese water puppetry — puppets performing on the surface of water — you already know what that house is for: it is a thủy đình, a water pavilion where the puppets perform. This one, in the middle of Long Trì pond, was built in the Lê dynasty, and by festival custom the puppet troupe of Ra village performs right there. The man folk tradition honours as the patron of the puppet craft is the Zen master of the pagoda facing it: Từ Đạo Hạnh.

Chùa Thầy: many eras gathered around one pond

Chùa Thầy ("chùa" means pagoda), also called chùa Cả, with the classical name Thiên Phúc tự, grew from a small hermitage into a pagoda in the Lý dynasty. The word "Thầy" — "Master" — has two explanations: Sài Sơn hill was known in the vernacular as Master's Hill; or local people called Từ Đạo Hạnh "Master", and the place where he practised took the name. His birth name was Từ Lộ, he came from Láng, and he lived in the early 12th century. Láng Pagoda is tied to his youth; Chùa Thầy saw the last part of his life. Legend says that in Thánh Hóa cave on the hill he left his body to be reborn as the son of Marquis Sùng Hiền, who later became King Lý Thần Tông. That is why folk belief sees him at once as a monk, a Buddha and a king.

Are you curious what a pagoda looks like when it honours a monk, a Buddha and a king all at once? Chùa Cả is made of three rows of halls on a raised stone-edged platform: the outer hall for offerings, the middle hall for the Buddha, and the innermost hall for Từ Đạo Hạnh, with statues depicting his three lives. His statue in the form of a saint has jointed limbs and can move. The Amitābha Triad — a set of three statues of Amitābha, Avalokiteśvara and Mahāsthāmaprāpta, carved from jackfruit wood, lacquered red and gilded, from the early 17th century — is a National Treasure. Two covered corridors run along the sides, and the last three bays of each rise into a Bell Tower and a Drum Tower.

What still lets Chùa Thầy speak to today is that it never belonged to a single era. A stone lotus pedestal carried by lions from the Lý dynasty, a pair of stone guardian creatures in the Trần style, the Lê-dynasty water pavilion, and two roofed bridges, Nhật Tiên and Nguyệt Tiên, said to have been built in the early 17th century. Đền Thượng temple on the hillside, where scholars once came to pray for exam success, was a meeting place of the Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục movement, an early 20th-century reformist education movement. In early 1947, President Hồ Chí Minh lived and worked for about a month at chùa Một Mái, the One-Roof Pagoda within the complex. A 1968 stamp set featured the roofed bridge of Chùa Thầy. The site has been a Special National Monument, Vietnam's highest heritage ranking, since 2014, and in 2024 the Chùa Thầy festival was inscribed as national intangible cultural heritage. Each era left something around the same pond. Now it is your turn — where will you stand to look at it?

Enough to decide whether to go

What it is

A pagoda tied to Zen master Từ Đạo Hạnh; Special National Monument since 2014

Where

At the foot of Sài Sơn hill, Quốc Oai commune, Hà Nội

Dates from

A small hermitage that became a pagoda in the Lý dynasty

Don't miss

The water pavilion on Long Trì pond, the Nhật Tiên and Nguyệt Tiên bridges, the Amitābha Triad

Other names

Chùa Cả, Thiên Phúc tự

Festival

Early in the third lunar month