In this article, I explore how Buddhist charity workers in Vietnam interpret rising cancer rates through understandings of karma. Rather than framing cancer as a primarily physical or medical phenomenon, volunteers state that cancer is a product of collective moral failure. Corruption in public food production is both caused by and perpetuates bad karma, which negatively impacts global existence. Conversely, charity work creates merit, which can improve collective karma and benefit all living beings. I argue that through such interpretations of karma, Buddhist volunteers understand their charity at cancer hospitals as an affective and ethical form of public health intervention.

This paper explores the charitable work of Buddhist women who work as petty traders in Hồ Chí Minh City. By focusing on the social interaction between givers and recipients, it examines the traders’ class identity, their perception of social stratification, and their relationship with the state. Charitable work reveals the petty traders’ negotiations with the state and with other social groups to define their moral and social status in Vietnam’s society. These negotiations contribute to their self-identification as a moral social class and to their perception of trade as ethical labor.

Based on twenty months of ethnographic research from 2016 to 2019 at Buddhist educational programs for youth in Hồ Chí Minh City, this article investigates the emergence of urban therapeutic Buddhism. Responding to the heightened public concerns over youth’s well-being and mental health, urban monastics are adapting Theravada vipassanā meditation and Thích Nhất Hạnh’s mindfulness teachings to help youth address their social-emotional concerns. The article argues that by promoting a lifestyle based on Buddhist mindfulness and meditation practices, Buddhist monastics and youth are fashioning a framework of ethical personhood and moral community that challenges, but also reinforces, market-socialist morality.

The Nôm Preservation Foundation recently made the libraries of two Buddhist temples near Hà Nội available in digitized form. The resulting composite temple collection allows us to pose questions about the history of the book in Vietnam. The history of the book in Vietnam must be understood from an interregional perspective. The availability of relatively inexpensive Chinese books influenced what was worthwhile to print locally. At the same time, even books with the same title are remarkably diverse in terms of content, medium, and annotation. A close look at individual books can show us what and how people read.

Bodhisattvas are an essential element of the Pure Land branch of Mahayana Buddhism practiced in Vietnam and its diaspora. Many Vietnamese lovingly refer to Bodhisattva Quán Thế Âm as a “gentle mother,” and the circulation of her name and image constitutes a spiritual geography of the transpacific in distinctly Buddhist terms. Through a reading of two miracle tales, I argue that Quán Thế Âm mediates the divergent histories of Vietnamese refugees without dissolving the historical structures of difference that separate the diaspora from the homeland. Devotion to the bodhisattva should thus not be seen only in terms of Mahayana doctrine but also as the embodiment of an alternative ethics of how Vietnamese refugees make sense of their place in the aftermath of war.

The Mendicant Sect is a Buddhist movement that combines Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. Based on fieldwork, analysis of ritual handbooks and other sect materials provided by informants, and readings of published works of Vietnamese monastics and scholars, this article introduces the sect's history and philosophy, describes its Central Vihara, and records a case study of its lay ritual practice, the Eight Precepts Ritual [Bát Quan Trai Giới]. In so doing, it illustrates the "revival of religion" thesis with a southern and Buddhist case study, while challenging the notion that Vietnamese Buddhism is essentially Mahayanist.