Buddhism in Vietnam’s Three Teachings configuration: religious syncretism as a mode of legitimation

Abstract

In Vietnamese history, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism coexisted both as three doctrinal traditions and as three symbolic resources mobilized by society to organize moral life, ritual practice, and political order. Yet existing scholarship either separates textual inquiry from social and institutional contexts, or frames the Three Teachings primarily as a discourse of “harmony,” and therefore leaves insufficiently answered a central question, namely why these three traditions could sustain durable co-presence across different historical periods. Addressing this gap, the present article foregrounds legitimation and, by adopting a lived religion perspective, clarifies how Buddhism was deployed as an ethical language through which social order and political choices were rendered legitimate. Methodologically, the study combines conceptual analysis, historical contextualization, source synthesis, and comparative examination to identify mechanisms of semantic translation and the coordination of values across divergent frames of reference. On this basis, the article traces the pathway from syncretic co-practice to a legitimating ordering of Buddhism within Vietnam’s Three Teachings configuration. It also highlights the risks that emerge when this mechanism becomes excessively institutionalized or overly ritualized, thereby weakening reflexive capacities and transforming intellectual dialogue into a formula for legitimating order.