Followers of an internationally known Buddhist monk say tensions are rising at a monastery in Vietnam’s Central Highlands after local officials accused them of trying to “sabotage” Vietnam’s communist government.
An angry crowd gathered outside the Bat Nha monastery on Monday and local police conducted late-night searches of the rooms, Brother Phap Tu said by telephone yesterday from the compound in Lam Dong Province.
The monks and nuns there are followers of Thich Nhat Hanh, an exiled Vietnam-born monk who has sold more than 1 million English-books in the West and is now based at the Plum Village monastery in southern France.
At the Bat Nha monastery, about 20 people, some carrying knives, pressured the monks to leave, ripped their clothing from a line and tossed it into a nearby river, Tu said. A few days before that, the group smashed the windows of the meditation hall, he said.
Late on Monday night, police searched the dormitory rooms of the nearly 400 monastery residents and took the identity cards of two monks, ordering them to attend a meeting with local government officials yesterday morning, Tu said.
Calls to the area’s police chief and local officials went unanswered yesterday.
Nhat Hanh has visited Vietnam three times since 2005, but remains based in southern France and is currently not in Vietnam.
His followers say they are being punished because Nhat Hanh has said the government should abolish its control of religion.
Authorities describe the conflict as an internal dispute between two factions of monks. They say they are simply acting at the request of the monastery’s owner, Duc Nghi, a member of the official Buddhist Church of Vietnam who invited Nhat Hanh’s followers to settle at the pagoda in 2005 but changed his mind last year.
The tensions first boiled over last June, when a mob descended on the site with sledgehammers, damaged buildings and threatened the monks and nuns who follow Nhat Hanh. Authorities also cut off electricity at the site.
Authorities later decided to allow the monks to stay until Sept. 2, but they declined to leave, saying they have no place to go and have spent nearly US$1 million expanding the property and adding buildings.
The deadline passed without incident, but on Sept. 7, local officials drafted a memo accusing the monks of illegally occupying Bat Nha and urged local communist organizations to persuade them to leave.
“Plum Village association has abused the religious policies of the party and state to sabotage the regime and oppose the Buddhist Church of Vietnam,” said the memo, a copy of which was leaked to Nhat Hanh’s followers.
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