Wednesday, December 10, 2025

Making friends in Buddhist Vietnam

(What Susan Does) The kindness of strangers: a 12-year-old girl invited me home, and I said yes!
Vietnamese Buddhist nun after ordination
Buddhism in Vietnam (Vietnamese Đạo Phật, 道佛 or Phật Giáo, 佛教), as practiced by the Vietnamese people, is a form of East Asian Mahayana Buddhism, according to 2019 figures [1].

Buddhism is the second religion in Vietnam (though arguably the first since the U.S. Department of State's 2023 Report on International Religious Freedom cites Vietnam's "White Book" that the Buddhist population increased from nearly 10 million in 2008 to approximately 14 million in 2021, which accounts for 13.3% of the overall population of Vietnam).

Korean Beauty Expo influences the Vietnamese
According to the Vietnamese government's 2019 National Population and Housing Census, approximately 4.6 million individuals officially identified as Buddhists, representing 4.8% of the total population at that time.

Roman Catholics represented 6.1% of the total population in the same 2019 census.

The vast majority (83.6%) in this officially atheistic communist country stated that they have no [organized] religion or practice [the traditional] folk religion. More

No comments: