Dai Bi Pagoda

Dai Bi Pagoda is a well-known old pagoda of the former Son Nam region, and one of the few sites in the lower Red River delta dedicated to the monk Tu Dao Hanh. Legend says that in the eleventh century, under the Ly dynasty, he brought his mother, Tang Thi Loan, here to shelter and built a pagoda where he practised.

It faces south, the direction of prajna wisdom, on a flat, favourable plot in the middle of the hamlet. In feng shui terms the land is shaped like a dragon’s head, with two small wells on either side that locals call the dragon’s eyes. Little is recorded of its original scale. Of the first building, only a few stone column bases at the gate remain.

Studies of its materials and surviving Han-Nom texts show that the present pagoda was built and enlarged in the seventeenth century, under the Later Le, and restored under the Nguyen in the nineteenth. In the noi cong ngoai quoc plan, it has some sixty bays, mostly in ironwood, the main material of religious buildings in the Red River delta.

The complex includes a three-entrance gate, the main pagoda, two long galleries, a bell tower and a founders’ hall, arranged in balance. Seen from outside, the buildings seem to rise and spread step by step along one main axis, giving the whole a sense of lifting upward.