• Journal of Daesoon Thought and the Religions of East Asia
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.41-59
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• 2022

Caodaism is a new religion from Vietnam which began in late 1925 and spread rapidly across the French colony of Indochina. With a broad syncretic aim, the new faith sought to revivify Vietnamese religious traditions whilst also incorporating religious, literary, and spiritist influences from France. Like Catholicism, Caodaism kept a strong focus on its monotheistic nature and today Caodaists are eager to label their religion a monotheism. It will be argued here, however, that the syncretic nature of this new faith complicates this claim to a significant degree. To make this argument, we will consider here the nature of God in Caodaism through two central texts from two important stages in the life of the religion. The first is the canonized Compilation of Divine Messages which collects a range of spirit messages from God and some other divine voices. These were received in the early years of the faith. The second is a collection of sermons from 1948/9 that takes Caodaist believers on a tour of heaven, and which is entitled The Divine Path to Eternal Life. It will be shown that in the first text, God speaks in the mode of a fully omnipotent and omniscient supreme being. In the second text, however, we are given a view of paradise that is much more akin to the court of a Jade Emperor within an East Asian milieu. In these realms, the personalities of other beings and redemptive mechanisms claim much of our attention, and seem to be a competing center of power to that of God. Furthermore, God's consort, the Divine Mother, takes on a range of sacred creative prerogatives that do something similar. Additionally, cadres of celestial administrators; buddhas, immortals, and saints help with the operation of a cosmos which spins on with guidance from its own laws. These laws form sacred mechanisms, such as cycles of reincarnation and judgement. These operate not in the purview of God, but as part of the very nature of the cosmos itself. In this context, the dualistic, polytheistic, and even automatic nature of Caodaism's cosmos will be considered in terms of the way in which they complicate this religion's monotheistic claims. To conclude, this article seeks to demonstrate the precise relevance of the term 'monotheism' for this religion.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.499-510
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• 2014

The purpose of this research is to understand interactive learning during docent-led tours in a science museum focusing on scaffolding. We developed a scaffolding framework by collating the work of other researchers in related fields. The results show that scaffolding included three dimensions: purpose, interaction, and domain. The purpose dimension, divided into six categories, is related to the intention of the scaffolder and what the scaffolding are for: strategic, social, procedural, conceptual, verbal, and metacognitive. The interaction dimension reflects students' interaction with the scaffolder in two ways: dynamic (situation specific) and static (planned in advance). The domain dimension is related to two contents: domain-general and domain-specific (such as science). The scaffolding framework was applied to dynamic interactions between docents and visitors. The data was collected from elementary school students' family visits with the guidance of two docents at the Seodaemun Museum of Natural History. The data collected consisted of surveys, interviews, video-recordings, and transcripts. The analysis shows that five guiding contexts and scaffolding phases were recognized; 1) strategic scaffolding in a poorly illustrated exhibit; 2) conceptual scaffolding in a thoroughly explanative exhibit; 3) verbal scaffolding in misleading interpretation; 4) procedural scaffolding in a manipulative exhibit; and 5) metacognitive scaffolding with inaccurate content. In addition, the results show that the docents used the dynamic and static scaffolding synthetically so that the docent-led tour was effective. In conclusion, this study presents the usefulness of understanding visitors' science learning through the scaffolding framework, as well as the how docents can scaffold actively.