Chùa Pháp Bảo

This guide to Chua Phap Bao in Hoi An opens in 1695, when a twenty-five-year-old Chinese monk named Minh Hai chose to stay in the port city rather than sail home with the ordination delegation he had traveled with from China. It follows him to the village of Thanh Ha, where he built a hermitage and, before his death in 1746, wrote two short poems assigning dharma names and titles carried by his lineage's monks for generations after him. That lineage, the Lam Te Chuc Thanh Zen school, still bears his name across Vietnam more than three hundred years on.