Buddhist Humanistic Values in Contemporary Vietnamese Family Ethics

Buddhist humanistic values continue to shape contemporary Vietnamese family life, but in a transformed register. Where the extended-household tam đại đồng đường once transmitted compassion, mindfulness, and filial piety, the post-Đổi Mới family inhabits nuclear arrangements, urban migration, and market pressures that require those values to be re-chosen rather than absorbed. This article reads the Vietnamese Buddhist contribution to that re-choosing as a distinctive philosophical anthropology of reciprocal filial relation — different philosophically, not merely culturally, from both Confucian filial piety and modern individualist family ethics. The argument advances three moves: first, reading the four immeasurables (từ bi hỉ xả) as virtue-ethical claims grounded in a Mahāyāna anthropology of dependent origination; second, treating the Sigālovāda Sutta’s six-directional household ethic as canonical evidence for mutual obligation rather than unidirectional hierarchy; third, engaging the Yeh–Bedford Dual Filial Piety Model to distinguish reciprocal Buddhist hiếu, which travels well into modernity, from authoritarian Confucian hiếu, which degrades under urbanization and gender-norm change. The Vu Lan / Ullambana festival, with the Mục Liên (Maudgalyāyana) story at its core, serves as the central case study: a site where the widening gap between ritual observance and lived ethical cultivation can be addressed by reanimating ritual as inner cultivation

Argument (complex analysis) · Buddhism · Filial piety · Humanism · Individualism · Reciprocal · Sacrifice · Vietnamese · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies