When Sara Swenson arrived in Ho Chi Minh City in 2015 to study Vietnamese Buddhism, she expected to interview Buddhist nuns. What caught her attention instead was a vast, informal world of volunteers—and a tradition far more varied than its contemplative reputation in U.S. media suggests.
Swenson’s first book, Near Light We Shine: Buddhist Charity in Urban Vietnam, draws on her conversations with more than 400 volunteers across 25 charity groups, conducted over two years of fieldwork. The book is among the first ethnographic studies of Vietnamese Buddhism and the first to focus on southern Vietnam.
An assistant professor in the Department of Religion and affiliated faculty in the Department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages, Swenson received support for the project from the Leslie Center for the Humanities, the Department of Religion, the Robert H.N. Ho Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. The Leslie Center also funded the 2021 Lived Karma Symposium, which Swenson organized. The symposium brought 22 Buddhist studies scholars to campus to examine how concepts of karma motivate social action.
In this Q&A, Swenson shares what drew her from rural Minnesota to the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, the proverb that gave the book its title, and her approach to building trust with the volunteer groups she studied.
When you were a teenager in rural Minnesota, your father handed you a book by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh. How did that introduction set you on the path to two years of fieldwork in Ho Chi Minh City?
My dad was an itinerant Christian minister, so I grew up moving all around rural Minnesota. Everywhere we landed, Christianity was more than just a belief—it was a whole way of being in the world. This upbringing gave me a strong appreciation for the way religion can help build community and sustain people through life’s biggest challenges. That said, like many teenagers, I hit a point where I was just struggling—dealing with a lot of anxiety and pressure in school. My dad loaned me Thích Nhất Hạnh’s books, Living Buddha, Living Christ (1995), which compares Christian and Buddhist teachings, and The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975), which teaches the basics of mindfulness meditation. My dad encouraged me to try multi-faith mindfulness practices as a way to deal with my anxiety. Those books were my first introduction to Vietnamese Buddhism. I grew fascinated with the life story of Thích Nhất Hạnh, who was an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War and promoted peace through Buddhist teachings.
After college, I moved to Denver for a master’s degree in religion, initially thinking I would follow my family path into Christian ministry. I connected with a Vietnamese American Buddhist monastery there and started visiting weekly, expecting to learn more about Thích Nhất Hạnh's style of mindfulness. Instead, I learned the community practiced many different styles of Buddhism: some closer to Thích Nhất Hạnh's approach, others more influenced by Pure Land Buddhism, including practices like chanting to support miraculous healings or funeral services to secure a good next life. That community helped me appreciate how internally diverse and dynamic Vietnamese Buddhism can be. I owe a lot to the temple grandmas there, who put me to work around the kitchen and answered my questions about day-to-day events. Like the Christian communities I grew up in, I saw how Buddhism wasn’t just a belief—it was a whole way of being in the world.
Soon after, I met a professor who recognized my academic potential as a religion scholar. He encouraged me to apply for a PhD. I really wanted to learn the Vietnamese language and interview practitioners about their experiences. That professor helped me pick a PhD program and apply for scholarships. His mentorship informs the kind of teacher I aspire to be—someone who helps students connect with interests and opportunities they might not have even known were options.
You went into fieldwork as a Scandinavian American with no family connections to Vietnam, learning the language along the way. How did you earn the trust of communities that largely operate outside public view?
I didn’t actually intend to study Buddhist charity when I started. I had this vision of interviewing nuns in Saigon about how they were adapting Buddhist teachings for life in the city, but I didn't know anyone in Vietnam. A classmate who had just been to Saigon for her honeymoon said, “Well, if you don't know anyone, here is the Facebook contact for a tattoo artist I met there.” So I sent him a message. He replied, “Hey, if you want to meet Buddhist nuns, come with me this weekend. We’re running a charity program, visiting 10 monasteries.” There were about 200 people on that trip, and most of them also volunteered with other organizations. They kept saying, “If you want to understand contemporary Buddhism in Vietnam, you need to understand charity work.” That’s where the whole project started.
I met a lot of people through friends-of-friends introducing me over Facebook—sometimes volunteers from different groups would see each other’s comments on my feed and become friends through my page. Volunteers cared deeply about their communities and were eager to share their understanding of Buddhist teachings and talk about their projects.
Some charity leaders didn’t necessarily choose to operate outside public view. Many felt their humanitarian work was underappreciated—even by their own family members, who were sometimes critical that they gave too much to strangers. Meeting an international scholar who thought their work mattered often created an instant connection, even though I was just a PhD student. That said, not every door was open. Some leaders were skeptical about having a foreign researcher along, and rightfully so—people have certainly abused investigative journalism or used research to promote a fantasized idea of Buddhism without respecting practitioners. When it became clear certain leaders didn't want to be involved, I didn't pursue it. Others became close connections. We spent time together almost every day and still chat regularly, now 11 years later.
Your book’s title Near Light We Shine, draws from a Vietnamese proverb about how the company we keep shapes our moral character. When did you first hear a volunteer invoke it in the field, and what made you realize it captured something essential about what you were witnessing?
One of the very first volunteers I met used this phrase—a young college student who volunteered at a monastery on weekends. He used it as a warning: “I know you’re eager to study Buddhist charity, and you think everyone is aspiring to do good, but you have to be careful. Some people do charity for selfish reasons or for advertising. There are issues of corruption and embezzlement. You need to be careful about who claims to be doing good and always ask why.”
The phrase gần đèn thì sáng—”what is near light, shines”— means that being around good people can help make you a better person. But the opposite is also true: people doing charity for the wrong reasons will draw you into their mire. A lot of my book explores how volunteers were wary of charity done for the wrong reasons. These charity groups didn't all cooperate. They were trying to do good in very different ways and for very different reasons, yet their collective influence still had a major effect on public life. As of 2018, Buddhist charities were the second most common providers of social services in Vietnam, after the government—and that’s not even counting all the grassroots, unregistered groups. I chose this title from the many proverbs people used to describe moral communities because it best captured these mixed feelings of risk, hope, and change.
Your book profiles a remarkably diverse group of volunteers, each approaching altruism differently depending on their values, histories, and place in society. Whose story surprised you most?
I was constantly surprised. I was surprised by the range of charity projects and by volunteers themselves. Some groups made food in their own kitchens to give away to people living on the street. Others fundraised tens of thousands of dollars to build schools and dedicate scholarships. They donated cash to cancer patients, cared for children with HIV/AIDS, and funded eye surgeries for busloads of patients at once. I met elderly women, up to age 90, who fundraised to have bridges built in the Mekong Delta. These women would get dressed up in beautiful formal gowns and ride motorbikes into the forest to attend the bridge dedication ceremonies. I met single mothers, queer men, nuns who had ordained as early as age 3, and veterans from all sides of the war. Several of the elderly women were veterans. People’s life stories were full of surprises.
One story I kept coming back to was Bảo’s. I was introduced to him through the tattoo artist. Soon after we met, Bảo came out as a queer man and married another male volunteer. That organization became a magnetic community for young queer men in Saigon to meet one another, find friendships and romances, and resist stereotypes that stigmatize queerness as a selfish lifestyle choice. They used charity to push back by showing amazing generosity and care for strangers, all while explaining queerness through a Buddhist understanding of falling in love with someone you’d already loved from past lifetimes.
When COVID-19 hit Ho Chi Minh City, the volunteers you had spent years studying had to reimagine how to give. What did the pandemic reveal that years of fieldwork hadn’t?
The pandemic happened a year after my main fieldwork. It revealed both the fragility and the resilience of these groups. A lot of unofficial organizations were just run by one charismatic person who suddenly wasn’t allowed to leave the house under lockdown. But at the same time, people pivoted—fundraising in different ways, turning their giving inward to support one another. So many volunteers were already on the cusp of not having enough resources for themselves and their families. What had been gifting food to strangers became gifting food to fellow volunteers, subsidizing medical treatments for friends and family. That persistence—to view giving as a way to have agency in the world, to try to make a difference against impossible odds—carried on.
What do you hope readers—especially those outside Vietnam or Southeast Asia—take away from Near Light We Shine?
I hope readers can appreciate the incredible internal diversity of Vietnamese Buddhism. You have people who do Zen meditation and practice mindfulness. At the same time, you have people who go to monks for exorcisms, astrology readings, or karmic healing. Buddhism draws people from many different demographic backgrounds who practice in different ways. The contemplative styles gaining popularity in the U.S. are just one facet.
I also hope the stories of these volunteers can inspire people, especially in this moment of change and uncertainty in our world. We get so much media saturation that it can be easy to feel like your own small actions are meaningless. But what we do every day can make a difference—for our quality of life and for our communities, including here at Dartmouth. I was moved by volunteers who persisted through challenges and loss with this conviction that little things matter. A lot of the conversations I had were actually about how to live a meaningful life. I hope that’s something readers take away. What you do matters. Find a way to care and keep trying—even when you want to question everything. Especially then.