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The fifth chapter explores the “Caodaists in black,” members of Tâm Tông Miếu, an esoteric temple dedicated to the “three great Asian traditions” of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism in the Sino-Vietnamese lineage. It is led by Lâm Lý Hùng, who spent three decades in California as a member of Caodai congregations. Called through a series of spirit séances to return to assume a position once held by his grandfather, Âu Kiệt Lâm, he is now a transnational religious leader (like Trần Quang Cảnh) who spends most of each year in Vietnam. The black-robed disciples of Tâm Tông Miếu practice a “religion of the shadows” that counterbalances the Caodai “religion of light” by emphasizing a blend of Chinese occult sciences, spirit mediumship, and ascetic renunciation. Guided by séance messages, they have suffered many of the same sanctions as Caodaists, and have formed their own pathway forward. It also examines the repression that Caodaism and other religions suffered after 1975, and efforts to slowly normalize relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

This chapter begins with a dominant scholarly definition of Kabbalah that regards its crucial component as a concern with the ten divine powers, the ten sefirot. In line with this view, Jewish Kabbalah emerged in Languedoc in the last decades of the twelfth century, and Christian Kabbalah in the final decades of the thirteenth. However, if we turn to another way of defining Kabbalah, found already in the eleventh century, as an esoteric tradition concerning the divine names, the situation becomes much more complex. Some passages dealing with divine names recur in Christian texts early in the thirteenth century, in the discussions of Joachim de Fiore. At the end of the same century and early in the next, Arnauld of Villanova wrote a whole treatise dealing with the divine name. Whether this treatise reflects the impact of Abraham Abulafia's Kabbalah remains to be investigated.