The essential role of Hung Kings worship in Vietnam’s cultural value system

Abstract

Across the world, ancestor worship is a widely practiced. The belief in ancestor worship, of which the worship of the Hung Kings is the most brilliant and profound expression, has distinct identities for the Vietnamese people and contributes to the ethnic community's distinctive qualities. Many cultural values from the nation’s beginnings (the Hung King era) were conceived, fostered, and crystallized into traditional cultural values and value systems from that special Vietnamese tradition. The article confirms a number of values and their centrality in the Vietnamese cultural value system to the nation’s historical process of nation-building and nation-defense through surveys of documents pertaining to the religious activities of worshiping Hung Kings in Phu Tho.