ABSTRACT
The Tale of Kieu, an epic poem is perhaps the best known Vietnamese literary work. It was written by Nguyen Du, a scholar and court official, whose life spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a time of dynastic upheaval and transition. The tale takes its name from its central figure, the young woman Kieu, and is a story of love, hardship, and the suffering that Kieu is forced to endure as a result of what she perceives to be her karmic burden from a previous lifetime. The tale highlights the complex Vietnamese admixture of belief systems, most notably Confucianism and Buddhism. Although Nguyen Du was a classically trained Confucian scholar who participated in the rituals of that world, like many Vietnamese, he also had strong sense of the role that larger forces played in peoples lives, for he had lived through a tumultuous time of civil war.
