On the way from Saigon to the Mekong Delta, our guide stopped in a temple complex, which was dominated by the enormous statue of the laughing Buddha that I posted earlier. Inside the temple, things were more tasteful.
We saw quite a few miniature mountains like this in monasteries.
Again, the aesthetic taste we bring with us from the West seems to be irrelevant to the Vietnamese, for whom a neon halo goes fine on a sublime, golden statue of the Enlightened One sitting in mediation.
It's hard for us to know what's usual and what's unusual in Vietnamese art, since we are so unfamiliar with it.
So, without saying that they are unusual (though we didn't see anything else like them), we were much taken with a series of small sculptures (about 25 cm. tall) of pilgrims riding various animals, some real, some mythological.
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