In a defiant Lunar New Year message, the head of an outlawed Buddhist church in Vietnam said the movement remains "very much alive" despite almost three decades of repression by the communist regime.
Thich Huyen Quang, the patriarch of Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) who has been under effective house arrest for 21 years without charge or trial, urged followers not to lose hope.
"The advent of every New Year shows us how to advance our condition by learning the universal law of impermanence," the 86-year-old monk said in a message clandestinely sent to the church's Paris-based information arm.
"It is because we understand the nature of impermanence that the fierce crackdown on the UBCV after the Special Assembly in Nguyen Thieu Monastery in October 2003 has not succeeded in perturbing the UBCV leadership."
Quang, who is being detained incommunicado at the monastery in central Binh Dinh province, said all senior church monks were under house arrest and subjected to harassment and repression.
"Venerable Thich Quang Do and myself are living in conditions indistinguishable from imprisonment. But we are not intimidated. We have already endured decades of repression.
"One more crackdown launched by the authorities against us, however harsh it may be, can never make us abandon our commitment to protect our faith and the people of Vietnam," he said.
It has been a turbulent year for the church.
In April, Prime Minister Phan Van Khai held a surprise meeting with Quang under the glare of television cameras after he was granted permission to visit Hanoi for hospital treatment.
"Subsequently, I traveled to Hue and visited many provinces in the south, as far as the province of My Tho. All over Vietnam, wherever I went, I found unwavering support for the UBCV," Quang said in his message.
The government subsequently tried to persuade him to take up a senior position in the state-sponsored Vietnam Buddhist Church -- an offer he has consistently refused.
Rebuffed, Hanoi stepped up its efforts to curtail the activities of the UBCV, which was formally banned in 1981 because it refused to come under the ruling Communist Party's control.
In October Quang, and his deputy Thich Quang Do, who was only released from two years of house arrest in June, were accused of being in possession of state secrets and trying to reorganize the church with the help of outside forces.
The pair -- Vietnam's most prominent religious dissidents -- were placed under unofficial house arrest. At least four other senior monks were placed under formal house arrest for two years.
In its annual report last month on international religious freedom, the US State Department grouped Vietnam in a worst offenders category of totalitarian and authoritarian states which view religious groups as "enemies of the state".
The previous month the European Parliament and the US House of Representatives both passed resolutions condemning religious repression in the country.