  Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss
papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes,
even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly
attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China,
which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were
many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new
norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory ones, to their culture. This
phenomenon, dubbed "cultural additivity", prompted us to study the
co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the
Three Teachings--Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism--as shown through
Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated
the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a
religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and
anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent
variables).
