Từ Đàm Temple was built and opened under the direction of Thiền master Thích Minh Hoằng, the 34th in the lineage of the Lâm Tế Zen tradition. Construction took place in the late 17th century under the nominal rule of Emperor Lê Hy Tông, though the region was effectively governed by the Nguyễn lords under Nguyễn Phúc Chu, who ran their domain as an independent state while paying formal allegiance to the Lê dynasty. The temple thus entered the world in a landscape of competing sovereignties — a condition that would recur throughout its history. For centuries it served as a center of Buddhist study and practice in central Vietnam, its position in Huế giving it significance in a city that was both the imperial capital and the spiritual heartland of Vietnamese Buddhism.

By the early 1960s, Từ Đàm had become the most politically charged Buddhist site in South Vietnam. The abbot, Thích Trí Quang, was the leading figure of the Buddhist movement and head of the General Association of Buddhists in central Vietnam. In 1961, the temple administration and the Association for Buddhist Studies organized a major expansion of the temple's facilities, adding buildings to support the growing range of activities the movement hosted. This was not merely spiritual growth — it reflected the temple's role as a gathering place for people who felt the government of President Ngô Đình Diệm was systematically discriminating against Vietnamese Buddhists.

In 1963 those tensions reached a breaking point. Self-immolation had emerged as an extreme form of protest, and on August 16 of that year, an elderly nun set herself alight at Từ Đàm. It was one of several such acts that shook the country and drew international attention to the crisis.

The political turning point came shortly after midnight on August 21, 1963, when Ngô Đình Nhu — the president's brother and the director of the secret police — sent special forces to raid Buddhist temples across South Vietnam simultaneously. At Từ Đàm, troops set off an explosion that leveled much of the pagoda. Many of the Buddhist monks and laypeople inside were shot or clubbed to death. Thousands of monks across the country were rounded up and detained. The coordinated raids were a deliberate attempt to destroy the institutional infrastructure of the Buddhist movement and silence those who led it. They failed: international outrage intensified, the military turned against the government, and Ngô Đình Diệm was overthrown and killed in a coup less than three months later. The monks who survived at Từ Đàm did not forget what had been done there, or why.

The 1963 raids were not the temple's only ordeal. In 1968, during the Tet Offensive, Từ Đàm was heavily damaged again in the fighting that engulfed Huế — damage that, according to accounts from after the war, some portions of the temple still bore unrepaired. In 1966, a bronze statue of Gautama Buddha was cast to replace the one destroyed during the 1963 attacks; the new statue stood as both a restoration and a memorial. The temple today continues its role as the provincial headquarters of the Buddhist Association, its monks maintaining the daily rhythms of prayer and study on the same hill where three centuries of Vietnamese Buddhist history have accumulated. Some of that history is visible in the architecture. Some of it is in the silence.