The
Self-Immolation
of Thich Quang Duc
June
11, 1963, in Saigon, Vietnam, a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc immolated
himself in a busy intersection. The following is an excerpt taken from
my Manufacturing Religion, pp. 167-177, which discusses this
incident.
Representing
Vietnamese "Self-Immolations"
The often-occluded
relations among power, imperial politics, and the specific portrayals of
religious issues is perhaps no more apparent than in the case of the
interpretations American media and intellectuals gave to the
much-publicized actions of several Vietnamese Buddhists who, beginning
in mid-June of 1963, died by publicly setting themselves on fire. The
first of these deaths occurred at a busy downtown intersection in
Saigon, on 11 June 1963, and was widely reported in American newspapers
the following day, although the New York Times, along with many
other newspapers, declined to print Malcolm Browne's famous, or rather
infamous, photograph of the lone monk burning (Moeller 1989: 404). The
monk, seventy-three-year-old Thich Quang Duc, sat at a busy downtown
intersection and had gasoline poured over him by two fellow monks. As a
large crowd of Buddhists and reporters watched, he lit a match and, over
the course of a few moments, burned to death while he remained seated in
the lotus position. In the words of' David Halberstam, who was at that
time filing daily reports on the war with the New York Times
I
was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming
from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his
head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning flesh;
human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the
sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to
cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even
think.... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound,
his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around
him. (1965: 211)
After his funeral, where
his remains were finally reduced to ashes, Quang Duc's heart, which had
not burned, was retrieved, enshrined, and treated as a sacred relic (Schecter
1967: 179).
In spite of the fact
that this event took place during the same busy news week as the civil
rights movement in the United States was reaching a peak (with the
enrollment of the first two black students at the University of Alabama
and in the same week as the murder, in Jackson, Mississippi, of the
civil rights leader Medgar Evers), as the week progressed, Quang Duc's
death and the subsequent demonstrations associated with his funeral were
covered by the American media in greater detail. From the small initial
article on page three of the New York Times on 12 June that
reported the death accompanied only by a photograph of a nearby protest
that prevented a fire truck from reaching the scene, the story was
briefly summarized and updated on page five the next day and then was
moved to the lead story, on page one on 14 June 1963, accompanied by the
following headline: "U.S. Warns South Vietnam on Demands of
Buddhists: [South Vietnamese President] Diem is told he faces censure if
he fails to satisfy religious grievances, many o which are called
just." The story, no longer simply involving the actions of a lone
Buddhist monk but now concerned with the official U.S. reaction,
remained on page one for the following days, was reported in greater
detail by Halberstam in the Sunday edition (16 June 1963), and was
mentioned for the first time in an editorial column on 17 June 1963, one
week after it occurred. By the autumn o that year, the images of either
protesting or burning monks had appeared in a number of popular
magazines, most notably Life Magazine (June, August, September,
and November issues).
In spite of the wide
coverage this event received in newspapers and the popular presses, it
seems puzzling that it received relatively little or no treatment by
scholars of religion. Apart from a few brief descriptions of these
events in an assortment of books on world religions in general (such as
Ninian Smart's World's Religions, where it is interpreted as an
"ethical" act [1989: 4471) or on Buddhism in Southeast Asia,
only one detailed article was published at that time, in History of
Religions, written by Jan Yiin-Hua (1965). This article was
concerned with examining the medieval Chinese Buddhist precedents for
Quang Duc's death, a death that quickly came to be interpreted in the
media as an instance of self-immolation, or selfsacrifice, to protest
religious persecution of the Buddhists in South Vietnam by the
politically and militarily powerful Vietnamese Roman Catholics.
According to such accounts, the origin of the protests and, eventually,
Quang Duc's death, was a previous demonstration, on 8 May 1963, in which
government troops aggressively broke up a Buddhist gathering in the old
imperial city of Hue that was demonstrating for, among other things, the
right to fly the Buddhist flag along with the national flag. The
government, however, took no responsibility for the nine Buddhists who
died in the ensuing violence at that time, blaming their deaths instead
on Communists. Accordingly, outrage for what the Buddhists considered to
be the unusually violent actions of the government troops at Hue was
fueled over the following weeks, culminating, according to this
interpretation, in Quang Duc's sacrificial death.
Given that the event was
generally acknowledged by most interpreters to be a sacrifice, an
essentially religious issue, it is no surprise that the central concern
of Jan was to determine how such actions could be considered Buddhist,
given their usually strict rules against killing in general, and suicide
in particular. In his own words, these actions "posed a serious
problem of academic interest, namely, what is the place of religious
suicide in religious history and what is its justification?" (243).
The reader is told that the monks' motivations were
"spiritual" and that their self-inflicted deaths were
"religious suicides," because "self-immolation signifies
something deeper than merely the legal concept of suicide or the
physical action of self-destruction" (243). Given that the event is
self-evidently religious (an interpretation that is based on an
assumption that is undefended), the question of greatest interest has
little to do with the possible political origins or overtones of the
event but rather "whether such a violent action is justifiable
according to religious doctrine" (243). It seems clear that for
this historian of religions, the action can only be properly
understood-and eventually justified-once it is placed in the context of
texts written by Chinese Buddhist specialists from the fifth century
C.E. onward (e.g., the Biographies of Eminent Monks by Hui-chiao
[497-554 C.E.] and the Sung Collection of Biographies of Eminent
Monks by Tsan-ning [919-1001 C.E.]). Jan's concern, then, is to
determine whether these actions were justifiable (something not properly
the concern of scholars of religion) exclusively on the basis of devotee
accounts, some of which were written over one thousand years before the
Vietnam War.
After a survey of these
texts, the article concludes that these actions are indeed justifiable.
Basing his argument on changing Chinese Buddhist interpretations of
self-inflicted suffering and death, Jan finds a "more concrete
emphasis upon the practical action needed to actualize the spiritual
aim" (265). Accordingly, these actions largely result from the
desire of elite devotees, inspired by scriptures (255), to demonstrate
great acts of selflessness (acts whose paradigms are to be found in
stories of the unbounded compassion and mercy of assorted bodhisattvas).
The closest Jan comes to offering a political interpretation of any of
these reported deaths is that the "politico-religious reasons"
for some scriptural instances of self-immolation are "protest
against the political oppression and persecution of their religion"
(252).
In terms of the
dominance of the discourse on sui generis religion, this article
constitutes a fine example of how an interpretive framework can
effectively manage and control an event. Relying exclusively on
authoritative Chinese Buddhist texts and, through the use of these
texts, interpreting such acts exclusively in terms of doctrines and
beliefs (e.g., self-immolation, much like an extreme renunciant might
abstain from food until dying, could be an example of disdain for the
body in favor of the life of the mind and wisdom) rather than in terms
of their socio-political and historical context, the article allows its
readers to interpret these deaths as acts that refer only to a distinct
set of beliefs that happen to be foreign to the non-Buddhist. And when
politics is acknowledged to be a factor, it is portrayed as essentially
oppressive to a self-evidently pure realm of religious motivation and
action. In other words, religion is the victim of politics, because the
former is a priori known to be pure. And precisely because the action
and belief systems were foreign and exotic to the vast majority of
Americans, these actions needed to be mediated by trained textual
specialists who could utilize the authoritative texts of elite devotees
to interpret such actions. The message of such an article, then, is that
this act on the part of a monk can be fully understood only if it is
placed within the context of ancient Buddhist documents and precedents
rather than in the context of contemporary geopolitical debates. (And
further, that the ancient occurrences of such deaths can themselves be
fully understood only from the point of view of the intellectual
devotees [i.e., Buddhist historians].) That the changing geopolitical
landscape of South Asia in the early 1960s might assist in this
interpretation is not entertained. It is but another instance of the
general proscription against reductionism.
Such an idealist and
conservative interpretation is also offered by several contributors to
the Encyclopedia of Religion. Marilyn Harran, writing the article
on suicide (Eliade 1987: vol. 14, 125-131), agrees with Jan's emphasis
on the need to interpret these events in light of doctrine and in the
light of spiritual elites. She writes that although religiously
motivated suicide (an ill-defined category that prejudges the act)
"may be appropriate for the person who is an arhat, one who
has attained enlightenment, it is still very much the exception to the
rule" (129). And Carl-Martin Edsman, writing the article on fire
(Eliade 1987: vol. 5, 340-346), maintains that although death by fire
can be associated with "moral, devotional, or political
reasons," it can also be "regarded as promoting rebirth into a
higher existence as a bodhisattva, an incipient Buddha, or
admittance to 'the paradise' of the Buddha Amitabha" (344). In a
fashion similar to the exclusive emphasis on the insider's perspective,
and having isolated such acts in the purer realm of religious doctrine
and belief, Edsman immediately goes on to assert that the "Buddhist
suicides in Vietnam in the 1960s were enacted against a similar
background; for this reason-unlike the suicides of their Western
imitators-they do not constitute purely political protest actions"
(344). The "similar background" of which he writes is the set
of beliefs in a pure land, compassion, selflessness, and so on, all of
which enable Edsman to isolate the Vietnamese deaths from issues of
power and politics. Because similar deaths in the United States took
place' without the benefit of, for example, a cyclical worldview and
notions of rebirth, and the like, he is able to conclude that the U.S.
deaths by fire may have been political. For Edsman, the doctrinal system
of Buddhism provides a useful mechanism for interpreting these acts as
essentially ahistorical and religious.
Some will no doubt argue
that, if indeed the discourse on sui generis religion was at one time
dominant, it no longer is. Even if one at least acknowledges that the
study of supposedly disembodied ideas and beliefs is interconnected with
material issues or power and privilege, it is easy to banish and isolate
such involvements to the field's prehistory, its European, colonial
past, in an attempt to protect the contemporary field from such charges
(recall Strenski's attempt to isolate interwar European scholarship as a
means of protecting the modern profession). To rebut such isolationist
arguments, one need look no further than Charles Orzech's 1994 article,
"Provoked Suicide," to find this discourse in its contemporary
forma form virtually unchanged since jan's article was published some
thirty years ago. Like Jan, Orzech attempts to overcome the "huge
cultural gulf that separated the observer from those involved"
(155) by placing Quang Duc’s tradition of what Orzech terms the
"self-immolation paradigms" (149) as well as the many other
stories of selfless action one finds throughout the mythic history of
Buddhism (e.g., from the jataka tales, the story of the bodhisattva who
willingly gives up his life to feed the hungry tigress). Also like Jan,
Orzech is concerned to answer one of the questions often asked about
these apparently puzzling Vietnamese Buddhists' actions: "whether
'religious suicide' was not a violation of Buddhist precepts condemning
violence" (145). Using Rene Girard's theory of sacrificial
violence, Orzech answers this question by recovering a distinction he
believes to be often lost in the study of Buddhism: its sacred violence
as well as its much emphasized nonviolent aspect (for a modern example
of the latter emphasis, see the essays collected by Kraft [1992]).
For our purpose, what is
most important to observe about both Jan's and Orzech's reading of Quang
Duc's action is that in neither case are historical and political
context of any relevance. In both cases, it is as if the burning monk is
situated in an almost Eliadean ritual time, removed from the terrors of
historical, linear time-a place of no place, where the symbolism of fire
is far more profound than the heat of the fire itself. For example, in
his interpretation of the early selfimmolation tales, Orzech explicitly
acknowledges that "(al)though little context information is
available to us, it is clear that in each case the sacrifice is
performed as a remedy for an intolerable situation" (154, emphasis
added)--clearly, social and political contexts are of little relevance
for authoritatively interpreting timeless ritual or religious actions.
Several lines later, when he addresses Quang Duc's death directly,
Orzech effectively secludes and packages this particular event within
its insider, doctrinal, and mythic context, by noting that the
"politics are complex, and I will not comment on them now"
(154). At no point in his article does he return in any detail to the
geopolitics of mid-twentieth-century Vietnam; instead, Quang Duc's
actions are exclusively understood as "sanctioned by myth and
example in Buddhist history" and as reworked, reenacted Vedic
sacrificial patterns (156). Assuming that mythic history communicated
through elite insider documents provides the necessary context for
ultimately interpreting such actions, Orzech is able to draw a
conclusion concerning the actor's motivations and intentions:
"Quang Duc was seeking to preach the Dharma to enlighten both Diem
and his followers and John Kennedy and the American people" (156);
"As an actualization of mythic patterns of sacrifice it [the
self-immolation] was meant as a creative, constructive and salvific act,
an act which intended to remake the world for the better of everyone in
it" (158). Simply put, Quang Duc's death is an issue of
soteriology.
In both Jan's and
Orzech's readings, as well as those of Harran and Edsman cited earlier,
the death of Quang Duc has nothing necessarily to do with contemporary
politics. In fact, it appears from the scholarship examined here that to
understand this death fully requires no information from outside of
elite Buddhist doctrine whatsoever. In all four cases-much as in the
case of the comparative religion textbooks examined earlier-the
discourse on sui generis religion effectively operates to seclude
so-called religious events within a mythic, symbolic world all their
own, where their adequate interpretation needs "little contextual
information." For example, in all these studies, Quang Duc is never
identified as a citizen of South Vietnam but is understood only as a
Buddhist monk, a choice of designation that already suggests the
discursive conflict I have documented. In other words, from the outset,
the parameters of the interpretive frame of reference are narrowly
restricted. Quang Duc is hardly a man acting in a complex sociopolitical
world, in which intentions, implications, and interpretations often fly
past each other. Instead, he is exclusively conceptualized as a
transhistorical, purely religious agent, virtually homologous with his
specifically religious forebears and ancestors. It is almost as if Thich
Quang Duc--the historical agent who died on 11 June 1963, by setting
himself on fire at a busy downtown intersection in Saigon--has, through
the strategies deployed by scholars of sui generis religion, been
transformed into a hierophany that is of scholarly interest only
insomuch as his actions can be understood as historical instances of
timeless origin and meaning.
However, it is just as
conceivable that for other scholars, the death of Thich Quang Duc
constitutes not simply "spiritually inspired engagement" but a
graphic example of an overtly political act directed not simply
against politically dominant Roman Catholics in his country but also at
the American-sponsored government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh
Diem. This alternative framework, one that recognizes the power implicit
in efforts to represent human actions, is best captured by Catherine
Lutz and Jane Collins:
Coming
to political consciousness through the period of the Vietnam War, we
were acutely aware of the power of photographic images to evoke both
ethnocentric recoil and agonizing identification. Malcolm Browne's
famous photo of a Buddhist monk's self-immolation in Saigon was
profoundly disturbing to Western viewers, who could not fathom the
communicative intent of such an act. (1993: 4)
According to Paul
Siegel, this event constituted an act of protest against the Vietnamese
government "which was carrying on a war of which they [the
Buddhists] were profoundly weary" (1986: 162). The distance between
these two readings is great indeed. On the one hand, one finds
representations varying from the Diem government's own press release
that, according to the New York Times, maintained that the event
was an example of "extremist and truth-concealing propaganda that
sowed doubt about the goodwill of the Government" (12 June 1963),
to the Times' and Orzech's (1994: 154) portrayal of the protest
as being against the specifically religious persecution of the
Buddhists by the powerful Roman Catholics. On the other hand, however,
one can question the relations between the presence of Christianity in
South Vietnam and European political, cultural, military, and economic
imperialism in the first place as well as question the relations between
Diem's government and his U.S. economic and military backers. To
concentrate only on the specifically religious nature and origins of
this protest, then, serves either to ignore or, in the least, to
minimalize a number of material and social factors evident from other
points of view using other scales of analysis.
Concerning the links
between Christianity and European imperialism in Southeast Asia, it
should be clear that much is at stake depending on how one portrays the
associations among European cultures, politics, religion, and the ever
increasing search for new trading markets. For example, one can obscure
the issue by simply discussing an almost generic "encounter with
the West," where "the West" stands in place of
essentially religious systems, such as Judaism and Christianity (for an
example, see Eller 1992). Or one can place these belief and practice
systems within their historical, social, and political contexts-a move
that admittedly complicates but also improves one's analysis. For
instance, in practice, the presence of Christianity was often
indistinguishable from European culture and trade. This point is made by
Thich Nhat Hanh, in his attempt to communicate the significance of Quang
Duc's death for his American readers. Much of his small book, Vietnam:
Lotus in a Sea of Fire (1967), is concerned with contextualizing
this event by placing it not simply in a religious but also in
its wider historical, social, and political framework. Accordingly, of
great importance for him is not simply to identify elements of Buddhist
doctrine for his reader but to clarify early on that, since its first
appearance in Vietnam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Roman
Catholicism has always been "closely associated with white
explorers, with merchants, and ruling classes"-specifically with
the explorers, traders, and cultural and political elites of France
between the years 1860 and 1945 (1967: 15). Whether intentional or not,
the exportation of Christianity throughout the world brought with it new
people, new architecture, new languages, new legal and ethical systems,
new styles of dress, new economic arrangements, new trading goods, and
so on, all based on the standards of large, powerful, and distant
European countries. Because of these interrelated issues, it is
inaccurate and misleading to understand Christian missionaries
exclusively in terms of what may very well have been their good
intentions. Such missionaries were part of a complex and interrelated
system or bloc of power relations, all of which presupposed that the
other was in desperate need of European-style education, economies,
technologies, trade, wisdom, and, ultimately, salvation. To understand
missionaries as somehow removed from this system of power would be to
inscribe and protect them by means of the sui generis strategy. Without
the benefit of such a protective strategy, however, it is easily
understood how, at least in the case of Vietnam, the popular belief
arose that Christianity was the religion of the West and "was
introduced by them to facilitate their conquest of Vietnam." As
Thich Nhat goes on to conclude, this belief "is a political fact of
the greatest importance, even though [it] may be based on suspicion
alone" (20).
It is completely
understandable, therefore, that Thich Nhat takes issue with
circumscribing these provocative actions that took place in Vietnam in
the early 1960s as essentially sacrificial, suicidal, and religious. In
his words,
I
wouldn't want to describe these acts as suicide or even as sacrifice.
Maybe they [i.e., the actors themselves] didn't think of it as a
sacrifice. Maybe they did. They may have thought of their act as a very
natural thing to do, like breathing. The problem [however,] is to
understand the situation and the context in which they acted. (Berrigan
and Thich Nhat Hanh 1975: 61)
The context of which
Thich Nhat writes is not simply the context of mythic self-immolation
paradigms so important to other scholars but the context of Vietnamese
meeting Euro-American history over the past several centuries.
Emphasizing this context, Thich Nhat's remarks make it plain that
insomuch as sui generis religion plays a powerful role in
dehistoricizing and decontextualizing human events, the very label by
which we commonly distinguish just these deaths from countless others
that took place during the Vietnam War-for example, "religious
suicide"--is itself implicated in the aestheticization and
depoliticization of human actions. What is perhaps most astounding about
Thich Nhat's comments is that, despite the discourse on sui generis
religion's tendency to limit scholarship to the terms set by religious
insiders (recall Cantwell Smith's methodological rule), Thich Nhat-most
obviously himself an insider to Vietnamese Buddhism-is the only scholar
surveyed in this chapter whose remarks take into account the utter
complexity of human action as well as the many scales of analysis
on which participants and nonparticipants describe, interpret,
understand, and explain these actions.
That the death of Quang
Duc had a powerful influence on the events of 1963 in South Vietnam is
not in need of debate. It has been reported that Browne's photograph of
Quang Duc burning, which ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer on 12
June 1963, was on President Kennedy's desk the next morning (Moeller
1989: 355). And virtually all commentators acknowledge that the imminent
fall of the Diem government was in many ways linked to the Buddhist
protests and their popular support among the South Vietnamese. In the
least, most commentators would agree that the deaths had what they might
term unforeseen or indirect political implications. The question to be
asked, however, is just what is at stake for secluding politics to the
margins of these otherwise self-evidently religious events.
As should be evident,
depending on how one portrays this historical event, one thing that is
at stake is whether it could be construed as having possible causes or
direct implications for American political and military involvement in
the escalating war or whether, as many commentators seem to assume, it
was: (1) a localized Vietnamese issue, Of (2) an essentially religious
nature, which (3), due in large part to the Diem government's
mishandling of the protest and its unwillingness to reach a compromise
with the Buddhists, only eventually grew from a local religious incident
into an international political issue. The event is thereby domesticated
and managed. As the children's literary critic Herbert Kohl has
convincingly demonstrated, in the case of the surprisingly homogeneous
and depoliticized school textbook representations of the events
surrounding the 19551956 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, the story is
truncated, presented completely out of context, and portrayed
as
the single act of a person who was tired and angry. intelligent and
passionate opposition to racism is simply not part of the story. [In
fact, often] there is no mention of racism at all. Instead the problem
is unfairness, a more generic and softer form of abuse that avoids
dealing with the fact that the great majority of White people in
Montgomery were racist and capable of being violent and cruel to
maintain segregation. Thus [in the dominant textbook account of this
event] we have an adequate picture of neither the courage of Rosa Parks
nor the intelligence and resolve of the African American community in
the face of racism. (1995: 35)
The very act of
representation, in both the cases of the Buddhist death and the bus
boycott, acts to defuse what might otherwise be understood as the
tremendous sociopolitical power of the events and acts in question. In
the case of the self-immolations, the image of the monk burning has by
now become so decontextualized that it has been commodified; it is now a
consumer item in popular culture. For example, the photograph appears on
the cover of a compact disk for the alternative rock music group Rage
Against the Machine.
Although both the
example of the Montgomery bus boycott and the Vietnamese deaths arise
from dramatically different historical and social contexts, both actions
are clearly part of an oppositional discourse that is today communicated
to us through, and therefore managed by, the means of dominant
discourses school textbooks in one case, and as a mechanism for selling
both scholarly privilege and expertise as well as a Sony Music product
in another. Therefore, it should not be surprising that, in both cases,
we find strategies that effectively package these actions in a
decontextualized and delimited fashion. It is in this precise manner
that the strategies of representation that constitute the discourse on
sui generis religion are complicit with such larger issues of cultural,
economic, and political power and privilege. One way to support this
thesis further would be to examine carefully media, government, and
scholarly interpretations of other specific historical episodes and
demonstrate the ways in which it may have been economically, socially,
or politically beneficial for a specifiable group to portray events as
essentially and exclusively religious rather than, say, political or
military. The example of what was widely termed the self-immolation-a
term that from the outset does much to isolate the event as being
exclusively concerned with issues of religious sacrifice--of Vietnamese
Buddhists is a particularly useful example, because it seems that there
was, and may yet be, a great deal at stake, economically, politically,
and militarily, in the interpretation and representation of these
events.
Another example well
worth study would be the interpretations given to the practice of suttee
or, the practice of a woman following her deceased husband to his
funeral pyre, for only within an interpretive system founded on sui
generis religion and which privileges the insider's account could such a
practice evade contemporary feminist analysis. As van den Bosch has
recently argued, the "question whether the custom [of suttee]
should be regarded as religious depends upon the definition of religion
within this context" (1990: 193 n. 76). In other words, one of the
primary differences between the frameworks that represent this practice
as, on the one hand, an example of pious female religious duty that
embodies lofty motives (as suggested by Tikku 1967: 108) and, on the
other, an instance of institutionalized misogyny is primarily the
assumption of the autonomy of religious life from social and, in this
case, specifically gendered ideology (van den Bosch 1990: 185). As
already suggested, the deaths of the Buddhists could be seen as a
statement either against American-backed imperialism and war or simply
against the localized persecution of one religious group by another, all
depending on the scale of the analysis. If the former, then the
repercussions of the event strike deeply not only in Vietnam but in the
United States as well. If only the latter, then the problem is isolated,
it remains in Saigon, and it is up to the decision makers in Washington
simply to distance themselves from Diem's mishandling of the episode.
Washington's decisions are then based on reasons varying from declining
public opinion in the United States, once the images reach the popular
media, to the realization that in fact Diem did not represent the
majority of South Vietnamese and therefore was the wrong leader to back
in the war against the North (this is the dominant theme of the Times
editorial on 17 June 1963). Clearly, there are practical and political
advantages and disadvantages depending on which of the two above
intellectual interpretations is favored. Furthermore, it is intriguing
that there exists a general correspondence between the interpretations
offered in the New York Times and those offered by scholars of
religion. Although differing in many ways, it appears that both are part
of a complex system of power and control, specializing in the deployment
of interpretive strategies-the politics of representation.
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