Thich quang duc biography of rory

In the air was the smell of burning human 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.

The spectators were mostly stunned into silence, but some wailed and several began praying. Many of the monks and nuns, as well as some shocked passersby, prostrated themselves before the burning monk. Even some of the policemenwho had orders to control the gathered crowd, prostrated before him. In English and Vietnamesea monk repeated into a microphone: "A Buddhist priest burns himself to death.

A Buddhist priest becomes a martyr. Outside the pagoda, students unfurled bilingual banners that read: "A Buddhist priest burns himself for our five requests. By p. The meeting soon ended and all but monks slowly left the compound. Nearly 1, monks, accompanied by laypeoplereturned to the cremation site.

Thich quang duc biography of rory

The police lingered nearby. At around p. The police encircled the pagoda, blocking public passage and giving observers the impression that an armed siege was imminent by donning riot gear. United States Secretary of State Dean Rusk warned the Saigon embassy that the White House would publicly announce that it would no longer "associate itself" with the regime if this did not occur.

The location chosen for the self-immolation, in front of the Cambodian embassy, raised questions as to whether it was coincidence or a symbolic choice. Trueheart and embassy official Charles Flowerree felt that the location was selected to show solidarity with the Cambodian government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. He appealed for "serenity and patriotism", and announced that stalled negotiations would resume with the Buddhists.

He claimed that negotiations had been progressing well and in a time of religious tension emphasized the role of the Roman Catholic philosophy of personalism in his rule. He alleged that extremists had twisted the facts and he asserted that the Buddhists can "count on the Constitution, in other words, me". Photographs taken by Malcolm Browne of the self-immolation quickly spread across the wire services and were featured on the front pages of newspapers worldwide.

I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think 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 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 rightsleader Medgar Eversas 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 Juneaccompanied by the following headline: "U.

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. 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 Religionswhere it is interpreted as an "ethical" act [ or on Buddhism in Southeast Asia, only one detailed article was published at that time, in History of Religionswritten by Jan Yiin-Hua 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 Mayin 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?

The reader is told that the monks' thich quang duc biographies of rory 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" Given that the event is self-evidently religious an interpretation that is based on an assumption that is undefendedthe 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" 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.

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" Accordingly, these actions largely result from the desire of elite devotees, inspired by scripturesto 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" 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. 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 thich quang duc biographies of rory, 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. That the changing geopolitical landscape of South Asia in the early s 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 vol. She writes that although religiously motivated suicide an ill-defined category that prejudges the act "may be appropriate for the person who is an arhatone who has attained enlightenment, it is still very much the exception to the rule" And Carl-Martin Edsman, writing the article on fire Eliade vol.

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 s were enacted against a similar background; for this reason-unlike the suicides of their Western imitators-they do not constitute purely political protest actions" 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. 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 article, "Provoked Suicide," to find this discourse in its contemporary forma form virtually unchanged since jan's article was published some thirty years ago. 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" 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 [].

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 usit is clear that in each case the sacrifice is performed as a remedy for an intolerable situation"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" 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 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" ; "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" Simply put, Quang Duc's death is an issue of soteriology.

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How did they raise such a talented and kind-hearted individual. Persecution of Buddhists drew some attention from representatives of other countries, although not very actively. The real uproar in the world press began after the events of June 11, The day before, a number of American journalists received a warning that something important would happen at a certain Saigon intersection the next morning.

Many journalists ignored this message, thinking that the persecution of Buddhists was temporary and not serious. However, some journalists arrived at the designated location. Shortly after, a procession of monks from a nearby pagoda reached the intersection. They officially declared their opposition to the government and Diem's policies, and demonstrated this opposition in a rather unusual way.

It is known that one of the monks tried to volunteer, but Thich Quang Duc, being older and more experienced, had the advantage. Thich Quang Duc took a lotus position on a special cushion at the intersection, and one of the monks doused him with gasoline. After making a final prayer to Buddha, Thich Quang Duc lit a match and instantly caught fire.