No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
They Who Burned Themselves for Peace: Quaker and Buddhist Self-Immolators during the Vietnam War
Abstract
Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 127-150
Nhat Chi Mai was a lay disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh and member of the Order of Interbeing, an Engaged Buddhist order founded by Nhat Hanh. On May 16, 1967, Vesak, the celebration of the birth of the Buddha, she burned herself to death outside the Tu Nghiem Temple, a nunnery. An idealistic young student with much to live for, she sacrificed herself in an effort to bring the war to an end. In a letter to the U.S. government she wrote,
In her farewell letter to Thich Nhat Hanh she wrote, "Thay, don't worry too much. We will have peace soon."
On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a devout Quaker and ardent pacifist, drove from Baltimore to Washington and burned himself to death at the Pentagon, at a spot estimated to be 40 to 100 feet from the window of Robert S. McNamara, then Secretary of Defense and one of the chief American prosecutors of the war. Shortly before his death, he wrote to his wife, "For weeks even months I have been praying only that I be shown what I must do. This morning with no warning I was shown. . . . Know that I love thee but must act. . . ." Morrison took his baby daughter, Emily, along with him and held her in his arms as he prepared for his act. Somehow -- accounts differ as to how it happened -- she was separated from her father before the flames engulfed him and she emerged entirely unharmed, though her clothing smelled strongly of the kerosene with which Morrison had soaked himself.
There were others who burned themselves to death during the war in Vietnam. The venerable Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc was the first. On June 11, 1963, at a downtown crossroads in Saigon, he sat in the lotus posture and, in a state of meditative control, burned himself to death in protest of the Diem regime's repression of the Buddhist religion. Many Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns followed his example; I do not know all their names, or exactly how many they were.
In America, to my knowledge, eight people burned themselves to death during the war. Two were Quakers: Norman Morrison and Alice Herz. Roger LaPorte, a former Trappist seminarian who had become a Catholic worker, burned himself to death one week after Norman Morrison. The others were: Hiroko Hayasaki, a Japanese-American Buddhist; Erik Thoen, a student of Zen Buddhism; another university student, George Winne; a high school student, Ronald Brazee; and Florence Beaumont, described as a "housewife." A number of others attempted self-immolation but survived.
In this paper I will focus upon the self-immolations of Norman Morrison and Nhat Chi Mai. I will also have a few comments on Thich Quang Duc. My remarks are intended, however, to have relevance to all the Buddhist and Quaker self-immolators.
Let us now consider in more detail some of the features of the self-immolations of Norman Morrison and Nhat Chi Mai, and some of the issues they pose to the Quaker and Buddhist communities, respectively.
While neither act was the result of a moment's impulse, we still would do well to ask what events most proximately precipitated the two self-immolations. In Norman Morrison's case, the precipitating events were two. The morning of the day he immolated himself he read a report of the American bombing of a village in Vietnam. Paris Match had published an interview with a French priest, recuperating in a Saigon clinic, who had witnessed and survived the bombing raid. The priest said, "I have seen my faithful burned up in napalm. . . . I have seen the bodies of women and children blown to bits. I have seen all my villages razed. By God, it's not possible!" Morrison was particularly upset by the account of the children who were killed. In the letter to his wife he wrote, "Know that I love thee but must act for the children of the...
... As has been widely acknowledged, not all conflict tactics resonate in every setting (Gould & Moe, 2012), and 'tastes in tactics' vary (Jasper, 1997). Rather than tracing self-violent resistance to essentialized understandings of religion or culture (Gouin, 2014;King, 2000), the next section presents illustrations from across India in how self-violent resistance was constituted and contested through embodiment, materiality, and speech acts. ...
Dramatic self-violent acts, such as self-immolations and hunger strikes, often draw attention, but do not interpret or constitute themselves. In this article, theories of embodiment, materiality, and speech acts clarify the constitution of self-violent resistance as a concept for academics and activists. A novel typology is introduced to situate self-imposed suffering among other forms of resistance, such as armed conflict, nonviolent action, and suicide attacks. An original discourse analysis of self-violence across India from 2011-2016 provides empirical examples of the power dynamics involved in constituting self-violent resistance. The analysis reveals how government officials may successfully frame self-violent resistance as personal desperation driven by mental disturbance, and how social movements use the bodies, objects, and physical spaces involved to declare a seemingly personal act as public resistance. This article contributes to the field of resistance studies by moving beyond generalized references to cultural frames in explaining self-violent resistance, clarifying the contested status of self-violence in relation to the usual violence/nonviolence dichotomy, and demonstrating how theories of embodiment and materiality reveal the differing logics behind self-violent, violent, and nonviolent tactics. Exploring what gets counted as self-violent resistance and who becomes authorized to conduct self-violent resistance is important not only as an exercise in concept formation but also for understanding how individual embodied practices become sites of wider struggle.
... The hunger striker has chosen food to make apoint, but it could have been something else. Forexample, in Buddhism we have seen selfimmolation used to bring the world'sa ttention to the plight of otherwise forgotten people (King 2000;Yang 2011). 2. Which kind of craving is active within the person?I nt he Buddhist analysis, there will always be craving,u nless the person is fullye nlightened, in which case he or she would be counsellingus! ...
... Jan Palach himself was inclined to think of his reaction to the social consequences of the Soviet occupation in a religious context. The newspaper clippings discovered in Jan Palach's estate witness his interest in the Buddhist monks' self-immolations in protest of the religious persecution and warfare in South Vietnam (Blažek 2009, p. 55;King 2000;Jan 1965). Known also are his admiring comments on Jan Hus (Blažek 2009, pp. ...
In recent years, new exciting, publicly debated, and further thought-provoking events have appeared in the Czech Republic including, the restoration and benediction of the Marian Column on the Old Town Square in Prague, Darina Alster’s art performance, the Non-binary Madonna, the opening of the new Jan Palach Memorial in Všetaty and the temporary memorial to the victims of COVID-19. All these events, taking place in public, manifested qualities associated with religious practices and the concept of the sacred. Pointing selectively to trends in religious geography (Kong) and utilising the concepts of liquid religion (de Groot) and iconic religion (Tweed, Knott), this case study describes and analyses those events and shortly discusses their public reconciliatory character. It claims that the religious or sacral character of public objects or acts in a secular setting is permanently subject to questioning, contesting and opposition. Ritually enacted boundaries between non-negotiable values (the sacred) and values permanently negotiated (the profane) are always temporary and elusive in the public domain, as so it is with public acts of reconciliation.
... This clearly shows that the protests expressed most visibly through self-immolations are cultural in nature rather than a political act of freeing Tibet from Chinese rule. As Barnett (2012, p. 54) writes, the self-immolations 'focus on broad, long-term concerns about the erosion of Tibetan culture, religion and education in general and the suffering of living under Chinese rule.' Barnett (2012, p. 55; see also King, 2000) further writes, 'Although all statements refer to Tibetans as having been occupied or invaded by China, most do not specify whether they seek independence or only what the Dalai Lama has called, meaning autonomy.' It is important to note that the Dalai Lama remains neutral on issues relating to self-immolations and their presumed call for independence from China (Branigan, 2012;Ong, 2013). ...
As of February 2019, there have been a total of 155 reported self-immolations in Tibet since February 2009, of which 129 are men and 26 women. Given the poor human rights situation and deplorable political condition in Tibet, these heroic acts of self-immolations may be viewed as a protest to free Tibet from China. In fact, the issue of independence from China has been the dominant theme in the international media coverage of Tibet. In relative parlance, scholars who are familiar with Buddhism assumed that because Tibet is a Buddhist nation, the instances of self-immolations were directly influenced by the Lotus Sutra, particularly its 23 rd chapter which venerates self-immolation and viewed it as the highest form of devotion to the Buddha. However, following Robert Barnett, this paper argues that these self-immolations are neither a form of protest to free Tibet from China nor are they directly influenced by the Lotus Sutra. This paper then looks at the relation between the concept of 'self-immolation' in the Lotus Sutra and Tibetan struggle for independence from China. It takes the position that, on the one hand, the protests in Tibet expressed most visibly through self-immolation were intended primarily to preserve Tibetan religion, culture, and language; and, on the other hand, they were shaped by the country's long history of colonial domination. Thus, as will be shown later, the Lotus Sutra has nothing to do with the instances of self-immolations in Tibet and that any attempt to read it as the principle of self-immolation is to utterly misinterpret its powerful teachings on truth and life from the perspective of the Buddha.
... In several contemporary studies on public self-harm, such as the cases of self-immolation among Buddhist monks in Tibet (Terrone 2017) and Vietnam (King 2000), it is described too how these acts are connected to the creation of legitimacy. They attest to the sincerity of belief in the cause and how this belief legitimizes such sweeping measures. ...
The asura’s demise at the hands of the goddess is a theme frequently revisited in Hindu myth. It is the chronicle of a death foretold. So too is the Bhadrakāḷīmāhātmya, a sixteenth century regional purāṇa from Kerala, that narrates the tale of fierce goddess Bhadrakāḷī and her predestined triumph over asura king Dārika. Violence is ubiquitous in this narrative, which was designed with one goal in mind: glorifying the ultimate act of defeating the asura enemy. In its course the story exhibits many kinds of violence: self-harm, cosmic warfare, murder, etc. This paper argues that (1) violence comes to serve as a structural aspect in the text. Reappearing consistently at key moments in the narrative, violence both frames and structures the goddess’s tale. Yet, it is not only the violent act that dominates, it is its accompaniment by equal acts of regeneration that dictates the flow of the narrative, creating a pulsating course of endings and beginnings; (2) these cycles, that strategically occur throughout the narrative, come to serve as a Leitmotif referring to the cyclic tandem of destruction and regeneration that has dominated post-Vedic Hindu myth in many forms. The pulsating dynamic of death and revival thus becomes a specific narrative design that aims to embed the regional goddess within a grander framework of Time.
... As an American Buddhist, she felt she lacked "the deep cultural familiarity" that "even many nonreligious Asian people possess." 13 Although sociologist Michael Biggs argues that acts of self-immolation are "exceptionally newsworthy," the absence of a "cultural framework" with which to comprehend self-immolation caused the US public to give passive responses to these "curious" events. 14 Most instances of selfimmolation by Americans passed with little media coverage and lack of contemporary recognition prevented an accurate history from developing. ...
In March 1965, 82-year-old peace activist Alice Herz immolated herself in opposition to US military action in Vietnam. Her protest followed similar public displays by Vietnamese Buddhists, but was an unprecedented form of protest in the United States. However, while it provoked sympathy from international observers, the US public reacted with ambivalence. Herz's legacy subsequently became overshadowed after Norman Morrison's identical protest in November that year. This article accounts for the multiple reactions to Alice Herz's forgotten self-immolation. It examines both the international and domestic context to highlight the cultural norms, political context, gender dynamics, and performative factors that influenced responses to the act. Using Morrison's example to show how responses were formed, this article reveals that because Herz did not receive contemporary interest she has been overlooked historically.
... Historical examples of violent sacrifice, such as the attacks carried out by the Assassins (1090-1275), and the Fenians in the nineteenth century (Burleigh 2009) provide precedents for this type of violence. Other examples of suicide in the furtherance of political objectives can be found in the activities of the Hunger strikers in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s and Buddist (King 2000) and Tibetan self-immolation during the Vietnam war and in recent years. However, there is a subtle difference between a mission that would result in the death of the assailant (a risk common to any non-suicide mission), suicide for political motives/concession and the modern suicide attack where the assailant becomes an integral part of the weapon. ...
This study examines the use of the term ‘new terrorism’ in a sample of the literature on terrorism, to identify whether the term represents a stable concept within the field, is of analytic value to terrorism research or is a phrase that merely identifies an unquantified concept. A content analysis of articles published in the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism from 1992 to 2011 was used as a literature sample to identify the most frequently cited features of new terrorism. The results of the analysis demonstrate that there was little consistent use of the phrase ‘new terrorism’ and the most common feature linked to it was only present in 25% of the articles. Three of the prominent features discovered in the content analysis are examined in greater detail: increased deadliness, new organisational structures (in particular, the leaderless phenomenon) and suicide terrorism. A common claim in the literature – of a decrease in the frequency of the attacks but an increase in the lethality per attack – seems to have been a short-term trend between 1992 and 2005. Since this time, the trend has reversed. Historical analysis was used to assess the notion of change in the organisational structure. This analysis allowed the authors to identify precursors of the ‘new’ organisational structures. Early groups such as the Anarchists were found to use a similar concept of decentralised command with varying degrees of success. Similarly, historical precursors of suicide terrorism were found, even though the recent exponential growth in the use of suicide terrorism by modern terrorist organisations could be considered as quantitatively ‘new’. This study concludes that the new terrorism represents a loose association of tactics, provides limited value to terrorist research, and represents not a category identifiable by novel features, but rather a loose referral to the perceived importance and threat of terrorism.
p align="center"> Resumen
La autoinmolación, como acto simbólico de sacrificio en la protesta política, rompe el proceso intrínseco del ser humano de la auto conservación, el escape al dolor y a la muerte trágica. En este punto, la utilización del cuerpo como medio de lucha reconfigura el concepto de soberanía que anteriormente Schmitt desarrollaría como forma última de justificar los procesos de expansión y preservación de la vida, todo esto en base a las ideas de dominio y propiedad territorial. Bajo este punto de vista, pensar en una “soberanía corporal” podría resultar clave a la hora de re significar una autoinmolación como mecanismo de protesta política, donde la pugna es resultado de la diada: individuo/poder totalizante; individuo/status quo y en última instancia, del Individuo/ Estado; además de entender la vida y la muerte como espacios claves de la pugna dóxica entre éstas. Este artículo aborda el acto de la autoinmolación, en su relación con el dominio corporal, el aspecto simbólico que ahí acontece y la resignificación de la muerte como forma de protesta política. Al final del escrito se defiende la tesis de que el acto de la auto inmolación en sí mismo, se configura como una herramienta de propaganda política y acto comunicacional que puede generar un impacto en la sociedad, cuando se es ejercida con un fin colectivo y concéntrico.
Palabras Clave : autoinmolación, protesta política, soberanía, politización de la muerte, altruismo.
Abstract.
The auto-immolation, like symbolic act of sacrifice in the political protest breaks the intrinsic process of the human being of auto-conservation, the escape to the pain and death. In this point, the use of the body like means of fight reconfigures the concept of sovereignty that previously Schmitt would develop like last form to justify the processes of expansion and preservation of life, all of this on the basis of the ideas of dominion and territorial property. Under this point, thinking in a corporal sovereignty would be able to result key to the hour to remaining an auto-immolation like mechanism of political protest, where the struggle is resulted of the dyad: Individual / Totalizing power; Individual / status quo and in last instance, of the Individual / state, in addition to understanding life and the death like ambits keys of the doxic struggle between them. This article talks about the act of the auto-immolation in his relation, to the corporal command, the symbolic aspect than there it happens and the re significance of the death like form of political protest. At the end of the article is defend the thesis of that the act of auto-immolation as such, it is configured like a tool of political advertising and act communicational that can generate an impact in the society, when this is exercised with a collective and concenctric.
Keywords : self-immolation, political protest, sovereignty, politicization of death, altruism.</p
Throughout the twentieth century, Americans interested in nonviolence and pacifism have experimented with innovative forms of protest, linking their ideas about a just and peaceful world to contemporary concerns such as military budgets, poverty and homelessness, environmental devastation, nuclear power, and, of course, nuclear weapons. In doing so, they expanded upon the scope of nonviolence and its application within broader social movements. In the 1980s, campaigns of nonviolent protest forged a polite, morally persuasive image, devised to attract public support. Mindful of the potentially divisive impact of acts of civil disobedience, some pacifists attempted to locate their actions firmly within the model of “polite protest” that characterized much of the peace movement. In the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, certain pacifist campaigns sought to blend traditional ideas about nonviolent protest with modern publicity strategies, intending to mobilize public opinion and provoke a favorable response from elites. Doing so updated the operation of pacifism in American social movements and incorporated contemporary trends of mainstream social movement organizing. In the process, some pacifists attempted to unite the tactics of nonviolent protest with modern public relations strategies. Such campaigns also sought to combine nonviolence with ideals of liberal reformism that characterized the nuclear freeze movement, an approach that was out of step with traditional pacifism and radical nonviolence.1
The day before he killed himself to protest the Vietnam War, Norman Morrison, a thirty-two-year-old pacifist and the executive secretary of a Baltimore-area Quaker meetinghouse, learned the sad news about forty-eight civilians in South Vietnam who had died after U.S. planes mistakenly bombed them. The next day, Monday, November 2, 1964, Morrison took his year-old daughter and drove to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and sat on the lawn under the office of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. After placing his daughter safely away from the spot where he would die, Morrison doused his body with kerosene, struck a match, and set himself on fire.
The world religions in general promote peace and happiness. They strongly discourage all sorts of violence in society including suicide. Religious commitments toward life-saving value are known to prevent suicide attempts since all world religions promote unity, reducing interpersonal hostilities. Therefore, understanding the basics on what religious scriptures narrate on life and death including suicide is essential. This paper highlights the seldom discussed topic on the concept and consequences of suicide portrayed in the ancient Hindu religious scriptures.
This article theorizes the self-immolation of alleged Falun Gong practitioners in Tiananmen Square in 2001 in relation to literature on martyrdom, self-immolation, and political protest. It explores the cultural context in relation to Buddhist traditions of self-immolation, Chinese political protest, and other uses of self-immolation as political protest. It will seek to expand the analysis of why these self-immolations may be said to have “failed” as a form of protest, and present a set of four key factors. Issues of legitimation and authority in the events and their representation will be raised, especially the contested nature of whether the self-immolations were “religious,” looking at the different meanings of this term in Chinese and Western contexts. It is argued that both secular and religious self-immolation can be seen as legitimate in the public sphere.
Accounts of Buddhist monks and laymen who made offerings of their bodies by fire or other means often hint at larger themes of resistance to state authority and millenarian or Utopian hopes on the part of religious communities. I will put some of these sources, drawn from hagiographical collections and commemorative inscriptions, into dialogue with each other and with other historical materials in order to reveal some of the larger forces at work behind (apparently) individual acts of self-immolation.
This article examines the political practice of protest by self-burning. Focussing on Mohammed Bouazizi's self-burning in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid in 2010, I explore the intellectual background for, and implications of, conceptualising such acts as ‘self-sacrifices’ or ‘self-immolations’. I argue that the use of the concept of sacrifice to define the politics of the act, given the difficulties in determining intentionality, is to focus only on its retrospective interpretation or semiotic capture. The result is that the self-annihilating subject is bypassed altogether, and his or her distinctively suicidal politicality is ignored. I argue that these subjects do not occupy political space due to a myth-making appeal to transcendence, heroic urge to sovereignty or assumed desire for community. Rather, drawing on Walter Benjamin, I argue that in such acts we bear witness to the shattering of sovereign order by a reminder to a politically constitutive excess.
Can one make a martyr of oneself? The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘martyr’ as ‘a person who is killed because of their religious or other beliefs’: can this definition be stretched to include those who kill themselves in what they appear to perceive as defence of their beliefs? Can a line be drawn to distinguish (self-inflicted) martyrdom from suicide? The question has relevance in light of the ongoing series of self-immolations in Tibet which started in 2011. Are these self-made victims ‘martyrs’?
Kathy Change was a performance artist whose outrageous public performances and leftist politics were largely ignored by the University of Pennsylvania students she performed for, until she set herself on fire. Her 1996 self-immolation prompts an inquiry into the effectiveness of public suicide as a mode of political performance.
Examining Malcolm Browne's photograph of the burning monk as well as appropriations of it by the Ministers' Vietnam Committee, I argue that self-immolation is a powerful rhetorical act that utilizes self-inflicted violence as a means of performing a visual embodiment of violence done by an “other.” I assert that the power and resonance of Browne's photograph stem from its freezing in time of what Barbie Zelizer terms “the about to die moment.” Additionally, this study expands Zelizer's concept by examining how appropriations of the burning monk image demonstrate the resonance of images of the dead and their potential to promote agency and civic engagement.
This article explores common political and social-psychological factors involved in acts of self-immolation that took place in Vietnam and South Korea in the later part of the 20th century. Drawing upon the pioneering work of Emile Durkheim, the author identifies some key analytical distinctions between altruistic suicide and cases of self-immolation. On the basis of suicide notes, diaries, and letters left behind by 22 self-immolators, the author sheds light on the intentions and beliefs of those actors and social significance of their acts. In addition to the unique geo-political circumstances of the Cold War era, under which massive numbers of dramatic public acts of self-immolation took place, the symbolic message imbedded in the acts of self-immolators is explored.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.