Most Venerable (Hòa thượng) Thích Quảng Đức (1897 – June 11, 1963) was a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at a busy Saigon intersection, Phan Đình Phùng (now Nguyễn Đình Chiểu) Street and Lê Văn Duyệt (now Cách Mạng Tháng Tám) Street, on June 11, 1963. Thích Quảng Đức was protesting against the persecution of Buddhists by Ngô Đình Diệm administration in South Vietnam. Photos of his self-immolation were circulated widely across the world and brought attention to the policies of the Diệm regime. Malcolm Browne won a Pulitzer Prize for his iconic photo of the monk's death, as did David Halberstam for his written account. After his death, his body was re-cremated, but his heart remained intact. This was interpreted as a symbol of compassion and led Buddhists to revere him as a bodhisattva, heightening the impact of his death on the public psyche.
Thích Quảng Đức's act increased international pressure on Diệm and led him to announce reforms with the intention of mollifying the Buddhists. However, the promised reforms were implemented either slowly or not at all, leading to a deterioration in the dispute. With protests continuing, the Special Forces loyal to Diệm's brother, Ngô Đình Nhu, launched nationwide raids on Buddhist pagodas, seizing the holy heart and causing deaths and widespread damage. Several Buddhist monks followed Thích Quảng Đức's example and burned themselves to death. Eventually, an Army coup toppled and killed Diệm in November, 1963. The self-immolation is widely seen as the turning point of the Vietnamese Buddhist crisis which led to the change in regime.
Bodhisattva Thich Quang Duc was born Lâm Văn Tức in 1897 at Hoi Khanh Village, Van Ninh District, Khanh Hoa Province, Central Vietnam. He was one of the seven children born to Lâm Hữu Ứng and his wife, Nguyễn Thị Nương. At the age of seven, he left worldly life to study Buddhism under Most Venerable (Hòa thượng) Thích Hoằng Thâm, who was his maternal uncle and spiritual master. Most Venerable Thích Hoằng Thâm raised him as a son, and changed his name to Nguyễn Văn Khiết. At the age of 15, he took the samanera (novice) vows, and was ordained as a monk at the age of 20 under the dharma name Thích Quảng Đức. After ordination, he traveled to a mountain near Ninh Hòa, vowing to live the life of a solitary Buddhism-practicing hermit for three years. He returned in later life to open the Thien Loc Pagoda at the site of his mountain retreat.
After his self-imposed recluse period ended, he began to travel around central Vietnam expounding the dharma. After two years, he went into retreat at the Sac Tu Thien An Pagoda near the south central coastal city of Nha Trang. In 1932, he was appointed an inspector for the Buddhist Association in Ninh Hòa before becoming the inspector of monks in his home province of Khánh Hòa. During this period in central Vietnam, he was responsible for the building of 14 temples. In 1934, he moved to southern Vietnam and traveled throughout the provinces spreading Buddhist teachings. During his time in southern Vietnam, he also spent two years in Cambodia studying the Buddhist texts of the Theravada tradition. After his return from Cambodia, he oversaw the construction of a further 17 new temples during his time in the south. The last of the 31 new temples that he was responsible for constructing was the Quán Thế Âm (Avalokiteshvara) Pagoda in Phú Nhuận district of Gia Dinh province, on the outskirts of Saigon. The street on which the temple stands is now named in his honor. After the temple-building phase, Thích Quảng Đức was appointed to serve as the Chairman of the Panel on Ceremonial Rites of the Congregation of Vietnamese Monks, and as abbot of the Phuoc Hoa Pagoda, which was the initial location of the Association for Buddhist Studies of Vietnam (ABSV). When the office of the ABSV was relocated to the Xá Lợi Pagoda, the main pagoda in Saigon, Thích Quảng Đức resigned in order to concentrate on his personal Buddhist practice.
In a country where surveys of the religious composition at the time estimated the Buddhist majority to be between 70 and 90 percent,President Ngô Đình Diệm was a member of the Catholic Vietnamese minority, and pursued policies widely regarded by historians as biased. Buddhist discontent erupted following a ban in early May on flying the Buddhist flag on Vesak, the birthday of Gautama Buddha. Just days before, Roman Catholics had been allowed to fly the Vatican flag at a celebration for Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc of Hue, Diệm's brother. A large crowd of Buddhists protested against the ban, defying the government by flying Buddhist flags on Vesak and marching on the government broadcasting station. Government forces fired into the crowd of protesters, killing nine people. Diem's refusal to take responsibility—he blamed the Vietcong for the deaths—led to further Buddhist protests and calls for religious equality. As Diệm remained unwilling to comply with Buddhist demands, the frequency and size of the protests increased.
On 10 June 1963, a spokesperson for the Buddhists privately informed the U.S. correspondents that "something important" would happen the following morning on the road outside the Cambodian embassy in Saigon. Most of the reporters disregarded the message, since the Buddhist crisis had at that point been going on for over a month, and the next day only a few journalists turned up, including David Halberstam of The New York Times and Malcolm Browne, who was the Saigon bureau chief for the Associated Press.
Thích Quảng Đức arrived as part of a procession that had begun at a nearby pagoda. Around 350 monks and nuns marched in two phalanxes, preceded by an Austin Westminster sedan, carrying banners printed in both English and Vietnamese. They denounced the Diệm government and its policy towards Buddhists, demanding that it fulfill its promises of religious equality. Another monk offered to burn himself, but Thích Quảng Đức's seniority prevailed.
Today, the car in which Thích Quảng Đức traveled to his self-immolation is parked at Huế's Thien Mu Pagoda.
The act itself occurred at the intersection of Phan Dinh Phung Street and Le Van Duyet Street. Thích Quảng Đức emerged from the car along with two other monks. One placed a cushion on the road while the second opened the trunk and took out a five-gallon gasoline can. As the marchers formed a circle around him, Thích Quảng Đức calmly seated himself in the traditional Buddhist meditative lotus position on the cushion. His colleague emptied the contents of the gasoline container over Thích Quảng Đức's head. Thích Quảng Đức rotated a string of wooden prayer beads and recited the words Nam Mô A Di Đà Phật ("homage to Amitabha Buddha") before striking a match and dropping it on himself. Flames consumed his robes and flesh, and black oily smoke emanated from his burning body.
The last words of Thích Quảng Đức before his self-immolation were documented in a letter he had left:
Before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha, I respectfully plead to President Ngo Dinh Diem to take a mind of compassion towards the people of the nation and implement religious equality to maintain the strength of the homeland eternally. I call the venerables, reverends, members of the sangha and the lay Buddhists to organise in solidarity to make sacrifices to protect Buddhism.
David Halberstam wrote:
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 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.
Police who tried to reach him could not break through the circle of Buddhist clergy. One of the policemen threw himself to the ground and prostrated himself in front of Thích Quảng Đức in reverence. 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. In English and Vietnamese, a monk repeatedly declared into a microphone, "A Buddhist priest burns himself to death. A Buddhist priest becomes a martyr."
After approximately ten minutes, Thích Quảng Đức's body was fully immolated, and it toppled forward onto the street and the fire subsided. A group of monks covered the smoking corpse with yellow robes, picked it up and tried to fit it into a coffin, but the limbs could not be bent and one of the arms protruded from the wooden box as he was carried to the nearby Xa Loi Pagoda in central Saigon. Outside the pagoda, students unfurled bilingual banners which read: "A Buddhist priest burns himself for our five requests." By 13:30, around one thousand monks had congregated inside Xa Loi to hold a meeting while outside a large crowd of pro-Buddhist students had formed a human barrier around it. The meeting soon ended and all but a hundred monks slowly left the compound. Nearly one thousand monks accompanied by laypeople returned to the cremation site. The police lingered nearby. At around 18:00, 30 nuns and six monks were arrested for holding a prayer meeting on the street outside Xa Loi Pagoda. The police then encircled the pagoda, blocking public passage and giving observers the impression that an armed siege was imminent by donning riot gear. That evening, thousands of Saigonese claimed to have seen a vision of the Buddha's face in the sky as the sun had set. They claimed that in the vision the Buddha was weeping.
After the self-immolation, the U.S. put more pressure on Diệm to re-open negotiations on the faltering agreement. Diệm had scheduled an emergency cabinet meeting at 11:30 on 11 June to discuss the Buddhist crisis which he believed to be winding down. Following Thích Quảng Đức's death, Diệm cancelled the meeting and met individually with his ministers. Acting U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam William Trueheart warned Nguyen Dinh Thuan, Diệm's Secretary of State, of the desperate need for an agreement, saying that the situation was "dangerously near breaking point" and expected that Diệm would meet the Buddhists' five-point manifesto. 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 Joint Communique and concessions to the Buddhists were signed on 16 June.
15 June was set as the date for the funeral of Thích Quảng Đức, and on that day 4,000 people gathered outside Xa Loi Pagoda, only for the ceremony to be postponed. On 19 June, his remains were carried out of Xa Loi to a cemetery 16 kilometers (10 miles) south of the city for a re-cremation and funeral ceremony. Following the signing of the Joint Communique, attendance was limited by agreement between Buddhist leaders and police to approximately 400 monks.
The body was re-cremated during the funeral, but the heart of Thích Quảng Đức remained intact and did not burn. It was considered to be holy and placed in a glass chalice at Xa Loi Pagoda. The intact heart relic is regarded as a symbol of compassion and Thích Quảng Đức has subsequently been revered by Vietnamese Buddhists as a bodhisattva (Bồ Tát) and accordingly is often referred to in Vietnamese as Bồ Tát Thích Quảng Đức.
The funeral was not to be the final act involving Thích Quảng Đức's remains. On 21 August, the ARVN Special Forces of Nhu attacked Xa Loi and other Buddhist pagodas across Vietnam. The secret police had intended to confiscate Thích Quảng Đức's ashes, but two monks had escaped with the urn, jumping over the back fence and finding safety at the U.S. Operations Mission next door. Nhu's men did manage to confiscate the charred heart of Thích Quảng Đức.
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. South Vietnam and Cambodia had strained relations: in a speech on 22 May, Sihanouk had accused Diệm of mistreating Vietnamese and ethnic minority Khmer Buddhists. The Times of Vietnam had published an article on 9 June which claimed that Cambodian monks had been encouraging the Buddhist crisis. The Times asserted that it was part of a Cambodian plot to extend its neutralist foreign policy into South Vietnam. Flowerree noted that Diệm was "ready and eager to see a fine Cambodian hand in all the organized Buddhist actions."
Diệm made a radio address at 19:00 on the day of Thích Quảng Đức's death, asserting that he was profoundly troubled by the event. 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 asserted that the Buddhists can "count on the Constitution, in other words, me."
The Army of the Republic of Vietnam responded to the appeal, putting on a show of solidarity behind Diệm to isolate dissident officers. Thirty high-ranking officers headed by General Le Van Ty declared their resolve to carry out all missions entrusted to the army for the defense of the constitution and the Republic. The declaration was a veneer which masked a developing plot to oust Diệm. Some of the signatories were to become personally involved in Diệm's overthrow and death in November. Generals Duong Van Minh and Tran Van Don, the presidential military advisor and the chief of the army who were to lead the coup, were overseas and were spared the charade of signing.
Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, the wife of Diệm's younger brother and chief adviser Ngo Dinh Nhu, who was regarded as the First Lady of South Vietnam at the time as Diệm was a bachelor, said that she would "clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show", a comment which further heightened Buddhist discontent. In late June, Diem's government charged that Thích Quảng Đức had been drugged before being forced to commit suicide. The regime also accused Browne of bribing Thích Quảng Đức to burn himself.
Photographs taken by Browne of the self-immolation quickly spread across the wire services and featured on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. The self-immolation was later regarded as a turning point in the Buddhist crisis and the critical point in the collapse of the Diệm regime. Although Diệm's decline and downfall had already begun, the self-immolation is widely seen as the pivotal point in the Buddhist crisis. The historian Seth Jacobs asserted that Thích Quảng Đức had "reduced America's Diệm experiment to ashes as well" and that "no amount of pleading could retrieve Diem's reputation" once Browne's images were ingrained into the psyche of the world public. Ellen Hammer described the event as having "evoked dark images of persecution and horror corresponding to a profoundly Asian reality that passed the understanding of Westerners." John Mecklin, an official from the U.S. embassy, noted that the photograph "had a shock effect of incalculable value to the Buddhist cause, becoming a symbol of the state of things in Vietnam." William Colby, then chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's Far East Division, opined that Diệm "handled the Buddhist crisis fairly badly and allowed it to grow. But I really don't think there was much they could have done about it once that bonze burned himself."
U.S. President John F. Kennedy, whose government was the main sponsor of Diệm's regime, learned of the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức when he was handed the morning newspapers while he sat in bed talking to his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, on the phone. Kennedy was reported to have interrupted their conversation about segregation in Alabama by exclaiming "Jesus Christ!" He later remarked that "no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one." U.S. Senator Frank Church, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, claimed that "such grisly scenes have not been witnessed since the Christian martyrs marched hand in hand into the Roman arenas."
In Europe, the photos were sold on the streets as postcards during the 1960s, and communist China distributed millions of copies of the photo throughout Asia and Africa as evidence of what it called "US imperialism". One of Browne's photos remains affixed to the sedan in which Thích Quảng Đức drove to his self-immolation and is part of a tourist attraction in Huế commemorating the event.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy said that "no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one."
Browne's award-winning photograph of Thích Quảng Đức's death has been reproduced in popular media for decades, and the incident itself has been used as a touchstone reference in many films and television programs.
After Thích Quảng Đức, self-immolations were carried out by five further members of the Vietnamese Buddhist clergy up until late October 1963 as the Buddhist protests in Vietnam escalated. On 1 November, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam overthrew Diệm in a coup. Diệm was assassinated after the coup on 2 November. Monks have continued to burn themselves since, although for reasons unrelated to Diệm, such as honoring the Buddha.
Thích Quảng Đức's actions were fatally copied in the United States in protests against the Vietnam War. Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker pacifist, poured kerosene over himself and set himself alight below the third-floor window of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at the Pentagon on 2 November 1965. Alice Herz, an 82-year-old woman, also burned herself that year in Detroit, Michigan. Roger Allen LaPorte self-immolated outside the United Nations building in New York City on 9 November 1965. Florence Beaumont burned herself to death outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles on 15 October 1967. George Winne, Jr., a student, self-immolated on 10 May 1970 on the campus of the University of California, San Diego and died the following day.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thich_Quang_Duc
Quoc Viet. The Immortal Heart. http://tuoitre.vn. A three-part document. Posted from May 31, 2010 to June 3, 2010.
