Barbecued Monks: Vietnam 1963

On June 11, 1963, Duc, a 67-year-old monk from the Linh-Mu Pagoda in Hue, burned himself to death at a busy intersection in Saigon. I was in junior high school when I first started hearing about this war in Vietnam. I had no clue where Vietnam was. I heard we had some soldiers there in some sort of advising capacity. I also heard that there were these Buddhist Monks that were setting themselves on fire. At the time, based soley on ignorance, I assumed these Monks were protesting something to do with the War in their country. There were pictures in the newspaper. As a joke, my father called them Barbecued Monks. When I look at the pictures, it doesn’t seem very funny.

Actually, I found the whole thing ludicrous then. I’d burned my hand on a stove before, so imagining this drenching of fire was, well, unimaginably horrible. What was worth dying like that? I put the whole thing out of my mind for many years, but recently I have been reading more and more about Buddhism. My understanding was that Buddhism had some sort of reverence for life. We have all seen that commercial for germ killing Kleenex and how this Buddhist guy saves a spider, and but when he sneezes into on of these bacteria killing tissues he looks up with an anguish caused by guilt over taking the life of the bacteria living in his snot. Lots of Buddhists advocate for vegetarianism, if not veganism.

I began to wonder why life-respecting Buddhists would set themselves on fire.

While the Buddhists involved did nothing to hurt anyone else, they did commit suicide in a painful and dramatic way. Do Buddhists feel that every life is precious except their own life? Buddhists do not function under the sin/salvation logic common to most Christians and Jews, so their act of self destruction is not a Buddhist sin, but is it a violation of Buddhist teaching?
While these acts of suicide by fire never involved any attacks on others, these Monks did kill themselves to send a political message. What surprised me is that the political message was not against the War but against Catholics. These burning suicidal acts served to raise political consciousness of the Catholic regime in South Vietnam and treatment from this Catholic regime against Buddhists.

So the protest was in part against Catholics, and in part it was purely political. We have to put events into context. Before the United States got involved in Vietnam the French were involved there. I remember watching an old movie on TV called China Gate (1957) and stared Gene Barry, Angie Dickinson, Nat 'King' Cole and Lee Van Cleef. [I was a long time fan of Nat King Cole and he didn’t make that many movies, so I clearly remembered this one.] Nat King Cole was an American who had joined the French Foreign Legion and was fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. [I'll never forget that scene where an enemy soldier passes by in a dark jungle, just as Nat King Cole steps on a board with nails in it, and the nails go all the way through his foot. You can see the agony on his face as Mr. Cole stifles his urge to scream, and the Vietnam solder passes by without detecting his presence.]

So the French had at one time made Vietnam part of their colonialism foreign policy, and a part of that effort included a flood of Catholic Missionaries entering that country. At one time Vietnam had the second largest number of Catholics in an Asian country. By the 1950s the French were failing to control the Nationalist movement going on in Vietnam, and they sent troops in, which was the background for the Nat King Cole movie China Gate.

The number of Catholics had declined in North Vietnam, where the communists regarded it as a reactionary force opposed to national liberation and social progress. In the South, however, Catholicism was expanded under their leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, who promoted Catholicism as an important bulwark against North Vietnam. In 1955 approximately 650,000 Catholics had fled from North to South Vietnam.

The French eventually pulled out. Nog Dinh Diem, a Catholic, who had been in exile, in the United States between 1950 and 1954, was eventually, with the support of President Eisenhower, became the President of South Viet Name. remained in charge of South Vietnam.
Diem was a nationalist, but he was not popular with the common Vietnamese. President Diem surrounded himself with friends and family and failed to cultivate relations with local leaders and the various political and religious groups in the South. Diem also tried to rule by command, The peasants in the south felt oppressed and threatened by the Diem rule, and Diem was a Catholic. The people were facing the loss of the land given them by the Viet Minh and they were were as ready to fight to keep their land.

Since the Diem family was Roman Catholic and the Diem government come into conflict with Buddhists - a large segment of the South's population – the Buddhist Monks saw the oppression coming from Catholics and from the Diem regime.

There may have been something to this. For example, in the city of Hué, Catholics had official permission to fly the papal banner, but the Buddhists were prohibited from raising their flag. In May 1963 thousands of Buddhists in Hué staged a protest demonstration. The Diem regime sent troops in armored vehicles against them, and nine of the Buddhists were killed. This conflict inflamed the conflicts. The Diem government accused the Buddhists of being communist sympathizers. It is at this point that Buddhist monks began setting themselves afire, and the photos in newspapers around the world caused a shockwave around the world. Diem's sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, described the burnings as a Buddhist barbecue. That turns out to be where my father got his Barbecued Monk joke. It was as offensive a comment as the alleged “let them eat cake” comment of Marie Antoinette.

But why would Buddhist Monks kill themselves, even in the name of protesting religious and political oppression? Isn’t life still precious?

One thing to remember is that all Buddhists do not believe the same stuff, just like all Christians do not believe exactly alike. While there may be common denominators between all Buddhists and all Christians, there are differences as well.

The Buddhists of South Vietnam were from the Mahayana tradition. As part of the ceremony of ordination, within the Mahayana tradition, the monk-candidate was required to burn small spots on his body while taking a vow to observe the 250 rules of a Ghiksu (or Monk). In their minds, the difference between burning your arm and burning your body to death was merely a matter of degree. They saw the act of burning their body until they were dead to be a symbol of their strength and determination, their willingness to endure the greatest of suffering in an effort to protect Buddhism. Death by fire was simply their total commitment to protest the policy of religious oppression and persecution coming from the Diem/Catholic government.

The Mahyayana Buddhist Monks did not see this as suicide. The dying Monk, in death was not losing anything because they did not believe death brought them nonexistence. Remember, some Buddhists cling to a literal belief in reincarnation. Therefore, he does not think that he is destroying himself; he believes in the good fruition of his act of self-sacrifice for the sake of others.

The Buddha taught that all of us will pass away, that eventually, as a part in the natural process of birth, old-age and death, we all die, and we should keep in our minds the fact that there is an impermanence of life. To these particular Buddhists death was not seen as the end of life, it is merely the end of the body we inhabit in this life. They believed that their spirit would continue to exist after their death, but without the need for those attachment common to most humans.
The will be reincarnated, and their new life will depend upon their past and the accumulation of positive and negative action, and the resultant karma (cause and effect) is a result of their past life-actions. They believed that humans would be reborn in one of 6 realms: heaven, human beings, Asura, hungry ghost, animal and hell.

Well, I don’t buy the reincarnation, or the heaven of Christians, or the 50 virgin after life of the Muslims. I think, when you die your like the old poem:

I had a dog
His name was Rover
And when he died
He died all over
Except his tail
and it turned over.

Nevertheless, the monks that set themselves on fire clearly believed they were practicing the doctrine of highest compassion by sacrificing himself in order to call the attention of, or to seek help from, the people of the world.

I feel now I understand the act a little better, but as much as I wanted to find something admirable about their protest, I find little that I admire. Perhaps, being a doubter, I see life as a tiny instantaneous spark with eternal darkness before and after its brief appearance. Life is so brief, even when it is long. Life is so unusual, and brief, and interesting to itself. Why waste life?