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| Poster: Atlas Reply Post Message Date: Wed Jun 12 23:02:32 2002 |
| Subject: Ven Thich Quang Duc |
| Post No: 956 |
"June 12: YESTERDAY was the 39th anniversary of the Burning Monk of Saigon. We may not even need to reproduce that image here for you to recall it — such was the impact of the photograph taken by Associated Press photographer Malcolm Browne in Saigon on the morning of June 11, 1963, that even those then unborn would likely have a visual memory of the fiery suicide of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, seated impassively in the lotus position on the street, his body engulfed in flames. "He didn't even twitch," recalled one awed witness, decades later. "He burned like wood." New York Times reporter David Halberstam had also been impressed by the monk's unfathomable discipline. "As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound," Halberstam wrote at the time. ("Human beings burn," he added, "surprisingly quickly.") In the pre-dawn darkness that fateful morning, 66-year-old Thich Quang Duc left his monastery at the Thien Mu Pagoda in Hue and, in the company of four other monks, climbed into a car for his final journey to Saigon. He had lived a monastic life since the age of seven, and had been ordained a monk at 20. Thich Quang Duc had long declared his intentions to his superiors and the Buddhist community. He wanted to bring attention to the harsh treatment of Buddhists under the US-backed regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, to which he had written asking for an end to the repression of Buddhism. When his letters were ignored, Thich Quang Duc began weeks of deep meditation preparatory to his final act. Arriving at the chosen site of his death, a busy crossroads in downtown Saigon, Thich Quang Duc sat down in the lotus position. Two of his fellow monks doused him with kerosene. Thich Quang Duc struck a match... and his destiny instantly intertwined with that of a 30-year-old photographer from New York City. Malcolm W. Browne was one of those "accidental journalists", in his own words "stumbling into the profession" after spending his 20s as a chemist. He had arrived in Vietnam a couple of years earlier. By the time Fate led him to that intersection in Saigon, he had already begun seeing through the John F. Kennedy Administration's "bright shining lie" of a purely "advisory" role in its support of the South Vietnamese government against Ho Chi Minh's North. The night before Thich Quang Duc's suicide, Browne received a call telling him to be at this place in Saigon at this time, as something "really important" was going to happen. He was there to see the car pull up and the monks emerge. He raised his camera and began taking pictures as they arranged their colleague's immolation. "I was stunned," Browne recalled. "A cold sweat had broken out on my head... it was only with the greatest difficulty that I kept my attention focused on the mechanics of picture-taking." Browne later related how at any point in the entire ghastly sequence, he could have stopped it. It would have been a matter of four quick paces for him to have stepped up and kicked away the jerrycans of fuel or grabbed the box of matches from Thich Quang Duc's hands. He didn't, and his decision not to interfere would haunt Browne for years thereafter. In the moment, however, both the monk and the photographer transcended their most basic and powerful instincts as human beings. The monk transgressed the most incontrovertible rule of his Buddhism, and killed himself. The photographer subjugated his own humanity, and took the picture. Although Halberstam's New York Times refused to use the photo for fear of spoiling its readers' breakfasts, John F. Kennedy saw it the next day and told his ambassador to Vietnam: "Diem must go." In Vietnam, Thich Quang Duc's suicide prompted seven other monks and nuns to follow his example in the ensuing months. By that December, the Diem regime was overthrown, Kennedy was dead, and American public opinion had swung to the anti-war stance that was so profoundly to change America's sense of self, not just in Vietnam but the world. The Vietnam War would become the most photographed and reported war in history, after which no armed conflict would ever again receive such critical, free and total media coverage. His photo of the burning monk won Malcolm Browne a Pulitzer Prize in 1964, and remains one of the most iconic war images of all time. Thich Quang Duc's heart, they say, did not burn, even after his charred remains had been ritually cremated to ashes. Considered a holy relic, it is kept at the Reserve Bank of Vietnam. Even though what both men did, or did not do, on that awful morning 39 years and a day ago went against the grain of everything to which they had dedicated their hearts and souls, they fulfilled their duties as they saw them — and changed the world". - SD |