Incendiary Acts and Apocryphal Avant-Gardes: Thích Quảng Đức, Self-Immolation, and Buddhist Spiritual Vanguardism

I. BLACK HOLES, EVENT HORIZONS, AND THE GRAVITATIONAL PULL OF THÍCH QUẢNG ĐỨC’S SELF-IMMOLATION

On June 11, 1963, a procession of somewhere between 200 and 350 Buddhist monks and nuns made its way toward the Cambodian Embassy in Saigon, Vietnam. The procession was a decidedly political event, and coming as that event did so early in emerging turmoil of the Vietnam War, it is surprising that its profoundly disturbing conclusion did not garner the attention that Richard Schechner devotes to other anti-war demonstrations in his classic essay “The Street is the Stage.” Not unlike the demonstrators whom Schechner discusses in his essay, the monks and nuns in this procession carried signs of protest that, in this instance, drew attention to the Buddhist-Catholic crisis in Vietnam under the government of then President Ngo Dinh Diem, a devout Catholic who used the power of his office, among other things, to repress non-Catholic religious traditions—despite the fact that Catholics were a small minority in a country that was overwhelmingly Buddhist. The demonstrators marched to demand the religious freedom denied them by Diem’s government, and on this day in early June of 1963, the demonstration was part of the continued unrest that had begun a month earlier when, as Michael Biggs has noted, the Diem regime “banned the display of religious flags in Hué”—“the centre of Vietnamese Buddhism”—on Buddha’s birthday.¹ All of that unrest came to a head on June 11.

The turning point in the demonstration, in the Buddhist-Catholic crisis, in Diem’s Presidency, and ultimately in the conflict in Vietnam in general came when a sixty-six year-old Buddhist monk by the name of Thích Quảng Đức emerged from the sedan leading the procession, assumed the lotus position at a busy intersection, was doused with gasoline by fellow monks, and then set himself on fire. It was an act that galvanized public and international opinion against Diem and the Kennedy administration that propped up his regime. News of this act of self-immolation spread quickly, facilitated in part by the shocking photograph of the “burning monk” taken by Malcolm Brown and published at first only by the Philadelphia Inquirer (other newspapers deeming it to be too shocking for general consumption). Indeed, Kennedy is “reported to have been so appalled” by the photo of Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation “that he bolted from the room” when he saw a copy of it that had been placed on his desk. He was not alone in his response. The historian Seth Jacobs quotes Kennedy himself “later telling Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge that ‘no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.’”² There were, of course, many other wrenching photos to come after the United States got more deeply entangled in the conflict in Vietnam and after the assassination of Kennedy itself had become—with the help of Abraham Zapruder—its own nauseating film loop. Despite all the photos that followed, however, Brown’s photo of Thích Quảng Đức endures in large part because it documents a performative act that opened up a profound cultural vortex. As an event, that act was an event horizon to a kind of black hole. It possessed a magnetism that over the years has consistently pulled the interest of experimental and mainstream performance practitioners into it while, strangely enough, remaining little more than a cautious passing reference for theatre and cultural historians who chart the terrains of performance in linear trajectories rather than gravitational pulls.

If this lack of interest on the part of theatre and cultural historians is a precautionary tactic against what might be described as the dangers of history’s “event horizons,” so too is this lack of interest a missed opportunity—if only because pausing long enough to feel the gravitational lure and thus to consider the cultural-historical implications of Thích Quảng Đức’s act of self-immolation has...