I actually believe I first saw film footage of another monk setting himself on fire before I had even heard of Thích Quảng Đức, the Vietnamese Buddhist who did the same act on June 11, 1963, protesting the minority Catholic President’s treatment of Buddhists in South Vietnam in the early days of the war, before American troops were sent.
But I am certain the famous photograph by Malcolm Browne was in one of our high school textbooks, for which I will always be hostile. There is something about images of violence—and suicide, rightly or wrongly, has always seemed to me to be homicide one commits on oneself—that repel me. Of course, such images are meant to repel. Or one should be repellant. But images like that haunt me in the wee hours and, for that, I remain ungrateful.
Recently, I finished a new play called There Will Always Be a Fire, a one-act of eight scenes on the events of Thích’s “martyrdom.” Obviously, no violence appears on the stage and Mahayana Buddhism is about as far removed from my life experience as Ancient Greek, so I had to concentrate on the conflict that spurned his self-immolation.
Thích was protesting (again) not the war itself, but Ngô Đình Diệm’s persecution of Buddhists while he was President of South Vietnam. Ngô was a Catholic in a majority Buddhist nation. Like certain Catholics of old, he forced conversions, only gave military promotions to fellow Catholics, and in some instances, refused to allow Buddhists to fly their flags (protests of which led to people being gunned down in the streets).
Eventually, Diệm and his brother Đình Nhu, were murdered in a coup organized by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). In fact, the coup had been officially authorized by President John F. Kennedy, though his plans were for the Ngôs to go into exile. Their assassination was the second of Kennedy’s horrific encounters with the war he foolishly escalated. Earlier in the year, upon seeing Browne’s image of Thích’s self-immolation he exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” and remarked, “no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world.”
At first, I imagined the work I would create would be a novella with spare, austere writing—an imagistic piece describing Thích’s day—riding in the blue sedan, using his seniority against a younger monk who wished to perform the act himself, and (eventually) lighting and dropping the match that caused the end of his life.
In the end, Thích’s suicide did bring attention to an important problem—the persecution of any religious sect is something, at least in America, we have had no tolerance for (with notable exceptions I shan’t explore here). But there was a lot more to explore—a lot of dramatic coincidences that could be formed into a play. For example, Ngô and Kennedy both were Catholics, the main differences being one had flawed domestic policies and the other flawed foreign policies (to put it mildly).
Thoughts such as these led to quite a different piece of writing on my part. I used the form I know best—the stage play—to offer theatrical snapshots of Thích’s journey to a busy intersection in front of the Cambodian embassy in Saigon along with the after effect of the Ngôs murders, and Kennedy’s reaction. But those events alone wouldn’t make a play.
It was the comparing/contrasting of East and West, Buddhism and Catholicism, peace and war that ultimately fueled the play I did write. To explore some of these larger themes, I added a fictional story about a Catholic Priest attempting to comfort a family after losing their son in Vietnam three years after Thích’s protest when Americans were finally on the ground in Southeast Asia and Kennedy was long gone. So, the play turned out to be a panoply of scenes—set in Saigon, South Vietnam and Washington, D. C. in 1963 and Boston, Massachusetts in 1966.
The play made me look frankly at issues of faith, religion, suicide, and martyrdom. At the end of the day, my personal faith tradition is a peaceful one. We have fought in the past, but also produced conscientious objectors and have, in recent years, promoted nonviolence as a part of our mission of peace and reconciliation. In other words, we have had too many martyrs and need of no more.
And yet people have not stopped killing themselves for causes. Even before Thích’s self-immolation, Buddhists had performed that act in times of strife. As in all faiths, suicide is frowned upon in Buddhism, but those who choose the act are not condemned for it. It is quite different in Christianity where most traditional churches proclaim those who commit it are doomed to Hell, while others do their best to comfort the families left behind and know that Heaven/Hell and judgment in general is left to a higher power.
As a matter of fact, Christianity has not been without its own sects who’ve promoted suicide. One early sect believed if we were to be happier in Heaven, it might be a way to get there faster. Other sects prevailed against such foolish notions (this was before even the oldest still-extant Orthodox churches) and suicide has remained, in the West, a taboo. Nevertheless, Christians have never been without martyrs. Aside from being thrown to the lions, there were many Christians trussed up and used as oil lamps for Roman streets in the nighttime.
So, martyrdom is common to Western and Eastern religions, but martyrdom in the form of suicide will never be something I can fully wrap my head around. I acknowledge, as a Westerner, I can never fully understand the Eastern perspective on this.
I dealt with Eastern “acceptance” of suicide directly in a play from 2004, Love Suicide. My junior project at Bennington College, it was an experimental adaptation of Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, a famous Bunraku (puppet) play. Chikamatsu wrote in a time where double suicides were common among lovers of different classes who could not marry, but believed they would live in the afterlife as couples. Chikamatsu took such ripped-from-the-headlines stories and theatricalized them, writing some of Japan’s great masterpieces of dramatic literature, including The Love Suicides at Amijima. Unfortunately, these plays eventually had to be banned for a time because the number of double suicides went up with it being sensationalized (and, therefore, disseminated to the wider public).
When I first learned of Chikamatsu's plays, I was struck by the words “love” and “suicide” being so close together in the title. At the time, I was a hopeless romantic and such an idea horrified me. Over the years, the inherent violence that can occur with people in rapturous/over-passionate love has made, if not more sense, more comprehendible. After all, the spousal abuse among us—perpetuated by men and women equally (women lead in verbal abuse rather than physical)—is proof that the closeness which occurs within couples can have disastrous consequences given the heat of passion.
So, I found myself writing again about suicide in the East. One of Chikamatsu’s translators, Donald E. Keene, commented that Japan had the unenviable reputation of being a place where suicide was seen as something noble. I can’t think of anything sadder, but it is not my place to judge.
The experience of writing Fire ended up being an uplifting thing. In a way, it wrote itself. So much fire imagery—from lit peace candles to the gasoline-fuelled death of Thích to the fires of Hell so much feared by the character of the Priest—the themes were there, waiting for a writer to attempt it.
I’m not sure I’ve said anything here about “martyrdom,” and I have even less to say regarding suicide, but I am certainly someone who only agrees partly with John Lennon’s (musically) beautiful and (lyrically) juvenile song “Imagine.” “Imagine there’s no countries/It isn’t hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for,” I’m with him there. Of course, he pins the whole concept of killing and dying on religion in the next line. He has already absconded with Heaven and Hell in the first verse, but I’m sort of with that in the sense that those concepts, again, are fluid among believers and only rigidly interpreted by fundamentalists (who espouse no interpretation of Scripture at all—a curious, mostly 19th century invention). Still, Heaven is an ironic thing to dismiss as the world Lennon describes is exactly the kind of New Jerusalem or Zion that mainline Christians yearn for—a Heaven on Earth.
Fire was not the play I wanted to write. I had been telling folks I wanted to write more plays about joy, a concept with which I’m becoming familiar as I try to let my worries go. But the world we find ourselves in has regressed to a world where people kill at random, people broken (I think) by our divided nation. An artist must respond to the world in which they live. Or, at the very least, not ignore it.
The main thrust of my play is the character of The Photographer. In reality, Malcolm Browne was thinking of technical things when he took the pictures of the self-immolation—aperture, whether he had enough film stock, etc. I couldn’t write a character like that, so I suppose my character stands in for me, a man affected by the fires we start and the fires we don’t start but still engulf us. He tries, as I often do, to remain aloof to such horrors. But, since his character is talking as a ghost (he died in 2012) looking back at the past, he compares the fires of the past to the burning cities we have now and the (mostly) fruitless protests of our present age. In the end, like me, he is moved by people’s desire to create change, but longs for a day when the killing—especially the self-killing—will stop.
There may be no joy in these thoughts, but I don’t think the play or I am without hope either. We have to believe there is something that can be done, even if so much of what people are trying to do now to make the world better will certainly make it worse. “There will always be a fire,” the Photographer says near the end of the play, but then adds, sadly, “Then again, I suppose there is also someone will burn.” There are vulnerable people out there who need protection and any way to help them without more violence should be our goal.
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