A Buddhist Monk Sets Himself on Fire
Just before noon on June 11, 1963, a slow-moving baby-blue Austin sedan pulled up at a busy intersection in the heart of Saigon. Inside was the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and temple abbot Thich Quang Duc, along with two attendant monks. When the car stopped, the three immediately got out. One attendant placed a cushion on the ground, and Thich Quang Duc quickly sat down in formal meditation posture. The other attendant removed a five-gallon can of gasoline from the trunk and poured it over the seated monk. As three hundred monks and nuns from his temple stood by, Thich Quang Duc pulled a pack of matches from his pocket and ignited his gasoline-soaked robes.
The monk was protesting the government’s crackdown on Buddhist clergy, an assault that most of the world knew nothing about, and it was not until the following morning, June 12, that the shocking image of Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation reached the United States. That’s when I first saw Malcolm Browne’s black-and-white photograph of an unimaginable sight: an elderly monk seated upright and straight as a statue as flames consumed his body. Browne’s photograph later won a Pulitzer Prize, and no one who saw it ever forgot it. Within an inferno of his own making, Thich Quang Duc sat so still that the whole world stopped. When it moved again, to me it never looked quite the same.
I was twenty years old and had never seen a Buddhist monk before. I had no clear idea of where Vietnam was either. But I had been studying anthropology at Hunter College in New York City, and had been looking at photographs of strange behavior. Restless within the conventions of my own society, I had turned to anthropology as an avenue for exploring alternatives. Photographs of scarified faces, noses pierced by bone, and penises sheathed in dried gourds were part of my coursework; and I was drawn to anything that challenged prevailing authority: civil rights, women’s rights, psychedelics, the Beats. Nothing prepared me for Quang Duc. He was certainly challenging authority—in his case, the powerful ruling regime of South Vietnam—but his method upended every idea I had assumed about human behavior. In order to make a political statement he reset the very parameters of human potential. It was impossible to imagine sitting in the midst of flames without flinching. Impossible. And no degree of political passion or moral righteousness could explain it.
Journalists had been alerted to a newsworthy event, but demonstrations in Saigon had become so common and without consequence that only a few had shown up. Those who did reported their visceral alarm at watching living flesh turn to ash, but no eyewitness in the English-language press attempted to describe Quang Duc’s composure. His equanimity remained outside the media narrative, leaving it to hang in the air like a hologram: true but not real. It would have felt natural to project excruciating pain and anguish onto the monk. After all, he sat burning to death. Yet as much as I looked for signs of torment, the photograph does not show a man in the throes of physical or mental suffering. There was nothing to relate to, to identify with—and I kept wondering how this could be.
Thich Quang Duc (thich is the Vietnamese pronunciation of Sakya, the Buddha’s clan name), then sixty-six, had made it his mission to draw international attention to the persecution of Buddhist clergy in South Vietnam by President Ngo Dinh Diem, a fundamentalist Roman Catholic. He fulfilled his mission so successfully that in the process of focusing worldwide attention on the plight of South Vietnam’s Buddhists, he spotlighted Diem’s regime in all its corruption, as well as its alliance with the United States military and the covert buildup of American troops. Though Quang Duc was not protesting American intervention, the image of his self-immolation became forever merged with the war itself.
Diem’s cronies attributed his dramatic achievement to anesthetic drugs. Others might have categorized it as a one-off magic trick of sensational street theater. Or perhaps the Buddhist robes and formal meditation posture told a story of training and discipline, of a mind that could not be harmed by the flames that destroyed his body. This possibility was especially difficult to consider in the West, where the meditative disciplines of his tradition were still largely unknown. It was, however, the version I wanted to believe, and I wondered if it made sense to Buddhists, even while stumping the rest of us. After all, he was a monk within a celebrated religious tradition, a revered abbot, not a faithless misfit; nor was it just the lone warrior against the establishment that made me cheer Quang Duc. The inexplicable version of this event stirred up questions from my childhood that I had not considered for many years.
* * *
By the time I was five, I played private games of make-believe—becoming other people, living with other families, exploring ways to disappear in plain sight. Later in life, psychotherapists would try to help me figure out my need not to be where I was. Nonetheless I became familiar with hidden aspects of the mind—the ones that no one ever talked to me about and were not taught in school—and l learned something of how secret and invisible worlds could run interference with unwanted circumstances and emotions. I was an unhappy little girl, so my curiosity about how reality could be manipulated was not whimsical. There was a precarious safety in conjuring my own hiding places and knowing that stories that came from inside my head could make life less scary—at least for a little while. When my father was unreasonably and irascibly critical of something my mother served for dinner, and my mother sat withering at the table, I wanted to protect her, which I could not do, but I didn’t have to stick around to witness something so troubling. I could remove myself to the safety of pastoral harmony, sunshine, and leafy trees. When the look on his face suggested an imminent explosion, or when his angry disapproval was leveled directly at me—for my table manners, my rude interruptions, dirty fingernails, swear words (which I had learned from him), or my insistence on trying to discreetly carve my name into the edge of the wooden table—then I would resort to the most reliable and recurrent escapes. In one favorite daydream, I was a ballerina in a yellow leotard with a matching tutu and a golden cardboard crown; in another I was Tarzan’s Jane, swinging from jungle vines.
When I saw the photograph of Quang Duc, I had to wonder if he had used his mind to create a field of protection; or had told himself a story that had separated his mind from his body. As his body burned, where was his mind?
Through the therapeutic lens, my flights of fancy had been reduced to escapism. In some prototypical psychological portrait, daydreaming was always in a negative classification; no therapist ever suggested that it might have been a healthy search away from sadness. Anthropology was viewed as another dive down the rabbit hole; yet comparing different cultures had also revealed how the mind processed or distorted or restructured sensory and emotional matter. This version of mind made it a blank screen that reflected distinct values through varying interpretations of sensory input; and this could account for why some societies relished eating dogs, while others found this culinary delight repulsive yet chowed down on pigs and cows. Or maybe this so-called blank screen had sentient qualities of its own. Maybe it had the capacity to make choices and not be automatically subject to conventional dictates, or to sensory response such as, for example, extreme heat. Quang Duc raised the question.
Following his death, I began revisiting my little-girl strategies for coping with anxiety and fear. When I think back to 1963, I can’t remember one basic feature of my life that didn’t bewilder me: my mind, Quang Duc’s mind, school, sex, drugs. But the encounter with Quang Duc inspired questions that felt more alive than my routine preoccupations with boyfriends, with how I looked and what I wore, and with what I wanted to be when I grew up. Within this muddle, Quang Duc roused my search for meaning, although it would take a few years before either Buddhism or the war in Vietnam began to shape the rest of my life.
East Twenty-Third Street, New York City
I’ve often been asked how I became a Buddhist. I’ve answered this question in different ways, sometimes including Thich Quang Duc, sometimes not. To my ears, all my answers have sounded hollow. Yet I’ve asked myself the same question, and have been as perplexed by my journey as others have been, for nothing about my family or education or childhood in New York City pointed to ancient India or to a 2,600-year-old spiritual tradition. When I consider the disjointed pieces of my own path, I am reminded of a teaching tale told by my Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche: A man is on a pilgrimage from Eastern Tibet to Lhasa, walking across snow fields. One day he stops for tea. He puts down his pack, digs out the flint he uses to light fires, and sets off in search of three small rocks. He returns and places the rocks in a circle. Then he sets off to find twigs. When he returns he places the twigs inside the circle, but he can’t ignite the twigs with his flint. So he sets off again to look for dry grass in the crevices of nearby boulders. He returns and places the grass on top of the twigs, and this time the fire ignites. He fills his small pot with snow and sets it over the fire to make tea. When the tea is ready he leans back against a rock to enjoy his hot drink. Suddenly he becomes alarmed at the sight of dozens of footprints in the snow, coming and going in every direction. Once he recognizes that all the footprints are his own, he contemplates the many interrelated actions required to make one pot of tea. That’s the end of the story, and it doesn’t even include the history of the tea, the pot, the flint, the snow, or the man himself.
When I try to understand how I made my way from the cultural capital of the United States to sacred Buddhist sites in Asia, I feel like that man, perplexed by so many footprints coming and going in different directions without obvious purpose. The steps are distinct but when taken together, they reveal how thoughts and movements intersect to lead to one pot of tea—or, in my case, to a willy-nilly path of waking up.
Before my make-believe games came the impulse to invent them. Before that came the dynamics of my nuclear family, and before that, what little I know of the dysfunction of my parents’ families. As the story of the man making a pot of tea reveals, nailing the beginning of anything requires an arbitrary choice. To begin my story about how Buddhism slowly reshaped my experience of myself and the world, I want to return to my childhood games.
One stands out because its lessons are still true today. I lived with my parents and my sister, Hermine, three and a half years older than me, in a railroad flat in downtown Manhattan on East Twenty-Third Street. Over the years we rearranged the apartment, and at different times I slept in different rooms. The game I remember most clearly started when I was about five and had a small room to myself at the front of the apartment. The privacy most likely factored into my investigations, for I never shared my games with anyone. At night, after I was put to bed, I would lie in the dark under the covers and run the fingers of one hand over the other hand. It felt soothing, a slight tickle. Then I would imagine what would happen if I turned on the light and discovered that the source of pleasure was a cockroach crawling on my skin. I would recoil, maybe scream. Once I got the gist of it, I played this game day and night, imagining touching different objects and confirming that the mind could transform what felt good one moment into something horrifying the next moment, even when the sensation itself remained the same. Intriguing, but just a game. It would take immersion in meditation decades later before I fully explored the power of preconception. Yet the game also emboldened other, less successful experiments, while providing a blueprint for a critical aspect of how the conceptual mind dictates experience, how it filters direct sensory input and turns it into something agreeable or not. Cockroaches regularly infested our apartment, and no one would think to allow one to crawl across their hand. How weird that experiences of pleasant or unpleasant were dominated by ideas and associations, not by direct experience.
This conclusion did not stop me from attributing my unhappy moods to my mother, father, and sister. Still, I would tell myself that if I could look at a flower and only a flower and think of nothing but that flower, I would be fine. If disturbing thoughts could not be willfully pushed out through the bones of my skull, I would smother them with imported nicer ones. I chose a sunflower by Van Gogh, as I had already spent many Sunday afternoons at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a family deal: first art and then roller skating in Central Park. In my most distressed moments, I tried walking around with a sunflower inside my head, imagining that all the unjust hurt, the insults, taunts, and teases, had transformed into yellow petals.
I was often asked, even by strangers, why I was so unhappy. I had not been looking in a mirror and saying, Gee, you look so unhappy, little girl, so the question had the benign stupidity of asking a fish in water how it feels to be wet. I do remember wanting a different family: a mother who was not so melancholy, and a father who was not so volatile, and an older sister who didn’t make fun of me and wasn’t my father’s favorite daughter. I fantasized that I had been adopted and was stuck living in the wrong family. Still, I wasn’t beaten or abandoned or sent to bed cold or hungry. I had a home and knew where it was, and I had parents who loved me and tried hard to be good parents, although that role did not come naturally to either one. We had photographs of relatives who had been killed in the death camps. When I saw those photos, or images of starving or homeless children, I could acknowledge my own good fortune—but life as I dreamed it would be so much better. In a flash, I could swap urban grit for a bucolic idyll with the proverbial prince and white horse. When anger threatened to overwhelm me, especially in response to my father’s harsh criticisms, I could disappear into the theater of my mind, dark and alone.
Dizziness was another game that explored how the world worked when I played spinning with the kids on my block. Twenty-Third Street was a main thoroughfare. This made for a lot of foot traffic, which did not prevent four or five of us from spreading across the sidewalk and spinning as fast as possible, then suddenly stopping and either remaining upright or falling to the ground. In my calculations, dizziness created an alignment with the rotation of the earth. If the earth was round and in constant motion, as I had been taught to accept as an indisputable scientific fact, then walking erect on a flat surface was an illusion, a big lie built into our most fundamental behavior. Everyone was in on the deception but no one discussed it, and everywhere people walked erect on a curved surface. This proved that nothing was as it appeared to be, and made me wonder if anything in the world could be trusted.
* * *
My father, Jack Tworkov, was an artist, a distinguished founder of what came to be called the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. This placed our family of four in a rarefied domain where the ranked conventions of class and money were displaced by the high value placed on making art. Today, making art has become so synonymous with making money that I encounter worldly people who register surprise on learning that in the years following World War II, making art was not a lucrative business. My father taught art, and my mother worked as a secretary. Our apartment, on the third floor of a four-story walk-up, was half a block east of the Bowery, and occasionally a boarder paid ten dollars a month to help cover the rent. To this particular apartment and to this crummy neighborhood, from time to time certain dinner guests arrived by taxi or a chauffeur-driven limo from Upper East Side townhouses or Park Avenue apartments.
I grew up among painters, writers, composers, and poets who were almost exclusively white men. Artists were not respected by our working-class Catholic neighbors, but in my childhood observations their preeminent status was defined by how they were treated by men of wealth and power who did not use public transportation when they came to visit. For these lawyers, bankers, and real estate developers, artists were the high priests.
From a very young age, I listened in on discussions of form and color, foreground and background, the use of perspective in Giotto’s floors, Cézanne’s mountains, making forms from emptiness, using emptiness to create form—ideas that applied to objects called paintings, to something called art. But such considerations of form and emptiness were never applied to the body or the mind. There was no opportunity to ask, Did Cezanne’s mountains exist outside his head? Are the images in a painting any more or less real than what we see in everyday life?
These discussions about art never included anything I could understand, but they occurred with such confident ease as to make my teachers at Public School 40 on East Nineteenth Street sound simpleminded. Then again, I was not a good student, and with budding arrogance I attributed my poor grades to a worthless system. I was frequently caught talking in class or chewing gum, or staring out the window or doodling instead of practicing penmanship. I regularly got my knuckles rapped with a ruler or was ordered to sit in the corner with a wad of gum on my nose. These punishments did not correct my delinquencies and only affirmed that school was stupid. My poor grades were consistently explained by my uncooperative personality. It was not until I was past fifty years old that I was diagnosed with spatial dyslexia. This had not made it impossible to string letters into words or words into sentences, but reading was slow and frustrating and I gave up easily. To compensate, I experimented saying words that I couldn’t read or spell; sometimes, I didn’t even know what they meant. As for my uncooperative personality, it’s possible that it was aggravated by dyslexia; yet I might have been just as uncooperative without any learning difficulties.
The conversations among artists often included names of European capitals and foreign museums and men of letters pronounced with foreign accents, and they sounded weightier and more informed than the conversations of other grown-ups I listened in on. They were more erudite than the conversations of not only my parents’ wealthy friends and my schoolteachers but also the two grandparents I knew as a child. My father’s mother spoke only Yiddish, and my mother’s father hardly spoke at all. The language difference between my parents and their parents was one of many indications that we barely coexisted in the same country at the same time. My grandparents came from the Old World, and my parents were not just creating lives in the New World from scratch like our Irish and Polish neighbors. Experimental artists like my father had a different vision of accomplishment, and the New World—not just the shiny new world of materialism but also the new postwar world of possibilities—invited a leap into an unchartered future not captive to the past or present. This made the gap between us and my grandparents a divide of centuries.
Copyright © 2024 by Helen Tworkov