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.

Prior to the self-immolation, the South Vietnamese Buddhists had made the following requests to the Diem regime, asking it to:


1. Lift its ban on flying the traditional Buddhist flag;


2. Grant Buddhism the same rights as Catholicism;


3. Stop detaining Buddhists;


4. Give Buddhist monks and nuns the right to practice and spread their religion; and


5. Pay fair compensations to the victim’s families and punish those responsible for their deaths.

From the prevailing point of view he has been “exclusively conceptualized as a transhistorical, purely religious agent, virtually homologous with his specifically religious forebears and ancestors.” Therefore, his self-immolation is seen as a “religious suicide” and is religiously justified based on Chinese Buddhist texts written between the fifth and tenth centuries C.E.


“The press spoke then of suicide, but in the essence, it is not. It is not even a protest. What the monks said in the letters they left before burning themselves aimed only at alarming, at moving the hearts of the oppressors, and at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured then by the Vietnamese. To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance…. The Vietnamese monk, by burning himself, says with all his strength and determination that he can endure the greatest of sufferings to protect his people…. To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, that is, to suffer and to die for the sake of one’s people. …”


Thich Nhat Hanh: “… The monk who burns himself has lost neither courage nor hope; nor does he desire nonexistence. On the contrary, he is very courageous and hopeful and aspires for something good in the future. 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…. I believe with all my heart that the monks who burned themselves did not aim at the death of their oppressors but only at a change in their policy. Their enemies are not man. They are intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred, and discrimination which lie within the heart of man.”


From Buddhist Information

The most well known and highly publicized act of self-immolation by an American took place on November 2, 1965. Norman Morrison, a devout Quaker and father of three, immolated himself outside of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office at the Pentagon. As if the location was not notable enough, there is another reason that Morrison’s self-immolation gets more attention than other acts of self-immolation in America. Morrison brought his infant daughter with him to the Pentagon that day. […]


What drove this man, a father of three young children, to burn himself to death? Although he never talked about taking his own life with his wife, several of Morrison’s friends reported that he had discussed it with them. One friend, John Paisley, said, “We had to talk him out in the same manner last year. He wanted to do it when the monks in Saigon were killing themselves in that way” (Hendrickson, 223). A close friend of Morrison’s, John Roemer, said that he had discussed self-immolation with Morrison on several occasions. When asked what he thought made Morrison decide to go through with it, Roemer replied,

I don’t know. I don’t know. He fought the war more and more deeply. I mean, when are you one of the Germans?…You have to be mentally different to fly in the face of received wisdom in this country. He played it out in his mind, I think, in terms of being a moral witness (Hendrickson, 224).


Roemer tried to explain Morrison’s actions at a memorial service three weeks after his immolation:

In a society where it is normal for human beings to drop bombs on human targets, where it is normal to spend 50 percent of the individual’s tax dollar on war, where it is normal…to have twelve times overkill capacity, Norman Morrison was not normal. He said, ‘Let it stop’ (Hendrickson, 224).


Anne Morrison sheds some light on Norman’s mindset in a recent article for Winds of Peace, a Quaker newsletter … Concerning that decision [to bring his infant daughter with him, although he handed his daughter to onlookers before he lit himself on fire], his daughter, Emily wrote, “No matter what could have happened to me, I believe I was purposefully with my father ultimately to symbolize the tragedy and brutality of war. Because I lived, perhaps I symbolized hope as well” (Hendrickson, 236). … Read all