The other day brought yet another Buddhist monk's self-immolation as protest against the Chinese government's continual repression of religious and cultural life in Tibet. While China celebrates its 1 October, 1949 Liberation every year, Tibet awaits its liberation from Peking. The monk who set himself aflame this week was nineteen. Thousands have preceded him.

     These kinds of martyrdoms first pierced American consciousness during our own moral and political and military and economic self-immolation in Southeast Asia forty years ago.

          For decades now, however, those most inclined toward this shocking, despairing act have been young Tibetan Buddhists. 

     It's instructive to look at precisely what setting oneself afire does.

     When your body is set on fire, of course, your skin burns, more or less quickly depending on the accelerant you choose. Bodies, however, do tend to burn fast.

     It's exquisitely painful.

     One mission of the martyr, of course--but just one--is to prolong the public display if at all possible and the human body in its wisdom, subversive of the flames' horrid work, mkes an attempt at self-protection. Your body will act in such a way as to try to ward off as much pain as possible. Shock sets in and when the burning reaches your nerves there may be a brief sensation of relief because your brain's absorbing the pain signals intermittently. Adrenaline floods your body and your burning areas may not feel the pain continually quite as much, say, as an onlooker may surmise. Then you're in overwhelming pain until, soon after, of course, you die.

     The celebrated writer David Halberstam witnessed a Buddhist monk's self-immolation during our war on the Vietnamese people.

     Halberstam wrote,

I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisi4444444444ngly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think…. As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.

     When you live and teach in China, as Tamar and I did in the mid-1980s, all you pick up are shreds of honesty coming out of Tibet. You glean those shards from Westerners who have traveled up to Tibet and back to the cities and civilized  universities and have been lucky enough to speak, unmolested, with the few there who know English, the even fewer bold enough to be at all open with Westerners.

     The official Peking line, that of respecting regional religious and cultural minorities, would be laughable were it not so horridly reminiscent of our own political lies.

     You remember -- I know that you remember -- the abjectly evil and continual official nauseating mouthing that we were in Vietnam burning villages in order to save them.  

The Vietnamese Monk, Thich Quang Duc, 1963

Tibet & adjacent regions (inset) within China (larger outline)

China & NE & SE Asia (including Vietnam)

     [When Tamar and I taught in China we lived at Tian Jin University in the northeast city, Tian Jin (Heavenly Port). On the map, Tian Jin would be on the Chinese mainland directly west and just a tad northwest of end of the black line indicating South Korea.]