(3 of 10)
If the Buddhists succeed, it will be the third South Viet Nam regime the Buddhists have been instrumental in ousting in just over a year with their peculiar "avoidance" of politics.
Off to Bed. It was only 18 months ago that a 73-year-old Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc sat down in the middle of a Saigon street and, drenched in five gallons of gasoline, calmly set himself afire with a cigarette lighter to dramatize Buddhist opposition to the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem. It was this calculated grisly act of propaganda—and Diem's harsh countermeasures—that eventually led the U.S. to withdraw support from Diem, permitting his overthrow and murder. At the time, the West had great sympathy for South Viet Nam's Buddhists. Now the atmosphere is different. There is no longer even the shadow of a religious issue. Around the charred object that is still exhibited and venerated as Quang Duc's heart has grown up a militant, devious, determined movement whose aim is power.
Any suggestions that they are trying to help the Communists are indignantly rejected by the Buddhist leaders. On the contrary, they insist that they represent "the people," while the government does not, hence that they are the only power in South Viet Nam that can truly oppose the Communists. Thich Tri Quang, who is emerging as South Viet Nam's top Buddhist leader—Americans remember him as the monk who took refuge in the U.S. embassy during the weeks preceding Diem's overthrow—sounds as anti-Communist as any American could wish. Says he: "Like all educated Buddhists, I don't like Communism because it is atheistic. I strongly believe that Communism can never win." In the next breath he adds: "But I fear it is coming to South Viet Nam because this government is unpopular and always seems to do the wrong thing." He even asserts that the government and the U.S. are favoring negotiations with the Communists—the very thing he himself has been accused of.
What Tri Quang wants, he says frankly, is any "government that agrees with our policy." But he offers no specifics. Spreading his thin fingers, he blandly asserts that "we never want anything, and to say that Buddhism wants this or that is wrong. We never sponsor anybody."
And with that, he goes off to bed till midnight, when he rises again for meditations on his mistakes of the day. Some exasperated Americans refer to Tri Quang as "the Makarios of VietNam."
Princely Ascetic. Are Tri Quang and the other Buddhist leaders naive or villainous, or both? Are they merely inconsistent in the grand Vietnamese fashion? Are they nationalists or Communist dupes? Whatever the answer, much of it lies embedded in the myriad traditions of a great faith—noble, puzzling to the West, durable yet widely decayed, and sharply challenged by the modern world.