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In 1962 General Ne Win and the army took over for the second time, and U Nu remains under house arrest. The wildly socialist military regime has been running the country into the ground, but there is no evidence that Buddhists could do better. Still, the Buddhists remain the government's only effective opposition. Recently, orange-and yellow-robed monks stormed and wrecked the printing plant of a pro-government newspaper. Ne Win and the Buddhist leaders have set a Dec. 15 meeting to air their differences.
The Provincials. Who are the faceless but no longer self-effacing monks behind Buddhism's political offensive?
In many ways South Viet Nam's Thich Tri Quang personifies the saffron politicians. He entered the Buddhist Institute in Hue when he was 13, has traveled little, speaks neither French nor English. Though not without personal charm and even a certain detached charisma, he has the provincial's distrust of all things Western, refuses to meet with U.S. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor on the ground that he is more comfortable dealing with lesser officials. The son of a farmer in what is now North Viet Nam, he went to Hanoi in his 20s, taught and edited a Buddhist magazine, helped found the Vietnamese Boy Scouts. In 1948, the French arrested Tri on charges of being a Communist, but released him within ten days. The Diem government also suspected him of working for the Viet Cong, but could never prove it.
During the Khanh regime, Tri Quang tried to set up a grass-roots Buddhist political party, but the Viet Cong got control of it and used it to provoke riots. Apparently frightened, Tri Quang dissolved his local councils, withdrew from Saigon to Hué, the true spiritual center of Vietnamese Buddhism, where a thousand ceremonies go on in a hundred temples and the sun is obscured by the smoke of millions of burning joss sticks. Here Tri lives in a spare cell in the Tu Dam pagoda, receives crowds of awed visitors, plays chess, and plots his moves against the government.
The Organizers. Tri Quang and the other political monks certainly do not speak for all of South Vietnamese Buddhism. Besides, though the monks claim that 85% of the Vietnamese are Buddhists, in fact the Vietnamese religion is an indiscriminate mixture of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and animism. Nevertheless, last January all 14 Buddhist sects in Viet Nam joined together in the Unified Vietnamese Buddhist Church, under the leadership of Tri and Thich Tarn Chau, a tiny, affable monk who is currently leading the Buddhist activists in Saigon and is clearly emerging as Tri's rival. The two leaders moved 50 chaplains into the South Vietnamese army and set up two ambitious institutes, one for religious and the other for secular affairs, with plans to organize families in rural areas into Communist-like cells.
South Viet Nam's military, including General Khanh, last week announced their backing of the Huong government—a setback for the Buddhists. But at Tam Chau's Buddhist secular institute—a ramshackle compound that has been the Buddhist base ever since laymen, fed up with politicking, chased the political monks out of Saigon's modern Xa Loi pagoda—the mimeograph machines and rumor mills were still grinding away against Huong.