Incendiary Acts and Apocryphal Avant-Gardes: Thích Qung c, Self-Immolation, and Buddhist Spiritual Vanguardism

This article discusses the Buddhist socio-political tradition of self-immolation as an expression of ontological abhorrence of repressive political systems through the lens of theatre, theatrical performance, ritual theory and historiography One can talk at length about how the images of Thích Qung c radicalized international public opinion against the repressiveness of the Diem government, drew international attention to the plight of Buddhists in Vietnam, and set the stage for the wide range of human rights and anti-war demonstrations that challenged the emerging debacle of the Vietnam War. Thích Qung cs act accomplished all this, but it did so, arguably, because his act of self-immolation was the kind of transformative moment that functioned like intense heat in an enclosed area, which, as it begins to cool, pulls in the air around it to fill the empty space that its previous incendiary expansiveness created. In such moments, parallel paths bend into each other and historical trajectories collide. In this particular moment, the cool pull after Thích Qung cs self-immolation was situated at the explosive collision of multiple, seemingly parallel forms of vanguardism, forms that like particles in Einsteins notion of the universe appear to be linear and parallel in their trajectories only then to collide as the universe itself bends and curves into its own revolution and vortex. OA