Rage Against the Machine, self-titled album cover featuring Thich Quang Duc, 1992.

Outside of Howard Beale from the classic film Network, nothing in the popular culture’s consciousness conveys “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” like the photo shown here, depicting Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc setting himself on fire to protest his government’s oppression of his religion.

So it’s fitting that Rage Against the Machine, a band whose music embodied large-scale protest — on the corporation’s dime, much like Howard Beale! — would employ the image for its eponymous debut. Rage weren’t Buddhists, but they knew that this photograph might make their already-long band name worth at least a thousand words.

In fact, the image turns out to be worthy of a $40,000 grant. After the jump, via Bates College: the story of Thich Quang Duc, and of Trian Nguyen, the Bates professor who hopes to more fully discover the monk whose 1963 self-immolation was not only one of the defining acts of the Vietnam War years, but one of the most significant images of the modern age.

On June 11, 1963, at a busy intersection in the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire to protest the government’s discrimination against the nation’s Buddhist majority.

Captured in an Associated Press photograph that was distributed worldwide, this horrific act launched a series of events resulting in the fall of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime. Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation also came to symbolize America’s unpopular involvement in Vietnam, and Malcolm Browne’s photo became an icon of the era.

Professor Trian Nguyen, who teaches art and Asian studies at Bates, has received an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for field research intended to address what he perceives as the scholarly neglect in recent decades of this figure, who remains highly revered among Vietnamese Buddhists. Nguyen was one of 57 to receive the ACLS grant out of a pool of 1,136 applicants.

“Many questions related to this Vietnamese senior monk and his final act are still unanswered,” says Nguyen, assistant professor of art and visual culture and the Luce Junior Professor of Asian Studies.

In his project, Nguyen will study Thich Quang Duc’s personal items and letters, books, legal records and other documents kept at Buddhist temples in Vietnam, and some two dozen interviews with people involved in events around the monk’s self-sacrifice.

Culminating in the first full-length book about Thich Quang Duc in English, the research will bring to light significant new facts about the monk and his significance within the cultural context of the time. Nguyen hopes that the project will also reawaken awareness, within and outside Vietnam, of both the historic importance of the monk’s self-sacrifice and the existence of the research materials.

The completed work, Nguyen writes in his ACLS proposal, “will make a substantial and original contribution to the understanding of both this famous monk and Vietnamese Buddhist culture and history in the mid-20th century.”

The ACLS advances studies in all fields of the humanities and the social sciences, and aims to maintain and strengthen relations among national societies devoted to such studies.

Nguyen came to Bates in 2000 under the auspices of a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, and is the first faculty member to teach Asian art history at Bates. He holds a doctorate in Asian art history from the University of California, Berkeley, and obtained his master’s degree in theological studies at Harvard Divinity School.

Nguyen’s primary research situates Buddhist art and architecture within the religious, political and social conditions of Southeast Asian culture. He has a particular interest in Vietnam. His teaching covers a wide range of topics in Asian art history, including the art of Zen Buddhism and Buddhist architecture, storytelling in Asian art and monuments of Southeast Asia.

The article, called “Heavy Metal Dharma Thunder,” features eleven examples of this surprising but time-honored trend. Check it out here.

What’s the Dharmic connection (besides the forced pose in their promo photo)?

Well, they describe their music as “Modern Metal, Ambient, Folk with soul-searching lyrics [in] an Oriental Dark Metal style” — and I guess I can kinda hear that — but other than that? Not a clue. (And seriously, someone tell them to ditch that word, “Oriental.”)

If this sounds like your bag, hear ‘em here.

“Hey, I read an article on this on pitchfork. Prince’s new 3 disc album will be released exclusively at Target. The title is Lotusflow3r and the image is below. He also bought the domain name: http://lotusflow3r.com/

“I just love prince’s weird embrace of the new age vibe.”

The site is nearly as odd as the cover graphic — but if you look around you’ll at least hear a little music….

Queen Elephantine has a new album called “Kailash,” named for the famed mountain of Buddhist and Hindu lore. You can hear it in entirety on their MySpace page — just select the second player (not the top one, though that one’s good if you want to hear older tracks).

So is QE Buddhist or Hindu? Can’t say, but they certainly seem interested. With song titles like “Search for the Deathless State” and previous releases called “Surya” and “Yatra,” they at least have a sympathy. Whatever their deal — if you like this kind of music, you’ll like them.

Also: good ol’ Konchog Norbu reminded me to give the band Hayagriva a mention. Named for the horse-headed deity found (again) in both Buddhism and Hinduism, they have a totally different thing going on — kinda theatrical black metal.

If that sounds like your kinda thing, you can hear it here.

You’ll find a bunch more Buddhist-inspired album covers — here, and in the Dhama-Burger archives, here and here.

You can hear it here.

With a name like that, you might think that these guys, who play metal in the death-metal/grindcore vein, are insensitive, bloodthirsty goons. But nope. They’re actually really quite concerned with such things as animal rights, vegetarianism, and the ecology.

The cover depicts a six-armed, knife-wielding, bull-headed figure that’s quite obviously a nod to the wrathful deities of tantric Buddhism (and also some of the gods of Hinduism).

It’s even levitating, in meditation, over the slaughterhouse drain. Strangely, it’s kind of a nice touch…

A: Nothing! (Of course.) Though it might cause some of us to recall the third precept.

So what’s it doing here?

Well, it was found whilst stumbling through music blogs, and this album by exotica musician Martin Denny caught my eye… for some reason. Looking at the list of songs, two titles (titles, I said!) jumped out: “Burma Train,” and “Buddhist Bells.” So I gave it a listen.

Good fun, but there’s pretty much nothing Buddhist about it.

But browsing has its rewards, and other Dharma-Burger-rific album covers were found.

Here are some more:

This one’s the cover for Lotus, by Santana. This was a live album recorded in Japan and released in 1974. Recorded in Japan, so it gets a Buddhist-y cover? Sure, why not.

I don’t have anything to say about the music here because I can’t stand Santana. Sorry.

Next up is A Meditation Mass, recorded by the funky German psychedelic band (the term for this kind of music is, really, “krautrock”), Yatha Sidra. Haven’t heard it yet, but it sounds like it’s gonna be pretty nutty and fun.

(In case you can’t make it out, the album’s cover is comprised of a close-shot of the Buddhist Wheel of Life, with some seriously goofy text laid over it.)

You can here it here, where I found it.

Last up is the cover for an album called Karma, by a band called Buffalo. How much does it have to do with karma, much less Buddhism? Dunno yet. But my guess is that, since it’s being compared to metal bands like Kyuss, Slayer, Corrosion Of Conformity (all of whom I like) and Alabama Thunderpussy (whose name is one of the most embarrassing of all time), I don’t think it’s gonna be much like, say, going on a silent retreat. Hear it here.

Despite the art (and album title) it seems that the Dharmic Nutritional Value is pretty much an unsurprising zero.

The album’s website, too has a similar taste.  You can hear samples there too — if big, raucous, absurd metallic prog-rock is your thing. (Hey, sometimes a little cheese can be a good thing. Especially on a Dharma-Burger.)