Here on the Horse we often discuss Dharma-Burgers, or manifestations of the ongoing collision of Buddhist imagery and ideas with pop-culture. Such occurrences can run the gamut: sometimes they can be subtle, fleeting nods, and sometimes they can wallop you over the head. Sometimes they’re funny, and sometimes they’re not. Blogger Scott Mitchell (The Buddha is My DJ) sends on a remarkable new example. See what you think of it.
Thanks, Scott! And thank you, Mr. Pizza!
Vietnam’s Thich Quang Duc — whose self-immolation protesting discrimination against his nation’s Buddhist majority has become one of the defining acts of the Vietnam War era — has been honored with a new statue that, as VietNamNews reports:
is 6.3m tall and stands amidst a 2,000sq.m park at the busy intersection of Cach Mang Thang Tam and Nguyen Dinh Chieu streets, where the self-immolation took place.
It’s beautiful. See it, larger, here.
See also: Uncovering the Buddhist monk at the center of one of the most significant images of the modern age
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.
Just heard about a special report on CNN, airing this weekend:
“Go inside the world of Buddhism with Christiane Amanpour. In the fight for freedom and democracy, their weapon is peace. They are ‘Buddha’s Warriors,’ Saturday & Sunday, 8 p.m. ET.”
Mark yr calendars! (Here‘s the schedule, by the way.)
This just in from the ever-mighty Sam DeWitt:
“Wow, this came as a surprise.
“While playing hooky from what I should be doing, and watching the ‘making of’ video journals from ‘The Watchmen‘ website, i found a sequence (of which I am sending 2 frames) where they apparently have recreated the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese Monk who self-immolated as a protest over the Vietnamese war.
“Not sure how I feel about this, but it is interesting to note the verisimilitude that the filmmakers have tried to conjure up while re-creating this seminal event (note the car in the background, same model as the one from the actual event).
“Pop culture – gotta’ love it, or go mad!
“If you use The Google on Thich Quang Duc you will see where there is a shrine erected to him now and they say that even after he self-immolated, and then the other Monks cremated his remains, his heart did not burn, and is now on display in the temple.”
…Thanks for the history-and-pop-/Dharma-culture lesson, Sam!
Seems like a cool guy, but that’s just extra-cool. Here’s a profile.
