Word: pagoda
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Over and over, the desperate voice shouted into the telephone: "They are breaking into Xa Loi Pagoda. They are breaking into Xa Loi Pagoda." In the background, gunfire mingled with the confused screams of Buddhist monks and nuns and the clanging alarm of the huge brass gong that hangs in the bell tower of Saigon's largest pagoda. Suddenly the phone connection from the temple went dead...
...Using their rifle butts as clubs, squads of tough, riot-trained "special forces" smashed into the pagoda, battering a path through a small guard of young Buddhist monks. The troopers had a list, and each monk on the list was considered to be a "Communist in disguise." On the temple's second floor, one monk tried to resist and was thrown bodily from a balcony to the courtyard 20 ft. below. Other monks and nuns were routed from behind a flimsy barricade of wooden benches and forced outside by tear gas and gunshots...
Sacking the pagoda's main altar, the raiders carted away the charred heart of Buddhist Martyr Thich Quang Due, who last June was the first of five Buddhists to burn himself to death in pro test against the Diem government's anti-Buddhist drive. But the Buddhists managed to spirit out of the building the receptacle holding Quang Due's ashes. "The ashes are holy," said one monk. "We would give 15 lives to defend them." Two other monks escaped over the back wall of Xa Loi (pronounced sah loy) into the grounds of the adjoining...
...then struck a match. In the village of Ninh-hoa, 200 miles north of Saigon, a young Buddhist nun sat down in a Catholic school playground and set herself on fire. Less than 24 hours later, back in Hué, a 71-year-old monk announced over the Tudam Pagoda loudspeaker that he was going to kill himself, then burned himself to death in the pagoda's courtyard...
Suddenly, about 500 saffron-robed Buddhist priests, laymen and women emerged from a nearby alley and started to run toward the pagoda to join their fasting fellow-Buddhists. Stymied by wire and police, the demonstrators sat down in the middle of the street...