Word: quang
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...suicide and the Saigon trial served once again to stoke South Viet Nam's smoldering religious and political crisis. Last month Buddhist Monk Thich Quang Due burned himself to death on a Saigon street corner in protest against restrictions imposed on the country's 12 million Buddhists by Diem's predominantly Roman Catholic regime. After a series of nationwide demonstrations,* the government, under U.S. prodding, yielded to Buddhist demands and granted them equal religious and political standing with the nation's 1,500,000 Catholics. But influenced by his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who believes that...
...held children up to see it all. On the altar, inside a crystal urn, which in turn was encased in a bouquet-flanked glass chest, lay the object of their reverence-a charred piece of flesh. Over it a hand-lettered sign announced: "The Eternal Heart of High Priest Quang...
...weeks earlier, to dramatize the Buddhist majority's fight for greater religious freedom under South Viet Nam's Roman Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem, a 73-year-old Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Due had spectacularly set himself afire in a Saigon street. Later the martyr's scorched remains were assigned to final cremation in a rice field outside the capital. But, as the priests told it, when the old man's ashes were removed from the oven, his heart emerged miraculously undestroyed-obviously the supernatural work of Buddha. Immediately, his fellow monks proclaimed Quang...
Skeptics suggested the Quang Due's heart had been removed from the body before cremation, or had been injected with a fire-resisting fluid. Certainly the phenomenon was far from original; down through the ages, in legend and fact, the hearts of heroic figures have more than once withstood the flames.*But the "miracle" serves the Buddhists in their two-month-old war with Diem. Thanks partly to pressure from the U.S., which fears that massive Buddhist disaffection could wreck South Viet Nam's long, vital campaign against the Communists, the Diem government signed a compromise agreeing...
Diem's reply was to clamp virtual martial law over Saigon. All the city's main pagodas were sealed off, and barbed-wire barricades blocked off streets. On the radio, Diem blamed Quang Due's "tragic death" on "certain minds, poisoned by seditious propaganda." Refusing to yield to Buddhist demands, Diem added: "Buddhism in Viet Nam finds its fundamental safeguards in the constitution, of which I personally am the guardian...