Source: http://www.buddhistinformation.com/self_immolation.htm
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 13:48:24+00:00

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Vietnam has marked the 40th anniversary of the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc.
The monk's protest came to symbolise the repression of the US-backed South Vietnamese regime against Buddhism.
The Executive Council of the Vietnamese Buddhist Church and local government officials in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, attended the memorial service at the An Quang Pagoda.
On June 11, 1963, Duc, a 67-year-old monk from the Linh-Mu Pagoda in Hue, burned himself to death at a busy intersection in Saigon.
"I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think…. As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him."
5. Pay fair compensations to the victim’s families and punish those responsible for their deaths.
When these requests were not addressed by the Deim regime, Thich Quang Duc carried out his self-immolation. Following his death, Thich Quang Duc was cremated and legend has it that his heart would not burn. As a result, his heart is considered Holy and is in the custody of the Reserve Bank of Vietnam.
While Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation has received little attention from religious scholars, it has been interpreted from both a religious and political perspective. From the prevailing point of view he has been "exclusively conceptualized as a transhistorical, purely religious agent, virtually homologous with his specifically religious forebears and ancestors." Therefore, his self-immolation is seen as a "religious suicide" and is religiously justified based on Chinese Buddhist texts written between the fifth and tenth centuries C.E.
"The press spoke then of suicide, but in the essence, it is not. It is not even a protest. What the monks said in the letters they left before burning themselves aimed only at alarming, at moving the hearts of the oppressors, and at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured then by the Vietnamese. To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance…. The Vietnamese monk, by burning himself, says with all his strength and determination that he can endure the greatest of sufferings to protect his people…. To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, that is, to suffer and to die for the sake of one’s people. This is not suicide."
"Suicide is an act of self-destruction, having as causes the following: (1) lack of courage to live and to cope with difficulties; (2) defeat by life and loss of all hope; (3) desire for nonexistence….. The monk who burns himself has lost neither courage nor hope; nor does he desire nonexistence. On the contrary, he is very courageous and hopeful and aspires for something good in the future. He does not think that he is destroying himself; he believes in the good fruition of his act of self-sacrifice for the sake of others…. I believe with all my heart that the monks who burned themselves did not aim at the death of their oppressors but only at a change in their policy. Their enemies are not man. They are intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred, and discrimination which lie within the heart of man."
Accelerated the spread of "engaged Buddhism" that had begun in Vietnam in the 1930’s.
Led to the overthrow of the Diem regime in South Vietnam in November of 1963.
Helped change public opinion against the American backed South Vietnamese government and its war against the communist supported Viet Cong.
The social and political impact of Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation was far reaching. It was reported in the New York Times the next day and a copy of the fach Quang Duc in 1963 has been followed by the self-immolation of several monks and by the continued activism of the "rebellious monks of Hue" against the communist government in Vietnam over the past three decades.
Who Was Thich Quang Duc?
Thich Quang Duc was born in 1897 and was 67 at the time of his self-immolation in 1963. He had lived in a Buddhist monastic community since he was seven years old and was ordained as a full Buddhist monk or Bhikku when he was twenty. Thich Quang Duc practiced an extreme ascetic purification way for several years, became a teacher, and spent many years rebuilding Buddhist temples in Vietnam prior to 1943. At the time of his death, he was a member of the Quan the Am temple and Director of rituals for the United Vietnamese Buddhist Congregation. Thich Quang Duc is considered to be a bodhisattva, "an enlightened being - one on the path to awakening who vows to forego complete enlightenment until he or she helps all other beings attain enlightenment."
After his funeral, where his remains were finally reduced to ashes, Quang Duc's heart, which had not burned, was retrieved, enshrined, and treated as a sacred relic (Schecter 1967: 179).
In spite of the fact that this event took place during the same busy news week as the civil rights movement in the United States was reaching a peak (with the enrollment of the first two black students at the University of Alabama and in the same week as the murder, in Jackson, Mississippi, of the civil rightsleader Medgar Evers), as the week progressed, Quang Duc's death and the subsequent demonstrations associated with his funeral were covered by the American media in greater detail. From the small initial article on page three of the New York Times on 12 June that reported the death accompanied only by a photograph of a nearby protest that prevented a fire truck from reaching the scene, the story was briefly summarized and updated on page five the next day and then was moved to the lead story, on page one on 14 June 1963, accompanied by the following headline: "U.S. Warns South Vietnam on Demands of Buddhists: [South Vietnamese President] Diem is told he faces censure if he fails to satisfy religious grievances, many o which are called just." The story, no longer simply involving the actions of a lone Buddhist monk but now concerned with the official U.S. reaction, remained on page one for the following days, was reported in greater detail by Halberstam in the Sunday edition (16 June 1963), and was mentioned for the first time in an editorial column on 17 June 1963, one week after it occurred. By the autumn o that year, the images of either protesting or burning monks had appeared in a number of popular magazines, most notably Life Magazine (June, August, September, and November issues).
In spite of the wide coverage this event received in newspapers and the popular presses, it seems puzzling that it received relatively little or no treatment by scholars of religion. Apart from a few brief descriptions of these events in an assortment of books on world religions in general (such as Ninian Smart's World's Religions, where it is interpreted as an "ethical" act [1989: 4471) or on Buddhism in Southeast Asia, only one detailed article was published at that time, in History of Religions, written by Jan Yiin-Hua (1965). This article was concerned with examining the medieval Chinese Buddhist precedents for Quang Duc's death, a death that quickly came to be interpreted in the media as an instance of self-immolation, or selfsacrifice, to protest religious persecution of the Buddhists in South Vietnam by the politically and militarily powerful Vietnamese Roman Catholics. According to such accounts, the origin of the protests and, eventually, Quang Duc's death, was a previous demonstration, on 8 May 1963, in which government troops aggressively broke up a Buddhist gathering in the old imperial city of Hue that was demonstrating for, among other things, the right to fly the Buddhist flag along with the national flag. The government, however, took no responsibility for the nine Buddhists who died in the ensuing violence at that time, blaming their deaths instead on Communists. Accordingly, outrage for what the Buddhists considered to be the unusually violent actions of the government troops at Hue was fueled over the following weeks, culminating, according to this interpretation, in Quang Duc's sacrificial death.
Given that the event was generally acknowledged by most interpreters to be a sacrifice, an essentially religious issue, it is no surprise that the central concern of Jan was to determine how such actions could be considered Buddhist, given their usually strict rules against killing in general, and suicide in particular. In his own words, these actions "posed a serious problem of academic interest, namely, what is the place of religious suicide in religious history and what is its justification?" (243). The reader is told that the monks' motivations were "spiritual" and that their self-inflicted deaths were "religious suicides," because "self-immolation signifies something deeper than merely the legal concept of suicide or the physical action of self-destruction" (243). Given that the event is self-evidently religious (an interpretation that is based on an assumption that is undefended), the question of greatest interest has little to do with the possible political origins or overtones of the event but rather "whether such a violent action is justifiable according to religious doctrine" (243). It seems clear that for this historian of religions, the action can only be properly understood-and eventually justified-once it is placed in the context of texts written by Chinese Buddhist specialists from the fifth century C.E. onward (e.g., the Biographies of Eminent Monks by Hui-chiao [497-554 C.E.] and the Sung Collection of Biographies of Eminent Monks by Tsan-ning [919-1001 C.E.]). Jan's concern, then, is to determine whether these actions were justifiable (something not properly the concern of scholars of religion) exclusively on the basis of devotee accounts, some of which were written over one thousand years before the Vietnam War.
After a survey of these texts, the article concludes that these actions are indeed justifiable. Basing his argument on changing Chinese Buddhist interpretations of self-inflicted suffering and death, Jan finds a "more concrete emphasis upon the practical action needed to actualize the spiritual aim" (265). Accordingly, these actions largely result from the desire of elite devotees, inspired by scriptures (255), to demonstrate great acts of selflessness (acts whose paradigms are to be found in stories of the unbounded compassion and mercy of assorted bodhisattvas). The closest Jan comes to offering a political interpretation of any of these reported deaths is that the "politico-religious reasons" for some scriptural instances of self-immolation are "protest against the political oppression and persecution of their religion" (252).
In terms of the dominance of the discourse on sui generis religion, this article constitutes a fine example of how an interpretive framework can effectively manage and control an event. Relying exclusively on authoritative Chinese Buddhist texts and, through the use of these texts, interpreting such acts exclusively in terms of doctrines and beliefs (e.g., self-immolation, much like an extreme renunciant might abstain from food until dying, could be an example of disdain for the body in favor of the life of the mind and wisdom) rather than in terms of their socio-political and historical context, the article allows its readers to interpret these deaths as acts that refer only to a distinct set of beliefs that happen to be foreign to the non-Buddhist. And when politics is acknowledged to be a factor, it is portrayed as essentially oppressive to a self-evidently pure realm of religious motivation and action. In other words, religion is the victim of politics, because the former is a priori known to be pure. And precisely because the action and belief systems were foreign and exotic to the vast majority of Americans, these actions needed to be mediated by trained textual specialists who could utilize the authoritative texts of elite devotees to interpret such actions. The message of such an article, then, is that this act on the part of a monk can be fully understood only if it is placed within the context of ancient Buddhist documents and precedents rather than in the context of contemporary geopolitical debates. (And further, that the ancient occurrences of such deaths can themselves be fully understood only from the point of view of the intellectual devotees [i.e., Buddhist historians].) That the changing geopolitical landscape of South Asia in the early 1960s might assist in this interpretation is not entertained. It is but another instance of the general proscription against reductionism.
Such an idealist and conservative interpretation is also offered by several contributors to the Encyclopedia of Religion. Marilyn Harran, writing the article on suicide (Eliade 1987: vol. 14, 125-131), agrees with Jan's emphasis on the need to interpret these events in light of doctrine and in the light of spiritual elites. She writes that although religiously motivated suicide (an ill-defined category that prejudges the act) "may be appropriate for the person who is an arhat, one who has attained enlightenment, it is still very much the exception to the rule" (129). And Carl-Martin Edsman, writing the article on fire (Eliade 1987: vol. 5, 340-346), maintains that although death by fire can be associated with "moral, devotional, or political reasons," it can also be "regarded as promoting rebirth into a higher existence as a bodhisattva, an incipient Buddha, or admittance to 'the paradise' of the Buddha Amitabha" (344). In a fashion similar to the exclusive emphasis on the insider's perspective, and having isolated such acts in the purer realm of religious doctrine and belief, Edsman immediately goes on to assert that the "Buddhist suicides in Vietnam in the 1960s were enacted against a similar background; for this reason-unlike the suicides of their Western imitators-they do not constitute purely political protest actions" (344). The "similar background" of which he writes is the set of beliefs in a pure land, compassion, selflessness, and so on, all of which enable Edsman to isolate the Vietnamese deaths from issues of power and politics. Because similar deaths in the United States took place' without the benefit of, for example, a cyclical worldview and notions of rebirth, and the like, he is able to conclude that the U.S. deaths by fire may have been political. For Edsman, the doctrinal system of Buddhism provides a useful mechanism for interpreting these acts as essentially ahistorical and religious.
Some will no doubt argue that, if indeed the discourse on sui generis religion was at one time dominant, it no longer is. Even if one at least acknowledges that the study of supposedly disembodied ideas and beliefs is interconnected with material issues or power and privilege, it is easy to banish and isolate such involvements to the field's prehistory, its European, colonial past, in an attempt to protect the contemporary field from such charges (recall Strenski's attempt to isolate interwar European scholarship as a means of protecting the modern profession). To rebut such isolationist arguments, one need look no further than Charles Orzech's 1994 article, "Provoked Suicide," to find this discourse in its contemporary forma form virtually unchanged since jan's article was published some thirty years ago. Like Jan, Orzech attempts to overcome the "huge cultural gulf that separated the observer from those involved" (155) by placing Quang Duc’s tradition of what Orzech terms the "self-immolation paradigms" (149) as well as the many other stories of selfless action one finds throughout the mythic history of Buddhism (e.g., from the jataka tales, the story of the bodhisattva who willingly gives up his life to feed the hungry tigress). Also like Jan, Orzech is concerned to answer one of the questions often asked about these apparently puzzling Vietnamese Buddhists' actions: "whether 'religious suicide' was not a violation of Buddhist precepts condemning violence" (145). Using Rene Girard's theory of sacrificial violence, Orzech answers this question by recovering a distinction he believes to be often lost in the study of Buddhism: its sacred violence as well as its much emphasized nonviolent aspect (for a modern example of the latter emphasis, see the essays collected by Kraft ).
For our purpose, what is most important to observe about both Jan's and Orzech's reading of Quang Duc's action is that in neither case are historical and political context of any relevance. In both cases, it is as if the burning monk is situated in an almost Eliadean ritual time, removed from the terrors of historical, linear time-a place of no place, where the symbolism of fire is far more profound than the heat of the fire itself. For example, in his interpretation of the early selfimmolation tales, Orzech explicitly acknowledges that "(al)though little context information is available to us, it is clear that in each case the sacrifice is performed as a remedy for an intolerable situation" (154, emphasis added)--clearly, social and political contexts are of little relevance for authoritatively interpreting timeless ritual or religious actions. Several lines later, when he addresses Quang Duc's death directly, Orzech effectively secludes and packages this particular event within its insider, doctrinal, and mythic context, by noting that the "politics are complex, and I will not comment on them now" (154). At no point in his article does he return in any detail to the geopolitics of mid-twentieth-century Vietnam; instead, Quang Duc's actions are exclusively understood as "sanctioned by myth and example in Buddhist history" and as reworked, reenacted Vedic sacrificial patterns (156). Assuming that mythic history communicated through elite insider documents provides the necessary context for ultimately interpreting such actions, Orzech is able to draw a conclusion concerning the actor's motivations and intentions: "Quang Duc was seeking to preach the Dharma to enlighten both Diem and his followers and John Kennedy and the American people" (156); "As an actualization of mythic patterns of sacrifice it [the self-immolation] was meant as a creative, constructive and salvific act, an act which intended to remake the world for the better of everyone in it" (158). Simply put, Quang Duc's death is an issue of soteriology.
In both Jan's and Orzech's readings, as well as those of Harran and Edsman cited earlier, the death of Quang Duc has nothing necessarily to do with contemporary politics. In fact, it appears from the scholarship examined here that to understand this death fully requires no information from outside of elite Buddhist doctrine whatsoever. In all four cases-much as in the case of the comparative religion textbooks examined earlier-the discourse on sui generis religion effectively operates to seclude so-called religious events within a mythic, symbolic world all their own, where their adequate interpretation needs "little contextual information." For example, in all these studies, Quang Duc is never identified as a citizen of South Vietnam but is understood only as a Buddhist monk, a choice of designation that already suggests the discursive conflict I have documented. In other words, from the outset, the parameters of the interpretive frame of reference are narrowly restricted. Quang Duc is hardly a man acting in a complex sociopolitical world, in which intentions, implications, and interpretations often fly past each other. Instead, he is exclusively conceptualized as a transhistorical, purely religious agent, virtually homologous with his specifically religious forebears and ancestors. It is almost as if Thich Quang Duc--the historical agent who died on 11 June 1963, by setting himself on fire at a busy downtown intersection in Saigon--has, through the strategies deployed by scholars of sui generis religion, been transformed into a hierophany that is of scholarly interest only insomuch as his actions can be understood as historical instances of timeless origin and meaning.
According to Paul Siegel, this event constituted an act of protest against the Vietnamese government "which was carrying on a war of which they [the Buddhists] were profoundly weary" (1986: 162). The distance between these two readings is great indeed. On the one hand, one finds representations varying from the Diem government's own press release that, according to the New York Times, maintained that the event was an example of "extremist and truth-concealing propaganda that sowed doubt about the goodwill of the Government" (12 June 1963), to the Times' and Orzech's (1994: 154) portrayal of the protest as being against the specifically religious persecution of the Buddhists by the powerful Roman Catholics. On the other hand, however, one can question the relations between the presence of Christianity in South Vietnam and European political, cultural, military, and economic imperialism in the first place as well as question the relations between Diem's government and his U.S. economic and military backers. To concentrate only on the specifically religious nature and origins of this protest, then, serves either to ignore or, in the least, to minimalize a number of material and social factors evident from other points of view using other scales of analysis.
Concerning the links between Christianity and European imperialism in Southeast Asia, it should be clear that much is at stake depending on how one portrays the associations among European cultures, politics, religion, and the ever increasing search for new trading markets. For example, one can obscure the issue by simply discussing an almost generic "encounter with the West," where "the West" stands in place of essentially religious systems, such as Judaism and Christianity (for an example, see Eller 1992). Or one can place these belief and practice systems within their historical, social, and political contexts-a move that admittedly complicates but also improves one's analysis. For instance, in practice, the presence of Christianity was often indistinguishable from European culture and trade. This point is made by Thich Nhat Hanh, in his attempt to communicate the significance of Quang Duc's death for his American readers. Much of his small book, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire (1967), is concerned with contextualizing this event by placing it not simply in a religious but also in its wider historical, social, and political framework. Accordingly, of great importance for him is not simply to identify elements of Buddhist doctrine for his reader but to clarify early on that, since its first appearance in Vietnam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Roman Catholicism has always been "closely associated with white explorers, with merchants, and ruling classes"-specifically with the explorers, traders, and cultural and political elites of France between the years 1860 and 1945 (1967: 15). Whether intentional or not, the exportation of Christianity throughout the world brought with it new people, new architecture, new languages, new legal and ethical systems, new styles of dress, new economic arrangements, new trading goods, and so on, all based on the standards of large, powerful, and distant European countries. Because of these interrelated issues, it is inaccurate and misleading to understand Christian missionaries exclusively in terms of what may very well have been their good intentions. Such missionaries were part of a complex and interrelated system or bloc of power relations, all of which presupposed that the other was in desperate need of European-style education, economies, technologies, trade, wisdom, and, ultimately, salvation. To understand missionaries as somehow removed from this system of power would be to inscribe and protect them by means of the sui generis strategy. Without the benefit of such a protective strategy, however, it is easily understood how, at least in the case of Vietnam, the popular belief arose that Christianity was the religion of the West and "was introduced by them to facilitate their conquest of Vietnam." As Thich Nhat goes on to conclude, this belief "is a political fact of the greatest importance, even though [it] may be based on suspicion alone" (20).
The context of which Thich Nhat writes is not simply the context of mythic self-immolation paradigms so important to other scholars but the context of Vietnamese meeting Euro-American history over the past several centuries. Emphasizing this context, Thich Nhat's remarks make it plain that insomuch as sui generis religion plays a powerful role in dehistoricizing and decontextualizing human events, the very label by which we commonly distinguish just these deaths from countless others that took place during the Vietnam War-for example, "religious suicide"--is itself implicated in the aestheticization and depoliticization of human actions. What is perhaps most astounding about Thich Nhat's comments is that, despite the discourse on sui generis religion's tendency to limit scholarship to the terms set by religious insiders (recall Cantwell Smith's methodological rule), Thich Nhat-most obviously himself an insider to Vietnamese Buddhism-is the only scholar surveyed in this chapter whose remarks take into account the utter complexity of human action as well as the many scales of analysis on which participants and nonparticipants describe, interpret, understand, and explain these actions.
That the death of Quang Duc had a powerful influence on the events of 1963 in South Vietnam is not in need of debate. It has been reported that Browne's photograph of Quang Duc burning, which ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer on 12 June 1963, was on President Kennedy's desk the next morning (Moeller 1989: 355). And virtually all commentators acknowledge that the imminent fall of the Diem government was in many ways linked to the Buddhist protests and their popular support among the South Vietnamese. In the least, most commentators would agree that the deaths had what they might term unforeseen or indirect political implications. The question to be asked, however, is just what is at stake for secluding politics to the margins of these otherwise self-evidently religious events.
The very act of representation, in both the cases of the Buddhist death and the bus boycott, acts to defuse what might otherwise be understood as the tremendous sociopolitical power of the events and acts in question. In the case of the self-immolations, the image of the monk burning has by now become so decontextualized that it has been commodified; it is now a consumer item in popular culture. For example, the photograph appears on the cover of a compact disk for the alternative rock music group Rage Against the Machine.
Although both the example of the Montgomery bus boycott and the Vietnamese deaths arise from dramatically different historical and social contexts, both actions are clearly part of an oppositional discourse that is today communicated to us through, and therefore managed by, the means of dominant discourses school textbooks in one case, and as a mechanism for selling both scholarly privilege and expertise as well as a Sony Music product in another. Therefore, it should not be surprising that, in both cases, we find strategies that effectively package these actions in a decontextualized and delimited fashion. It is in this precise manner that the strategies of representation that constitute the discourse on sui generis religion are complicit with such larger issues of cultural, economic, and political power and privilege. One way to support this thesis further would be to examine carefully media, government, and scholarly interpretations of other specific historical episodes and demonstrate the ways in which it may have been economically, socially, or politically beneficial for a specifiable group to portray events as essentially and exclusively religious rather than, say, political or military. The example of what was widely termed the self-immolation-a term that from the outset does much to isolate the event as being exclusively concerned with issues of religious sacrifice--of Vietnamese Buddhists is a particularly useful example, because it seems that there was, and may yet be, a great deal at stake, economically, politically, and militarily, in the interpretation and representation of these events.
Another example well worth study would be the interpretations given to the practice of suttee or, the practice of a woman following her deceased husband to his funeral pyre, for only within an interpretive system founded on sui generis religion and which privileges the insider's account could such a practice evade contemporary feminist analysis. As van den Bosch has recently argued, the "question whether the custom [of suttee] should be regarded as religious depends upon the definition of religion within this context" (1990: 193 n. 76). In other words, one of the primary differences between the frameworks that represent this practice as, on the one hand, an example of pious female religious duty that embodies lofty motives (as suggested by Tikku 1967: 108) and, on the other, an instance of institutionalized misogyny is primarily the assumption of the autonomy of religious life from social and, in this case, specifically gendered ideology (van den Bosch 1990: 185). As already suggested, the deaths of the Buddhists could be seen as a statement either against American-backed imperialism and war or simply against the localized persecution of one religious group by another, all depending on the scale of the analysis. If the former, then the repercussions of the event strike deeply not only in Vietnam but in the United States as well. If only the latter, then the problem is isolated, it remains in Saigon, and it is up to the decision makers in Washington simply to distance themselves from Diem's mishandling of the episode. Washington's decisions are then based on reasons varying from declining public opinion in the United States, once the images reach the popular media, to the realization that in fact Diem did not represent the majority of South Vietnamese and therefore was the wrong leader to back in the war against the North (this is the dominant theme of the Times editorial on 17 June 1963). Clearly, there are practical and political advantages and disadvantages depending on which of the two above intellectual interpretations is favored.
Furthermore, it is intriguing that there exists a general correspondence between the interpretations offered in the New York Times and those offered by scholars of religion. Although differing in many ways, it appears that both are part of a complex system of power and control, specializing in the deployment of interpretive strategies-the politics of representation.
Now days, the development of computer technology, especially through that of the World Wide Web, internet communication and the Super Information Highway, we are al connected through individual computers in a new kind of electronic society. This activity has been effective in strengthening al fields of human endeavor and it has created new ways of social organization in which Buddhism cannot avoid being involved. This electronic communications revolution is a natural progression that must be embraced by Buddhism. Buddhism is a religion, which always adapted to new discoveries and social changes, and through modern technological science, and has used new media to communicate the Buddha’s teachings into the world.
In this spirit, besides constructing the Quang Duc Monastery, (a Vietnamese Buddhist and cultural centre in the City of Moreland, Melbourne Australia ), our Monastery establish the www.quangduc.com website in May 1999, the aim being to assist everyone to have an easily accessible means to study Buddhism. It is hoped that through the teachings available on this website that all will gain insight into Buddhism and themselves towards relieving their suffering and in promoting greater harmony everywhere. This website is bilingual being published in both Vietnamese and English and was created and maintained by the Venerable Thich Nguyen Tang, the Vice Abbot of the Quang Duc monastery.
· The Biography of The Most Venerable Thich Quang Duc.
At the moment this website is still under development, and will be constantly updated as a matter of course, there are many things to do. We would appreciate any help that you may provide, particularly that of practical skills such as word processing and layout of both Vietnamese and English documents that can be posted on the site. Parents may assist in encouraging their children to contribute to the site and positively effect the promotion of Buddhism, to establish a moral and ethical foundation in their lives. This life is impermanent, everything will rapidly change and all things seemingly constant will fade away, nothing will be retained forever. However, positive and negative Karma (the positive and negative actions you have performed in this and past lives) will remain with you. Negative Karma will cause suffering and turmoil in life, and positive Karma will provide you with peace and happiness. Performing good actions benefits all and oneself as a happy disposition is a healthy one, and this is communicated to others. Taking time to perform useful actions in the world is most important, all actions resonates across the world and affection and peace need to be cultivated within and without. All of us are the world, we do not live in isolation, it is imperative then that we act in improving and reflect this in our lives. When we are happy so is the world and vice versa. Helping to bear the load and dealing with difficulty in a positive manner can only improve things not the contrary. Thinking of other is thinking of ourselves in the long run while being selfish and acting entirely in ones own self interest without a thought for others splits and divides us form the common good. The fruit of peace happens and glory will bloom after you initiate this deep and profound vow of action.
We appreciate any contributions, support and assistance you can provide for the benefit of all beings. We hope our web page will serve as a good friend of you personally and all others in the realization of enlightenment in this busy life. Contact with us in regards to anything you may be able to contribute may be made by email quangduc@quangduc.com, by phone: (61) 03 93573544, fax: (61) 03 93573600.
May the Lord Buddha bless all of you and may all of you attain peace and happiness.

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