In the video, she stands still in a street as a car goes by. Then, like the wick of an offering lamp, her body is hardly distinguishable from the fire burning up from her. The only thing clearly visible under the burning bonfire is her unmoving feet and the end of her robe. Palden Choetso, was one of the 12 Buddhist nuns and monks who set fire to themselves to protest against China’s policy on Tibet.
The footage of was smuggled out of Tibet and released on social media websites. Watching it makes one wonder what impels people to take on such a painful act? The Chinese government, whose repressive policies must have prompted such a form of protest, has derisively described it as an act of terrorism. Even the Dalai Lama has questioned the efficacy of such acts. If the object was to draw world attention toward the plight of the Tibetans, beyond some murmurs of protest from a distance, the free world has shown no signs of losing sleep over these mass suicides.
In Buddhism, taking life is considered to be a fundamentally sinful action. However, at the same time, traditional Buddhist teaching says giving up one’s own well-being and one’s own life for the well-being of others is also a noble act, an act of Bodhisattvas. This goes along with the solemn dedication of the Buddha of Compassion who said, “I shall remain in the suffering world to serve others until all beings are free of suffering,” instead of moving onto nirvana.
Like Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese monk burned himself to death in 1963 to protest against South Vietnamese government’s treatment of Buddhists, Palden Choetso has left us with a message. Her determination seemed to surpass that of many people who burned themselves in the world this year, even though she may not have got the attention she deserved.
But the spark that began with Tunisian fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi, who self-immolated in December 2010, has already resulted in the blossoming of the Arab Spring. Within months a series of self-immolations occurred in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Sudan and Mauritania — all places without any tradition of death by fire.
Legends of people of committing the act of self-immolation date back centuries. But the first and most famous moment of self-immolation as agitprop was that of Thich Quang Duc in South Vietnam. Later, four more monks and a nun set themselves ablaze protesting the Diem regime before it finally fell in 1963.
Rather suddenly, setting oneself on fire became a political act. As the American presence increased in Vietnam in the mid- to late 1960s, more and more monks committed self-immolation, including 13 in one week. It even took place in the US, right outside the Pentagon, when Norman Morrison, an American Quaker burned himself to death while clinging onto his child as a mark of his rejection of the Vietnam War.
The grim tactic spread across the globe: Czechoslovaks did it to protest the Soviet invasion in 1968; five Indian students did it to protest job quotas in 1990; a Tibetan monk did it to protest the Indian police stopping an anti-Chinese hunger strike in 1998; Kurds did it to protest Turkey in 1999; outlawed Falun Gong practitioners did it in Tiananmen Square in 2009.