Word: buddhists
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...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...
...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 to let the Buddhists fly their own flag and promising...
...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...
...Warning. But Diem's intransigence troubled the U.S. In Saigon, U.S. embassy officials bluntly warned Diem that the U.S. would publicly condemn his treatment of the Buddhists unless he took prompt action to redress their grievances. Behind the U.S. threat was the fear that continued Buddhist discontent could cause passive resistance to government programs in the rural provinces where political unity is the key to victory in the war against the Communist Viet Cong...
...warning seemed to sink in. At meetings with Buddhist leaders, government officials tentatively acceded to all their demands. The government promised to change existing laws so as to give Buddhism equal standing with Catholicism, granted Buddhists the right to fly their flags at religious festivals. It was the flag restriction at Hué last month that set off demonstrations in which nine Buddhist marchers were gunned down by government troops. Under prodding from Buddhist leaders, the government, which had blamed the Viet Cong for the Hué tragedy, reluctantly agreed to take the blame for the incident...