South Viet Nam: The Heart of Quang Due

Heads bowed, palms pressed together in prayer, thousands of Buddhists filed quietly through Saigon’s Xa Loi Pagoda last week to witness what most of them believed to be a miracle. Amid the fragrance of incense-burning reeds, yellow-robed priests chanted from sunrise to midnight, laymen gazed in awe, and weeping women 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 Due.”

Two 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 Due a saint.

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 to let the Buddhists fly their own flag and promising to ease anti-Buddhist discrimination. If the regime fails to show good faith, the Buddhists vow, they will start new demonstrations—and they are counting on the symbol of Quang Due’s durable heart to help keep the faithful inspired.

-When Gautama Buddha’s body was cremated, tradition has it, some parts of it failed to burn. Joan of Arc’s heart is said to have survived her burning at the stake and been thrown into the Seine. When Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off Italy in 1822, three literary friends —Lord Byron, Edward John Trelawny and Leigh Hunt—cremated the corpse on a pyre of driftwood. The job almost done, Trelawny suddenly thrust in his arm and snatched out the heart, which, although fiery hot, was strangely unconsumed. In Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale, The Happy Prince, the statue’s broken heart fails to melt in the furnace.