“Sea of Fire”: A Buddhist Pedagogy of Dying and Black Encounters Across Two Waves

• In Event: Activating Dissent/Descent: Epistemologies of the Fantastic

Abstract

This paper studies an exchange between “engaged Buddhism” and Black liberation theology from 1965-1967 in an effort to articulate a different approach towards a politics of death, or what scholars now call “necropolitics,” at this interface. Focusing on a world-transformative dialogue between Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King, Jr., this study begins with Hanh’s vindications of the practice of self-immolation during the imperialist wars in Vietnam, as mediated through his pedagogy of “engaged Buddhism” and its epistemological and historical elaboration in the West. Decisive to MLK’s momentous shift towards both anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist political commitments, formally enunciated in his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” I interrogate how this encounter develops and globalizes a distinctive epistemology of death and dying, justice, and non-violence—one that absolutely cannot be accessed without a notion of the “fantastic,” an avowal or faith in something beyond those ontologies assumed by the limits of modern secularism or any formation of civil society. This paper moves on to bring this earlier formulation to bear on contemporary discourses of necropolitics that predominantly revolve around either terroristic martyrdom or the abjection connoted under the heading “social death.” I raise questions about how earlier legacies can move our pedagogies and activism away from tendencies towards teleological thought and fascinations with the pathologies of spectacular violence, instead to recenter the preservation of ontological totality and the praxis of abolishing suffering as instantiated by Buddhist and Black liberation theologies at their conjunctures. In doing so, I also hope to restore historicity to the political and social injunctions of both engaged Buddhism and Black passive resistance as they have been displaced in subsequent movements of counter-insurgency: an endeavor which returns to visions of justice yet unknown in their paradoxical claims to freedom, inheritance, and descent.

Author

• Sharon Luk