July 13, 2025

It is 8 o'clock in the morning of 11 June, 1963. In the city of Saigon in South Vietnam more than 300 Buddhist monks and nuns have gathered inside the largest Pagoda in Saigon, the Xa Loi Pagoda. They emerge, walking in procession, chanting and beating small drums. They follow a pale blue sedan, containing a revered 66 year old monk named Thich Quang Duc¹, as well as two attendant monks.

They walk toward a busy intersection, a few blocks away from the presidential palace. They arrive shortly after 9am. A large crowd has gathered, attracted by the procession, including two American reporters, tipped off the day before that something newsworthy will happen, although they have not been told what.

Thich Quang Duc and his attendants exit the car, and place a small pillow on the ground. He seats himself upright in the lotus posture. He is alert but serene, assured and in full command of his body. His attendants douse him from head to toe with five gallons of gasoline. He takes a single wooden match. Strikes it. And drops it into his lap, setting himself on fire.

The flames roar, engulfing him entirely.

He does not cry out, but instead recites aloud "homage to the Buddha of Infinite Light", repeating this for about 30 seconds until the rising flames drown his voice. From that point on his voice can no longer be heard, but he continues to sit upright for roughly six minutes, while, as one reporter wrote, "his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh… he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him."

Quang Duc was not depressed nor suicidal. He was active in his community, and well respected. Another monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, who had lived with him for the prior year, wrote that Thich Quang Duc was "a very kind and lucid person… calm and in full possession of his mental faculties when he burned himself." Nor was he isolated and acting alone or impulsively. As we'll see, the decision was one he made carefully, with the blessing of and as part of his community.

Background to the sacrifice

At the time, South Vietnam was led by President Ngo Dinh Diem, a devout Catholic who had taken power in 1955, and then instigated oppressive actions against the Buddhist majority population of South Vietnam. This began with measures like filling civil service and army posts with Catholics, and giving them preferential treatment on loans, land distribution, and taxes. Over time, Diem escalated his measures, and in 1963 he banned flying the Buddhist flag during Vesak, the festival in honour of the Buddha's birthday. On May 8, during Vesak celebrations, government forces opened fire on unarmed Buddhists who were protesting the ban, killing nine people, including two children, and injured many more.

After the shooting, protests erupted throughout South Vietnam. Leaders of the main Buddhist groups met in the Xa Loi Pagoda, the largest Pagoda in Saigon, and decided to form the "Inter-Sect Committee for the Protection of Buddhism". The Committee's purpose was to help co-ordinate protests and negotiate with the government.

Unfortunately, standard measures for negotiation – petitions, street fasting, protests, and demands for concessions – were ignored by the Diem government, or met with force, as in the Vesak shooting. The Inter-Sect Committee quickly realized something more was needed. In Buddhist teaching, suicide is an unwholesome action, a violation of the first moral precept to refrain from taking any life (including your own). But sacrificing your body for the benefit of others was considered not to be a violation of the precept, but rather the highest form of generosity and compassion. This was made explicit in the Lotus Sutra, from the second century CE, which told the story of a Bodhisattva who self-immolated as an act of service to all sentient beings, with the fire of his body illuminating the world for 1,200 years.

Since conventional measures were failing, the Inter-Sect Committee decided to consider more extreme measures, including the idea of a voluntary self-immolation. While extreme, they hoped it would create an international media incident, to draw attention to the suffering of Buddhists in South Vietnam. They noted in their meeting minutes the power of photographs to focus international attention: "one body can reach where ten thousand leaflets cannot." It was to be a Bodhisattva deed to help awaken the world.

At least three younger monks volunteered to self-immolate. But the leaders of the Committee worried that this offer, while generous, was overly impulsive. They insisted the act be done by a revered elder of unassailable calm. Thich Quang Duc, a 66 year old monk who had helped build many Pagodas and instruct many younger monks, offered himself to the Committee on June 9.

On June 10, the Inter-Sect Committee contacted at least four Saigon-based members of the international media, telling them to be present for a "major event" that would occur the next morning. One of them was a photographer from the Associated Press, Malcolm Browne, who said he had "no idea" what he'd see, beyond expecting some kind of protest. When Thich Quang Duc and his attendants exited the car, Browne was 15 meters away, just outside the ring of chanting monks. Browne took more than 100 photos, fighting off nausea from the smell of burning gasoline and human flesh, and struggling with the horror, as he created a permanent visual record of Thich Quang Duc's sacrifice.

The sacrifice was not in vain. The next day, Browne's photos made the front page of newspapers around the world. They shocked people everywhere, and galvanized mass protests in South Vietnam. US President John F. Kennedy reportedly exclaimed "Jesus Christ!" upon first seeing the photo. The US government, which had been instrumental in installing and supporting the anti-communist Diem, withdrew its support, and just a few months later supported a coup that led to Diem's death, a change in government, and the end of anti-Buddhist policy².

What are we to make of self-immolation?

I first saw the image of Thich Quang Duc's self-immolation as a boy of about ten years old.

I was shocked and astonished.

What could make someone choose to do this?

It appeared to involve pain beyond what I'd ever previously conceived.

And yet it was pain that he took upon himself voluntarily, to serve his community's need. His pain, and the witnessing of the chanting monks around him, said to the world: "this is how we are hurt."

How deep must his belief in his own intention have been? To not only light and drop the match, but to do so deliberately, and to sit there and not cry out?

Was there anything in this world I would be willing to endure this for? Would there ever be any such thing, in all my life? Did I know people with such belief? How had he come to have such intensity of belief, such incredible resolve?

What was he feeling as he exited the car and sat down on the cushion? As the gasoline was poured over him? Was he nervous? Connected to what he was about to do? Or numb, proceeding on auto-pilot?

With how much conscious intention did he make the final decision to light himself on fire? Was he mostly anticipating pain? Thinking of loved ones? Perhaps considering putting the match down, standing up, and walking away? It would have been understandable, a very human choice.

And, most of all, as he burned: what was he going through? How could he bear to burn so, and not cry out?

Perhaps most astonishing of all to me: he went through all this despite not knowing what the outcome of his actions would be. He must have wondered if his sacrifice would be in vain, ignored by the world. He never knew that he helped precipitate the end of the oppression of Buddhists in South Vietnam.

It was an event so extraordinary as to almost defy comprehension. But it's best understood not as an anomaly, but rather as an extreme example of the many sacrifices, small and large, that we all choose to make through our lives. This essay uses Thich Quang Duc's sacrifice as a lens to better understand how we make these choices.

What was it like? How could he have endured that pain?

The most unavoidable question is: what was Thich Quang Duc experiencing? We can see his outward composure, but what was happening inside? And how could he endure such pain?

Let us begin with the question of how he could have endured the pain. As we explore this question, we'll find ourselves drawn deeper into the question of what he was actually experiencing.

The most obvious explanations for how he endured the pain seem inadequate. Perhaps, you might think, he used an anesthetic. But it's unlikely: Vietnamese monks take vows against mind-clouding drugs, and independent witnesses noted his clear speech and decisive movement. Or perhaps he went into a kind of shock, a combination of burned-away nerve endings, and stress-induced analgesia, dulling the impact of the pain. Those things likely did eventually ameliorate the pain. But not initially. More speculatively, perhaps he had congenital analgesia, a rare condition where people don't feel pain. That's also unlikely – such conditions are extremely rare, and there's no evidence he had such a condition.

It is true that inhaling carbon monoxide from the flames would have reduced the pain, probably after about 30 to 60 seconds. But full carbon monoxide stupor makes people slump. Thich Quang Duc remained upright for six minutes. And, in any case, there was still the initial period, before carbon monoxide narcosis had time to take effect.

What seems most likely is that deep meditation helped reduce his pain³. He sat in full lotus position, legs crossed, each foot resting on the opposite thigh. He held a string of wooden prayer beads in his left hand, often used as a sensory focus in meditation. And, as mentioned earlier, he repeated the Vietnamese mantra "Nam mô A Di Đà Phật" – meaning "homage to the Buddha of Infinite Light" – for at least thirty seconds, when the rising flames drowned his voice.

But saying "meditation made him feel less pain" explains little. How did it change his experience of pain? Unless you are an experienced meditator who has used meditation to modulate your own pain, the statement has little meaning. It's a mere label for experience, and doesn't convey the actual felt sense. What does that experience feel like? How is it different from the experience of a non-meditator?

One approach to these questions is to use science to develop a detailed description of how developing meditative mastery causes corresponding changes in people's brains and their experience of pain. Hundreds of such studies have been done. Most offer detailed nuts-and-bolts findings: one study, for example, taught novices how to focus on their breath, returning attention when it wanders; then applied an uncomfortably hot probe to the novice's calf; and used MRI to find that meditation changes which parts of the brain respond to the probe. Ordinarily, the response is seen in the anterior insula, a part of the brain which typically acts as an internal alarm bell for bodily threats. But what the scientists observed was that the activity moved to the fronto-polar and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, regions usually involved in deliberate planning and cognitive re-appraisal.

This kind of description is disappointing. If you don't understand what the meditators are doing, and brain regions like the anterior insula aren't meaningful to you, then these studies don't add much to your understanding of what's going on. It feels a bit like hearing that "doing the wibble wobble caused the gyrating goonbas area of the brain to flibble flobble, and so the meditators felt less pain." Still, perhaps with hundreds of such studies, you'd begin to build up a picture of the connections between different brain regions, how they interrelate to one another, and to subjective experiences of pain, and so arrive at a deeper understanding of how the brain feels and modulates pain.

Some studies do connect more directly to things most of us already understand. In one study, scientists wrapped almost-naked monks in towels that had been soaked in icy water, and placed the monks in a cold room. In ordinary subjects this quickly produces hypothermia. The monks, steeped in meditative practice, were able to raise their body temperature, in some cases boosting their finger and toe temperatures by up to 8 degrees celsius, and drying the soaking-wet towel within about 15 minutes. Followup MRI studies showed a rich variety of changes in the monks' brains, from a massive surge in frontal gamma waves, to heightened activity in the hypothalamus and periaqueductal gray – regions that increase body heat and damp pain. At the same time, the anterior insula alarm centre mentioned above also fell quiet. These results are much more intelligible, since things like hypothermia, raised temperature, the shock of ice-cold water, and so on, have familiar meanings to most of us. And you think to yourself: "even if I've no idea what 'frontal gamma waves' and the 'anterior insula' are, I could no doubt learn about the role they play in the brain. And it sounds like humanity is starting to develop a detailed understanding of the relationship between meditative practice and changes in the brain, and how this modulates pain, even if there's still much to learn.'

Unfortunately, however good such descriptions get, on their own they don't bridge the gap between description and experience. It's like playing the violin: you can have an incredibly detailed and accurate and insightful description of how to play the violin well, and yet have no idea at all of what it feels like to play the violin well. We can understand the mechanisms relating meditative technique and pain. And yet that doesn't tell us what it's like to meditate, how it affects our experience of pain, or how it can enable such an incredible victory of mind over matter, triumph over our body's most urgent demands.

Suppose, however, that instead of describing meditation, someone instructs us in how to meditate. We try it, experience something, try some more, experience some more, change and develop what we do, what we experience. All without needing to know about the anterior insula or gamma waves or the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And yet, we humans are apparently similar enough to one another that learning similar techniques often (not always!) gives us similar experiences. We can't (yet) make one another have particular experiences. But we can give hints, diagnose differences, make suggestions. At the same time: we are different enough that what works for one person may not work for another, or need modification. And we can never be sure how similar our experience is to that of another. We don't even really know what it means to have a similar experience. And so: we can learn meditative technique. We can learn to modulate our own pain response. We can come to understand experientially, at least a little, what it would be like to be doused in gasoline and set alight. But there is still a fundamental mystery: we are forever barred⁴ from the experience of Thich Quang Duc.

How do we decide what to sacrifice for?

We cannot know what it was to be Thich Quang Duc in that moment. But a more tractable and at least equally interesting question is: what was it like to become him? How did he come to make that final choice to drop the match? These questions matter because we all face similar questions. "How do we decide what to sacrifice for?" is a great question, a question of almost open-ended depth, connected to many other important questions and crucial life decisions. How do we decide what we want? What does success mean? How is our understanding of success constructed, both individually and collectively? What do we value?

I'm framing these as intellectual questions. But that is only a small part of the story. Our answers are grounded in our friendships, in our community, in our culture. They are not just intellectual, but also emotional, social, and cultural questions. Our answers emerge out of our most basic stances toward the universe. Thich Quang Duc's sacrifice wasn't an impulsive one-off, nor did it arise from some purely philosophical argument. It was the outcome of a lifetime of becoming. One that saw him become a venerated figure within the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam. One that saw him in that place and that time, with that serenity and that conviction, and most of all with that capacity to take on pain for others. It can only have arisen out of a powerful belief grounded in his entire being. How did he come to believe so deeply? We do not so much decide what to sacrifice for, rather we come to embody certain sacrificial values. How does that process of embodiment come about? And perhaps an even better question: what kinds of community can produce such an individual? What values and beliefs and practices in a culture lead to what qualities of sacrifice⁵?

These questions are too large to answer here! But we can explore and riff on them, and make some small increment in understanding. I will return to them in later writing.

Self-immolation as moral invention

In the 1990s, a wealthy businessman named Zell Kravinsky began donating millions of dollars to support public health. As he increased his philanthropic giving, he wondered what more he could do. Kravinsky learned that the odds of a kidney donor dying from the transplant procedure was about 1 in 4,000. After the transplant, most donors continue to live well with just one kidney, apparently near unaffected, while transforming the recipient's life. Upon learning these facts, most of us would perhaps find them interesting, and then move on. Kravinsky's empathy and generosity went deeper. In a leap of moral imagination, he decided to donate a kidney altruistically to a stranger, someone he didn't know. He decided: "to withhold a kidney from someone who would otherwise die means valuing one's own life at 4,000 times that of a stranger".

Many people object to Kravinsky's reasoning, some even finding it abhorrent, a form of disconnection from his own loved ones, or alienation from self. I won't attempt to sort through those issues. Rather, I want to point out that Kravinsky was inventing a new kind of moral act: purely altruistic kidney donation. Even if you think that act had negative moral value, that it was a bad thing to do, it was still rooted in moral imagination that expanded our moral universe. That initial spark of moral imagination resulted in a broader moral invention, a new, repeatable, scalable form of altruistic giving.

Since Kravinsky's donation, many articles have been written about it, and it's been debated at great length. More than a dozen organizations have been founded to encourage and enable people to make altruistic kidney donations. As I write, several thousand kidneys have been altruistically donated worldwide. While those donations are of great importance for the people involved, it's tempting to conclude that the number is small enough that this doesn't meaningfully change our society as a whole. But acts of moral invention often take time to grow in importance. Similar acts of moral invention have changed and expanded human civilization many times, for both good and for ill. They are one of the most remarkable of human inventions.

Consider slavery. For much of human history, slavery was commonplace, including in Ancient Greece, Rome, China, and many other ancient civilizations. The Bible mentions slavery often, sometimes framing it positively. Even Jesus does not explicitly condemn slavery. That was first done forcefully in the 4th Century, by a Christian Bishop named Gregory, in the town of Nyssa (in modern Turkey). Gregory calls the idea of one human owning another "opposition to God", and asks: "Who can sell a man, made in the image of God, for money?" Gregory was an important person in his time, and influential on other matters, but his ideas on slavery were ignored at the time, despite being forcefully argued. And yet more than a thousand years later, Gregory's argument resurfaced, and was eventually quoted by important 18th- and 19th-century Christian abolitionists, as an ancient precedent for emancipation. This is often the way: moral invention changes our relationship to the universe; at first the effect is barely noticeable, but it is gradually embodied in movements and organizations that scale that change.

Today, we take ideas like abolitionism for granted. They are part of the repertoire of moral acts available to us. But they required great imagination, almost a kind of moral genius, to conceive. They change our relationship to the universe, saying "this type of act is possible", and also making some assertion about the value in the act, for good or for evil. And by expanding our repertoire of moral acts and changing our values, they also change the range of ways we may decide to sacrifice for. Of course, abolitionism and altruistic kidney donation are just two examples of a larger constellation of moral inventions: the street protest; the hunger strike; gender equality; racial equality; human rights; the elevation of kindness to a virtue ("turn the other cheek", "love thy neighbour as thyself"); animal rights; and many, many more.

Self-immolation as protest is a kind of moral invention. The idea did not originate with Thich Quang Duc and the Inter-Sect Committee. In a similar though much less well-known case, in 1948 a Vietnamese Monk named Kuo-shun self-immolated to protest Maoist destruction of Buddhist temples. It's uncertain, but plausible that this helped inspire Thich Quang Duc's protest. And there were other antecedents, too – from the Lotus Sutra mentioned earlier, to the historical gari mass burnings in Russia in the 17th through 20th centuries, where entire groups of people self-immolated to protest changes imposed on their Christian faith. So Thich Quang Duc's self-immolation was likely inspired by earlier acts. It was also different to them: for instance, in the ceremonial and community and media aspects. In that sense, it was part of an ongoing process of moral invention. In particular, it contributed greatly to the spread of self-immolation as a form of protest. The sociologist Michael Biggs⁶ has identified more than 500 self-immolations as protest in the four decades after Thich Quang Duc, most or all of which appear to have been inspired in part by Thich Quang Duc.

I've discussed Thich Quang Duc's sacrifice in tacitly positive terms. But I don't want to uncritically venerate this kind of sacrifice. As with Kravinsky's kidney donation, while it had admirable qualities, it also had many downsides, and the value may be contested. Among the 500 self-immolations identified by Biggs, many seem pointless, even evil. For example: more than 200 people in India self-immolated in protest over government plans to reserve university places for lower castes. This doesn't seem like self-sacrifice in service of a greater good. Rather, it seems likely many of these people lacked meaning in their own lives, and confused the grand gesture of the sacrifice for true meaning. Moral invention is often difficult to judge, in part because it hinges on redefining our relationship to the rest of the universe.

Moral invention matters. As I said above, it expands the range of actions we can conceive of taking. And it changes the way we think about the meaning of our actions. In all this it changes what we may sacrifice for. I won't address the questions here, but I am fascinated by many concomitant questions: how does moral invention work? What is the source of moral imagination? Is it some platonic realm, as seems to be true in mathematics and parts of design? I am not sure, though I suspect that in some regards it is. But in almost all cases I know of, it did not come out of thin air. From Jesus⁷ to Mary Wollstonecraft to Gandhi to Thich Quang Duc, acts of moral imagination and moral invention are often sourced in and provoked by suffering or injustice.

The choice of sacrifice

I struggled writing this essay. Sacrifice is often an uncomfortable topic, and in discussing Thich Quang Duc, I've kept that discomfort mostly at arm's length. His story is darkly compelling but also distant: most of us will never seriously consider making such an extraordinary sacrifice. But lurking beneath the discussion is a jugular personal question: am I too selfish? What sacrifices am I willing to make, even small ones, in service of others? In service of the greater good? How to balance sacrifice with self-interest?

I hope these questions have pulled at you as you've read, too. For myself: I've lived a life often centered on my creative pursuits, protecting those pursuits from many of the demands of the other. Such protection is necessary for individual creative contribution: individual creators find the world contains many forces attempting to co-opt their creative energy. That energy only survives if fiercely defended. Still, I wonder if I've gone too far. Have I been too self-centered in my own life? And was it sometimes for my own self-aggrandizement? What is the role of sacrifice in a life well lived? What do I owe myself? What do I owe the unself?

Both modesty and shame contribute to my aversion to discussing sacrifice too deeply here. Modesty, because such discussion too easily veers into the self-indulgence and even exhibitionism of the internet confessional. And shame, because I fear concluding that I have lived a self-centered life, and need to make a major change. I haven't overcome these feelings enough to write entirely frankly; nor have I yet thought deeply enough to write well. But I will make a few observations.

To begin: there are two quite different meanings of sacrifice. There is sacrifice for self, and sacrifice for unself. Sacrifice for self is doing difficult, painful, or dangerous things in service of our own ends. They may be quite ordinary: denying ourselves the sweet food we crave; getting up early to write a book; exercising hard, despite discomfort⁸. They may be extreme: in 2003 the rock climber Aron Ralston's arm was pinned by a falling boulder while solo canyoneering in Utah. After five days stuck under the boulder, he used a multi-tool to amputate his own arm, rappelled out of the canyon, and got help. All these involve giving up something – comfort, safety, even body parts – for our own longer-term ends.

Often, we celebrate extreme public cases of sacrifice for self. The great tennis player Rafael Nadal was known for his extraordinary dedication, and willingness to put everything into his tennis. He suffered multiple injuries that would have ended most players' careers, only to come back and dominate tennis. He was renowned for practicing with an intensity beyond what many professionals can achieve even on game day. Most of us can't routinely muster that kind of extreme will. But by the same token, Nadal and others like him, are extremely well-rewarded. While other people certainly benefit from his work – indeed he gave joy to millions of people, who enjoyed seeing him hit a piece of rubber over a nylon net – it seems at core a sacrifice for self.

By contrast, Thich Quang Duc made a sacrifice for unself. It's the sacrifice of a soldier throwing themself on a live grenade to save their friends. Of the story of Jesus on the Cross, sacrificing himself for humanity. Or in quieter ways: the anonymous donation to the homeless shelter or food bank. Caring for a debilitated family member. Giving up individual ambitions to support one's children. Often, it's difficult to assess how much such actions are for self or for unself. I've heard it argued that "people should have more children" both for fundamentally selfish reasons ("it's the most meaningful thing I've ever done") and on the grounds that not having children is selfish. I suspect both types of reason may be true: for some people having children is a great sacrifice, while for others it is not. Regardless, all these examples are, in different measures, forms of sacrifice for unself, forms of love.

Did Thich Quang Duc feel selfless, from the inside? I have no doubt he felt loss and pain. But also that he suffered those in part in trade for a way of making his own life more meaningful. Much of sacrifice for unself seems to consist of transmuting the act into one that you view as in your own best interest. In some sense, it's about internalizing the other as self. I'm uncomfortable with this speculation, since it seems to reduce the meaning in his sacrifice. But I think it's better to value the expansion in self. We all act selfishly. But some of us have more and less admirable senses of self. And so how selfish something is may depend upon the vantage point. From the inside, sacrifice doesn't entirely feel like sacrifice.

One of my favourite quotes is from the author Lois Bujold:

All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In service of their goals they lay down time and energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self.

That is, a consequence of a well-chosen sacrifice is growth and transformation. Perhaps what you sacrifice for is determined in part by whether you are growing in worthwhile ways, consumed but also transformed, developing the enlarged self. Indeed, the higher our standards for our deeds, the greater the sacrifice, and the greater the transformation. Thich Quang Duc was not positively transformed in the sense Bujold literally describes. But perhaps he felt himself as contributing to a larger transformation in humanity. His act of sacrifice wasn't giving back the enlarged self; it was giving back an enlarged humanity.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Fawaz Al-Matrouk, Mona Alsubaei, Alexander Berger, Joe Carlsmith, Laura Deming, Andy Matuschak, Howard Nielsen, Wendy Nielsen, and Hannu Rajaniemi for conversations that influenced this essay.

Footnotes

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