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

This article presents a preliminary sketch of a broader investigation into encounters between “engaged Buddhism” and Black liberation theology in the United States from 1965–1968, an itinerary of study motivated by the eventual goal of articulating 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 Viet Nam, as mediated through his pedagogy of “engaged Buddhism” and its epistemological and historical elaboration in the West. Decisive to King’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 aim to interrogate how this encounter develops and globalizes a distinctive epistemology of death and dying, justice, and nonviolence—one that absolutely cannot be accessed without an avowal or faith in something beyond those worldviews assumed by the limits of modern secularism or any formation of civil society. Ultimately, my goal is to bring this earlier formulation to bear on contemporary discourses of bio- or necropolitics that predominantly revolve around either lenses of terroristic martyrdom or the limits of white ontology precipitating Black “social death.” Such a task includes pursuing questions about how earlier legacies can move our pedagogies and activism away from tendencies toward 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 spiritual praxes at their conjunctures. In doing so, I also hope to restore historicity to the political and social injunctions of both engaged Buddhism and Black nonviolent 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 life beyond death and pain without suffering.

Dialogue

To begin most concretely with the source material itself, Thich Nhat Hanh’s open letter to Martin Luther King, Jr. was first released in the collection Dialogue in 1965 by La Boi Press, an independent publishing house based in Saigon and established as part of the Buddhist resistance movement during the U.S. war in Viet Nam. Dialogue consists of five open letters, three written in French and two in English: leading with Hanh’s address to King entitled “In Search of the Enemy of Man,” and followed by Ho Huu Tuong’s “Paroles d’un Revenant (adress,ees 'a Mr. Jean Paul Sartre)” [“Words of a Revenant (addressed to Mr. Jean Paul Sartre)”]; Tam Ich’s “Letter to Andr,e Malraux”; Bui Giang’s “Lettre 'a Ren,e Char (Sur Le Sentier du Silence)” [“Letter to Ren,e Char (On the Path to Silence)”]; and Pham Cong Thien’s “The Ontological Background of the Present War in Viet Nam (An Open Letter to Henry Miller).”1 While future work on this project will engage each of these dialogues in the richness of their own terms, this present discussion will concentrate exclusively on the exchange between Hanh and King. It may be enough in this context to note, for now, that the latter encounter is the only one in the collection to stage a dialogue in which Western civilization is rendered through the Black radical tradition rather than through prevailing frameworks of French and Euro-American existentialism. It is precisely this distinction and the horizons of thought extended by it that concern me.

Methodologically, this particular work, Dialogue, is also compelling because it models an approach to thought that I seek to develop in my present work: namely, as per its title, the anthology performatively calls attention to the significance of elaborating the dialogical context of any particular instance of narration as its own event, as means to clarify the historical limits that enable and constrain acts of enunciation which themselves cannot be disentangled from their life and death stakes. Two examples help illustrate the relevance of this point for the specific case at hand while bringing into view the hegemonic ways that the encounter between Hanh and King has been narrativized in contemporary terms. First, a dialogue between Thich Nhat Hanh and Oprah Winfrey,2 originally televised on Winfrey’s O Network as part of her “Super Soul Sunday” series, proceeds along dominant premises that frame mid-20th-century liberation movements through ideologies accommodating and attendant on subsequent movements of counter-insurgency. Namely, in providing a synopsis of the general historical context and empirical details of the Hanh–King encounter, Winfrey recasts the imperialist wars in Viet Nam as a “civil war”; positions the United States and France as places of democratic refuge for Hanh, whose call for social transformation was presumably exclusive to the North and South Vietnamese states; and represents Hanh’s spiritual praxis as a method of personal growth for “modern man seeking mindful living,” at one point reducing Hanh’s references to political contexts of the pursuit for world peace to the resolution of atomized family conflicts. This framework of engaged Buddhism, so common today, thus renders the concept of compassion as bourgeois politeness and peace as greater complacency with—perhaps more precisely, greater responsibility rightfully to uphold—the existing social order. Such a rendering of the context and significance of the Hanh–King exchange marks a crucial one precisely because the popular figure of Winfrey herself mediates contemporary understandings of both global progressive change in general and the legacy of Black racial progress in particular (an iconography recently intensified by public enthusiasm over speculations of a Winfrey 2022 U.S. presidential run) and hence shapes common sense notions of the substance of both engaged Buddhism and Black radicalism simultaneously.

On the other hand, even more politically progressive discourses delimited by sharper terms of anti-racism, anti-sexism, and social justice can reproduce interpretations that, perhaps against their own intentions, rely on binary tropes and misleading teleologies. For example, in the prologue preceding a transcript of her Shambhala Sun interview with Hanh, Black feminist intellectual bell hooks provides as backdrop to their dialogue her own story of self-transformation that introduced her to Hanh’s work and led to his presence in her life “as teacher and guide.”3 Reflecting on her life-long journey to articulate the definition of love, hooks’s exposition routes precisely through her experiences of King and the early civil rights movement to trace her political–spiritual maturation, the latter relying on a critique of both the women’s movement and “racially-based civil rights liberation struggle” as “moving away from a call for love.”4 Her binary logic of love versus hate (augmented by other oppositional tropes such as compassion/rage, war/peace, and body/feeling) further deepens as hooks’s narrative assumes the form of a conversion plot, charting her movement from seduction by movement ideologies to ultimate enlightenment. In this context, she defines nonviolence in direct contradistinction to the supposed amorality of Black Power, positioning radical “militants” as war-mongers and indirectly reproducing reactionary logics of their criminality. Such a discursive maneuver hence builds a binarized framework to comprehend or contemplate “violence/nonviolence” and removes from the realm of possible consideration both the political machinations of state counter-intelligence and the military conditions of genocide that compelled people to question, and constrained people’s willingness to continue practicing, existing measures of nonviolent resistance. Within this simplistic construction of good versus evil to explain the positive and negative contours of Black radicalism, then, the last stage of narrative progression brings us to hooks’s foray into Buddhism— foundationally shaped by the Beat poets’ interpretations of “Eastern” philosophy— and finally, the entrance of Hanh into the story. These particular limits of hooks’s earlier exposure to Buddhism, mediated by Euro-American thought and social life, thus preclude contemplation of other crucial factors when grappling with the meaning of Hanh’s work at that time, specifically vis-'a-vis the elaboration and interventions of Asian diasporic epistemologies in the West.5

Ultimately, in pointing out such perils of hooks’s exegesis, my purpose is certainly not to censure the many legitimate critiques of second-wave feminism and the various excesses of late-20th-century liberation struggles, nor is it to make a claim to any “authentic” Buddhism or to rehash grievances against orientalism. Most relevant to the discussion at hand, I mean to make explicit, again, the dialogical or discursive limits through which even the most progressive contemporary renderings of Hanh and King’s legacies can constrain greater examination of the potentialities contained in their mutual encounter. From this outset, in which I have outlined the hegemonic dialogical contours that restrict what Hanh himself can and cannot communicate as well as what is received of this history today, my interest resides in questioning the ways that placing the praxis of engaged Buddhism in a different discursive terrain can open horizons of thought and practice that are necessarily foreclosed in competing dominant articulations. Thus returning directly to the dialogue between Hanh and King and excavating the possibilities that decohered but did not completely die with the denouement of late 20th-century Black and Third World liberation struggles and all of the assassinations, my goal is not necessarily to contest or “correct” the dominant frame nor to promote or espouse any particular liberation theology. Instead, I hope to help generate means through which we may keep grappling with processes of social transformation, taking into account what Ashon Crawley has called the “theological-philosophical” origins of race-thinking whose contemplation can move us beyond normative approaches to social justice movement and historiality inherited from modern Eurocentric political traditions.6

In sum, then, in reconsidering what the dialogical encounter between Hanh and King makes available to theorize, I am concerned with how articulation with Black social movements enabled a particular enunciation of the aims of engaged Buddhism and its rendering of historical being, on the one hand; and on the other, how articulation with engaged Buddhism at that time helped to ameliorate what Cedric Robinson has examined as the “crisis of the Black petit bourgeoisie” as it intersects with the evolution of Black radicalism.7 As I discuss these dynamics in the second and third sections of this article, respectively, I do so by thinking through four strands of articulation unfolding in relation to this dialogue: offering, first, a cursory analysis of the discourse of death taking place in the Hanh–King encounter; and moving on to contemplate, again in only provisional terms, the relevance of this analysis for then problematizing—or more precisely, resituating our present orientation toward the problematization of—concepts of nonviolence, dialectics, and ontological totality.

A Pedagogy of Dying

In “In Search of the Enemy of Man,” Hanh sets out to explain to “the West,” by way of King, the distinction between Christian and Buddhist epistemologies of death, as the dominance of the former over the latter in the context of the U.S. War in Viet Nam contributed to the anti-Asian ideological campaign attendant on military conquest, and Buddhist acts of self-immolation were widely represented in the global North as acts of pathology, cowardice, and suicide. Hanh’s task is nearly unthinkable: addressing a civilization predicated on the conceit of infinite expansion and entitlement, from a way of life that takes as its First Noble Truth that all life is suffering, or the recognition that all things pass away. The opening Hanh seizes in this dialogical encounter, then, begins with choosing an interlocutor who represents Black American struggle on the global stage—a struggle and a tradition that are also predicated on breaking down the conceit of infinite expansion and entitlement at the heart of white supremacy. From this shared worldview, albeit from still different traditions and representational grids, Hanh is able to elaborate the incommensurability of Christian notions of self-sacrifice and the acts carried out by Vietnamese monks:

The self-burning of Vietnamese Buddhist monks in 1963 is somehow difficult for the Western Christian conscience to understand. The Press spoke then of suicide, but in the essence, it is not. It is not even a protest. What the monks said in the letters they left before burning themselves aimed only at alarming, at moving the hearts of the oppressors and at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured then by the Vietnamese. To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with the utmost of courage, frankness, determination and sincerity.8

As Hanh makes explicit here, dominant U.S. paradigms of theological–political explanation—whether expressed through reactionary logics of suicide or progressive logics of protest—offer inadequate means to interpret the acts of transcendence performed by self-burning Vietnamese monks. In challenging these limits of modern discourse, he establishes foundations to assert the interlocking, rather than bifurcation or duality, of spiritual and historical being in the engaged Buddhist worldview and the readiness of the monks, through their spiritual training and discipline, to leave behind the limits of the physical body in order to improve the historical condition of people still struggling for enlightened being in this world of samsara or suffering. This recognition of suffering, as theologian and Sri Lankan peace activist Jude Lal Fernando points out, must be understood as part of the movement’s broader undertaking to articulate Buddhist practice in the context of the crises of modern life and society.9 From this perspective, facing the First Noble Truth involves grappling with two distinct but interarticulated orders of suffering today: that experienced in the face of the universal fact of death and that experienced as we are enjoined to examine and act within the historical context in which all suffering is lived and unfolds.

Thus shifting discursive boundaries from those defined by dominant Eurocentric epistemologies to those of engaged Buddhism, Hanh moves on to clarify the concept of death itself in the latter worldview:

The Vietnamese monk, by burning himself, say with all his strengh [sic] and determination that he can endure the greatest of sufferings to protect his people. But why does he have to burn himself to death? The difference between burning oneself [as practiced in ordination ceremonies of the Mahayana tradition] and burning oneself to death is only a difference in degree, not in nature. A man who burns himself too much must die. The importance is not to take one’s life, but to burn. What he really aims at is the expression of his will and determination, not death. In the Buddhist belief, life is not confined to a period of 60 or 80 or 100 years: life is eternal. Life is not confined to this body: life is universal.10

In this ontological framework, concepts of life and death are, again, not understood as binary or dualistic absolutes but as different states in a dynamic flow and totality of existence. Hence, while Hanh does deploy the language of “sacrifice” throughout the piece to describe Buddhist acts of self-immolation, the term’s dominant connotations of martyrdom or self-sacrifice—let alone the pathologizing charges of suicide—do not apply, since in this epistemological context: (1) there is no operative notion of the Eurocentric modern “self,” that is, no notion of autonomous being premised on the bifurcation of individual and collective life; and (2) death does not mark an end but only a different dimension in the continuum of existence. In these senses, then, it also becomes possible to fathom “sacrifice” as coterminous rather than at odds with the practice of self-defense, as Hanh characterizes the monk’s act of “burning oneself to death” as a show of strength “to protect his people.”

The Buddhist worldview of life and death, then, differs substantively from Christian traditions in at least two fundamental ways.11 First, Christianity is premised on the exceptionalism of Jesus as the son of God: a categorically distinctive being at once mortal and invested with Omnipotence, his unique place in universal order made manifest by the singularity of both the suffering of his crucifixion and the glory of his resurrection. In contrast to dominant Christian paradigms of sacrifice, premature death, and eternal life that emerge from these phenomena in a primal sense, “in the Buddhist belief … life is universal,” meaning that all beings, not only exceptional ones following a paragon of martyrdom, are always-already subject and available to the most essential ontological struggles and mysteries animated by tensions between the secular and sacred, the ephemeral and eternal. Second, then, rather than interpreting Buddhist acts of self-immolation through normative Christian perceptions of sacrifice (as those trials suffered in the service of a monotheistic notion or calling of God or a manifestation of that God’s vengeance), the act may be more likenable to the Christian idea of sacrament, a most profound offering that ceremonializes a relation to Oneness and, in this case, honors as it expresses solidarity with the lives of others. Through this lens, Buddhist acts of self-immolation come into clearer view not as a rejection or fleeing from historical being but precisely as an inhabitation of the historicity of the path to enlightenment and its injunctions—in the monk’s application of the Way and orientation to the disciplines that are aimed toward improving the universal condition of being in the mundane world, not in the abstract but under the constraints of its contemporary livedness.

Hence, as Hanh went on to use this dialogue with King as a template for his 1967 treatise, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, the title metaphor explicitly calls attention to the disciplining of oneself in the service of peace—being the “lotus”— within the context of “a sea of fire,” the vicious world of imperialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and war unfolding in Viet Nam. Beginning with a story of his encounter with an American woman doctor, who approached Hanh with her views on “self-burning as an act of savagery, violence, and fanaticism, requiring a condition of mental unbalance,”12 the book’s Introduction moves directly from this hook to clarifying Hanh’s intention to outline “the history and nature of Vietnamese Buddhism, together with a survey of the relationships between it and other social realities present in this country.” Hanh explains:

After twenty years of war, Vietnamese society now approaches the ultimate in disintegration. The needless killing and dying that occur every day, the destruction of property, and the venal use of money to erode human values have resulted in widespread doubt and frustration among the Vietnamese. Nearly everyone is prey to venality, so that money seems able to purchase women, politicians, generals, and intellectuals alike. In such a situation the peasants, who constitute up to 90 per cent of the country’s population, turn for help to their religious leaders. They, in turn, are all but forced to act. … Only against this background can the role of Buddhists in Vietnam be evaluated and understood.13

We return, then, to the heart of this part of my investigation: this explicit attention to the “sea of fire” and ethical obligation to others within it as central to any serious exploration or judgment of the meaning of engaged Buddhism in the contemporary period. Specifically, I seek to foreground the ways that this frame of reference was made possible through the dialogical mediation of King as the gateway between the so-called East and West. I contend that King’s ability to receive and elaborate Hanh’s communication, to connect the historiality of Hanh’s message with references, experiences, and problems more immediately discernible to Western publics in general and U.S. social justice workers in particular, allowed for a capacious discursive and social field through which to articulate engaged Buddhism and its relevance to global liberation movements. This perspective also allows us to problematize how the targeted dismantling of Black radical movements in subsequent years also impacted engaged Buddhism: destroying the fertile terrain established for historical and social enunciation and compelling the disarticulation of the praxis of becoming “the lotus” from lived suffering in “the sea of fire.” Instead, limited in a hegemonic sense to the formulation we have today—the lotus qua lotus, or mindfulness in the service of an atomized white bourgeois self, in the most abstracted sense of that fantasy14—the critical danger of such devolution resides not only in this impression of engaged Buddhism. Perhaps even more so, as the Winfrey interview makes more apparent, the emergency also lies in the limits imposed on dialogical condition and the dramatic contraction of discursive space that position Hanh himself passively to participate in, rather than to contest, orientations to engaged Buddhism as the cultivation instead of the desedimentation of modern man.

The “Wilderness” and Nonviolence as a Way of Life

Perhaps the greatest evidence for King’s effectiveness as Hanh’s interlocutor resides in transformations this dialogue compelled in King himself. Namely, as narrativized in Hanh’s contemporary recollections of their encounter and as documented in King’s own words, his fellowship with Hanh profoundly impacted King’s own political thought and direction of leadership: prompting him to break his silence on the war in Viet Nam and, by the end of his life, influencing him to come to stronger grips with imperialism and capitalism as forces that perpetuate Black suffering. Most recently, this twilight of King’s life has been the focus of public reconsideration, perhaps best illustrated by the 2018 documentary feature King in the Wilderness, released by the Home Box Office (HBO) network and premiered at the January 2018 Sundance Film Festival. As suggested by its title and narrativized in promotional campaigns, the film’s perspective on the last eighteen months of Kings life, from late 1966 until his assassination in April 1968, rests on an ideological framework that juxtaposes the amplification of King’s social justice efforts with his increasing isolation and alienation from some of his original supporters.15 While such a view captures, indeed, the personal and political costs of King’s evolving radicalization vis-'a-vis the parochialisms of U.S. civil society, this vantage point also cuts out of focus the new global potentialities achieved by King’s “coming out” as well as the powerful reach and social expansion of Black radicalism in this context. In these senses, the titular metaphor of “the wilderness” resonates in perhaps unintended ways—alluding both to the racialized primitivism ascribed to Black and Third World peoples (even as they are largely excised from the frame of reference as social subjects), and to the great “unknown” embedded in ontological articulations emerging from the work of those like King and Hanh at this historical conjuncture (even as the epistemological matrix of this work also remains beyond the scope of the frame).

The worldview through which the film is presented also shapes its formulation of death and King’s relation to it: constructing a quintessential Christian martyr who, at the contradictory crossroads of his human vulnerability and extraordinary gift of moral courage, willingly and knowingly marches through intensifying public vilification to meet his sure demise. Without necessarily contesting the “truth” of such a depiction (nor diminishing the significance of this effort to contest hegemonic post-movement representations both of King’s career as static and of King himself as a popular and colorblind U.S. icon), I am interested here in interrogating other sources or traditions of knowing and inspired action that guided King and hence render prevailing hermeneutics perhaps less salient than generally assumed. This inquiry returns us directly to Dialogue and its Forward, in which the collective authors offer their own meta-discourse of “the essence of dialogue” that explicitly connects the problem of language with the problem of death. That is, Dialogue opens with a poetic reflection on the “risk of language,” in which— somewhat homologous to contemporaneous French deconstructionist interventions regarding differ,ance and ontological displacements of meaning—the revelation of “World” and assertion of being mediated through language are haunted by the animating force of “the pure and simple ‘non-world,’”16 the abyss that remains constant while realities bound to language prove ephemeral. In the process of our exposure to this dialectic, “our language becomes adulterated” by a realization of “the ultimate danger” contained within it, the primal alienation associated with acknowledging an anterior state of nonbeing “which determines the being of our stay on the earth.”17 Thus linking the ontological dilemma presented by the limits of discourse with the authors’ ultimate concern, to point out the reality and priority of “non-being,” the La Boi collective concludes their Forward by calling attention to the universal awakening announced by Buddhist acts of self-immolation, which compel the West to contend with the dialectic of being-nonbeing and, thereby, finally to engage in dialogue through a contradictory state of surrender to that which conditions and exceeds the secularity of language:

Are we all aware of the gravity of the fact [of the heroic death of the Buddhist monks of Vietnam]? What is the unexpressed call which resounds from one end of the earth to another, and which is silent after reaching the depths of our souls?

Distant brothers, it is from this question that these thin leaves have resolved— perhaps fatal—to risk their puny being through so many stormy seas, in order to open up before you.18

In such an expression of dialogical truth and imagination, then, two aspects come to the fore. First, conditioned by the ontological unknown or the para-ontological19— that is, the paradoxical “unexpressed call that resounds from one end of the earth to another,” instantiated by the fact of death both as the monks’ palpable return to a state of nonbeing in an immediate sense and as the First Noble Truth of suffering in a universal one—language itself takes on its material and living aspect: a “puny being” coming to historical life on “thin leaves” of paper, facing literal destruction as the correspondence must travel through perilous landand seascapes of war in order to reach its destinations. Second, on another level, Dialogue’s exposure to fatal risk “through so many stormy seas” can also refer metaphorically to the dialogical and epistemological barriers between the collective authors and their “distant brothers” that render the communication, at best, precarious. In these senses, the act of reception includes and exceeds aspects of rational cognition and must ultimately manifest as an ontological opening, the latter attendant on acceptance of a para-ontology that can be acknowledged even as it cannot be “known.” In other words, with awareness of “the unexpressed call” and “the gravity of the fact” of death, actualization of the dialogue or message must entail conceding and responding to the condition of nonbeing and thereby changing our orientation to historical being: an injunction which King uniquely receives and accepts, as discernible in his own turn toward “the wilderness.” It is at this crossroads, then, that I am interested in examining the ways that King’s encounter with engaged Buddhism elaborated the latter’s praxis specifically within a global “sea of fire,” even as the modalities of this elaboration remained continuous with the referential universe of Black radicalism and took forms of appearance different from the activities of Vietnamese Buddhist monks and peace activists. More particularly, I am working to explore how his dialogue with Hanh impacted King’s evolving articulation of nonviolence in both theory and realization, related to concomitant shifts in perspective regarding dialectics and death, further to universalize the essence of engaged Buddhism and its rendering of ontology.

Hanh’s own direct appeal to King, in fact, highlights preexisting ethical and spiritual affinities that would explain Hanh’s choice of interlocutor and incline King to reciprocate in kind:

I am sure that since you have been engaged in one of the hardest struggles for equality and human rights, you are among those who understand fully, and who share with all their hearts, the indescribable suffering of the Vietnamese people. The world’s greatest humanists would not remain silent. You yourself can not [sic] remain silent. America is said to have a strong religious foundation and spiritual leaders would not allow American political and economic doctrines to be deprived of the spiritual element. You cannot be silent since you have already been in action and you are in action because, in you, God is in action, too [ … ].20

Indeed, given Hanh’s academic training in the Philosophy of Religion and ability to speak fluently across Buddhist and Christian representational grids, he was undoubtedly attuned to King’s own theological praxis that paralleled the disciplines of engaged Buddhism (and may have even informed them). For example, in King’s essay “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” originally published in 1958 and reprinted in Christian Century magazine in 1960, King explicitly asserts his own formulation of engaged spirituality as he argues, “Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribound religion awaiting burial.”21 Here, we see the positioning of Christian faith as a historically embedded struggle that resonates precisely with Hanh’s analogy of “a sea of fire.” Moving on in the essay to elaborate his philosophy of nonviolence at that historical moment, King narrativizes his wellknown encounter with “the Ghandian method of nonviolence” and his first attempt to apply it to the African American context, explaining that “[Initially,] I had a merely intellectual understanding and appreciation of the position, with no firm determination to organize it in a socially effective situation … [In the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott] Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.”22 In thus practicing a philosophy that King had only previously encountered theoretically, he further reflects that “[l]iving through the actual experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life.”23

It is precisely this distinction between strategy and “way of life” to which I would like to attend, with care toward questioning the manner and extent to which his dialogue with Hanh may have influenced essential aspects of King’s transformations vis-'a-vis embodying nonviolence as a way of being. In this regard, as is the case with contemporary reconsiderations of King’s late career, it bears mentioning that the current moment has also enjoyed an accompanying reappraisal of the discourse of violence/nonviolence in its normatively assumed binary framework; therein, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements are positioned in a fundamental antagonism with one another based on presumably antithetical strategic and tactical differences between the two (an interpretation well represented, for example, both by bell hooks’s narrative synthesized earlier and by promotional discussions of King in the Wilderness centering on the relationship between King and Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Tur,e]). In this ideological context, critical scholarship and debate have recently surfaced to challenge what has become the “common sense” of 20th-century U.S. social movement historiography. For example, in his monograph This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, Charles E. Cobb, former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), extends his argument regarding armed selfdefense as a constitutive element of the civil rights movement:

Armed self-defense (or to use a term preferred by some, “armed resistance”) as part of black struggle began not in the 1960s with angry “militant” and “radical” young Afro-Americans, but in the earliest years of the United States as one of African people’s responses to oppression. … Thus the tradition of armed self-defense in Afro-American history cannot be disconnected from the successes of what today is called the nonviolent civil rights movement. … Simply put: because nonviolence worked so well as a tactic for effecting social change and was demonstrably improving their lives, some black people chose to use weapons to defend the nonviolent Freedom Movement. Although it is counterintuitive, any discussion of guns in the movement must therefore also include substantial discussion of nonviolence, and vice versa.24

This shift in theoretical perspective—that is, of nonviolence and armed self-defense as complementary rather than antagonistic practices—compels attendant shifts in other essential aspects of narrativizing “the Freedom Movement.” For example, adding further dimension to conventional interpretations of the King–Carmichael public debates, Cobb points out that in his autobiography, Carmichael credits nonviolent activism for sparking the politicization of his generation; alongside quotes from Mississippi SNCC director Bob Moses confirming that nonviolence and “pledges to shoot a marauder’s head off” are not contradictory,25 or descriptions of King’s own house as “an arsenal,”26 such evidence corroborates claims of the mutual avowal and cooperation between activities and/or movements normatively understood in seeming opposition to one another. This view also enables more textured understandings of the concept of nonviolence itself, as Cobb offers constructive (if not corrective) analysis to rebut salient critiques posed by influential figures of that era:

Their reactions suggest that neither Dr. [W. E. B.] Du Bois nor Malcolm X could grasp the fact that nonviolence—although risky, as any challenge to oppression always is—was not passive, that it provided an effective means of directly challenging white supremacy with more than just rhetoric. … The principled, militant dignity of nonviolent resistance also won nationwide sympathy for the idea of extending civil rights to black people.27

In such assertions of nonviolence as “not passive” but an active performance of “militant dignity” that served to destroy white supremacy, Cobb’s characterizations of nonviolence move away from its definition as a facile negation of violence as its antithesis, instead to contemplate nonviolence as a contradictory practice that, situated in a less dualistic framework, also contains certain qualities of violence within it its own internal dynamics.

While Cobb thus presents a richer dialectical approach to discern the limits of and relationship between nonviolence and armed self-defense, specifically focused on the U.S. context up to 1966, his argument maintains a view of both nonviolence and dialectics as they relate strictly to the realm of tactical analysis, thereby still leaving unthought their resonance at the scale of ontology. My own aim, then, is to problematize further the significance of speaking of nonviolence more precisely as “a way of life”: distinguishable from, as it shapes, tactical and strategic decisions in the world of secular politics and situated in global context during the last and most transformative years of King’s life. In this regard, other studies of Black radicalism offer countering perspectives to Cobb’s claim that in the 1950s “the idea of nonviolent struggle was newer in the black community.”28 More particularly, in his influential elaboration of the roots and trajectories of the Black radical tradition, Cedric Robinson argues that—parallel to Cobb’s assertion of the long and foundational history of armed resistance—nonviolence, too, as a violence that “most often was turned inward,”29 has animated global Black freedom struggles since the advent of modernity. Working out of this latter framework, I am interested to interrogate how King’s encounter with Hanh coincides with a corresponding shift in King’s perspectives on nonviolence and dialectics, wherein nonviolence in King’s discourse moves farther away from its delimitation as a morally inspired political strategy and, in concert with Hanh and engaged Buddhism, more deeply into its delimitation as a commitment to honoring a (para)ontological state of being. In other words, I am focused on the discernible shift from a framework grounded in the mores of the Southern African American Christian bourgeoisie to one that is much more directly resonant with underlying Afro-cosmologies and Black folk religions, or the heart of a Black radical tradition of violence turned inwardly. As the latter is further elucidated by Robinson:

This violence was not inspired by an external object, it was not understood as part of an attack on a system, or an engagement with an abstraction of oppressive structures and relations. … [Rather, it was t]he renunciation of actual being for historical being; the preservation of ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses. … [The enemy’s] machines, which flung metal missiles, his vessels of smoke, gas, fire, disease, all were of lesser relevance than the integral totality of the people themselves.30

In King’s return to this articulation of Black radicalism and cosmology, then, in which the “preservation of ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system” takes priority over notions of political opposition, conversion, or even victory, King’s grounding in what Robinson calls the “supra-rational” elements of Black resistance remains unchanging. The question resides in the extent to which King’s dialogical encounter with Hanh may have provoked consequential revisions in the dialectical approach through which King fathomed and practiced the relationship between the rational and supra-rational. On this point, Jude Lal Fernando calls attention to a slippage in “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” wherein, on the one hand, King’s institutional training compelled him to rely on Hegel to provide an intellectual structure of dialectical method for resolving conflict; yet, on the other hand, King’s own notion of “interrelatedness” rooted in Black thought and religion, in this same essay, presses against the limits of Hegelian dualities and synthesis.31 Like Fernando, I am thus interested in how articulation with Buddhist dialectics—elaborated by Hanh as cultivating an understanding of reality as dynamic relationality, an approach to conceptual categories as historically contingent, and faith not as dogma but as a path of mindfulness into the non-duality of all things—offered means for King to transgress the boundaries of Eurocentric discourse and resolve these inconsistencies between the actual practice of interrelation modeled by Black nonviolent resistance and the intellectual structure or language through which such practices were explained and rendered meaningful theoretically.

Evidence for such a transformation exists in both King’s discourse and activities in the final years of his life. Starting from his position in “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” King articulates his critique of secular reason in the assertion that “[r]eason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.” Following Hegelian methods to correct for the segregation of the rational from the supra-rational, King argues for a solution in which “adequate understanding of man is found neither in the thesis of liberalism nor in the antithesis of neo-orthodoxy, but in a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both.”32 In thus establishing a path toward achieving the ultimate condition of highest good, as manifested in the practice of nonviolence, the essay leads to a conclusion in which, having conquered rational distortion in “a world crisis which often leaves us standing amid the surging murmur of life’s restless sea. … In a dark, confused world the spirit of God may yet reign supreme.”33 Somewhat forecasting the encounter to come—at least, establishing fruitful conditions of possibility—King presents us here with his own early formulation of a dark, confused, and restless “sea” whose murmur would eventually reach the mouth of Hanh’s sea of fire. It is precisely at this convergence that it may be conceivable to trace King’s changes in perspective, from his supreme view of binary opposites resolved through teleological synthesis to a different universe of dialectics: the latter as dynamic relationality within total conditions of interdependence, framed by both the breaks and continuum between ontology and para-ontology as elaborated in and through Dialogue.

We return, then, to the claims made on historical being in relation to that which exceeds history in “In Search of the Enemy of Man.” By Hanh’s own account (as narrativized, for instance, in his interviews with Winfrey and hooks), it was this dialogical encounter and subsequent meetings with Hanh that persuaded King to study the situation in Viet Nam and, ultimately, definitively to break his silence about the war. Hanh’s perspective is corroborated by details of King’s career during those years—perhaps most famously (though still little discussed), his nomination of Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 in which, in his letter of nomination dated January 25, 1967, King asserts:

I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam. … Here is an apostle of peace and non-violence, cruelly separated from his own people while they are oppressed by a vicious war which has grown to threaten the sanity and security of the entire world. … I know Thich Nhat Hanh, and am privileged to call him my friend. … You will find in this single human being an awesome range of abilities and interests.34

Following this nomination, King went on to deliver his speech, referred to alternately as “A Time to Break the Silence” and “Beyond Vietnam,” on April 4, 1967 to mark his official position not only against the war but against U.S. imperialism and global capitalism. In this speech that directly cites from Hanh’s Vietnam: Lotus in Sea of Fire,35 King presents his revolutionized analysis of the connections between U.S. imperialism and capitalist exploitation in Viet Nam and the Third World and demands for social and economic justice within the United States.

This turn to Third World solidarity marks a powerful manifestation of evolutions in King’s dialectical worldview, and I propose that it is precisely this “awakening,” as the La Boi collective called it, through which King comes more deeply into nonviolence as “a commitment to a way of life.” In this regard, it is possible directly to correlate changes in King’s concept of world with changes in his framework of dialectics—as affected by his dialogical encounter with Hanh—in order also to chart substantive changes in his praxis of nonviolence. Returning to “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” for example, King’s reliance on a Hegelian framework corresponds with a somewhat underdeveloped global analysis, in which his narrative of India’s nonviolent freedom struggle abides by mythic tropes and hyperboles of good overcoming evil to achieve a teleological happy ending:

It was a marvelous thing to see the amazing results of nonviolent struggle. India won her independence, but without violence on the part of the Indians. The aftermath of hatred and bitterness that usually follows a violent campaign is found nowhere in India. Today a mutual friendship based on complete equality exists between the Indian and British people within the commonwealth.36

It is rather extraordinary to compare this worldview with the one King represents by 1967; indeed, very little in this 1958 analysis suggests or plants seeds for any of the critical directions that King would eventually take. While, of course, this evolution cannot be contemplated outside the context of radical historical changes throughout that decade that made such dramatic shifts in consciousness necessary, neither can we assume King’s transformation as somehow inevitable insofar as, returning to arguments drawn from recent progressive historiography, the positions King took were (and still are) considered, more precisely, unpredicted and scandalizing. Under these circumstances, I would like to suggest that King’s trajectory makes more sense if we situate it in global context, broadly speaking, and in dialogical context with Hanh, most specifically: for framing it as such opens windows of opportunity to account more rigorously for the conditions of possibility that eventually allowed for King’s rethinking of his theological–political articulations and his ability to jump scales vis-'a-vis involvement in and analyses of seemingly disparate social movements.37 Namely, it is precisely through his willingness to study the U.S. war in Viet Nam, as influenced by Hanh, and ultimately to oppose it that King not only comes to identify as one “who deem[s myself] bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism”;38 this critical exposure also concretizes his decisive enunciation of social visions beyond the chimera of “mutual friendship” based on the conceits of liberal democracy—in a critique he formally enunciates exactly as what is “beyond Vietnam”:

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.39

Finally, in this passage, we have arrived at a crossroads in which King’s analysis, while rendered in terms of his own universe of Black life, fully rearticulates the message of engaged Buddhism as elaborated at the outset. We may discern the subtleties of this interchange in at least three aspects. First, King has reoriented his theological discourse since its formulation in “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” the latter concluding with his assertion of a “living God” in which “I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose and in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship.”40 Complementing or revising this framework of divine right, emphasizing God’s inspiration that can transform despair into hope, in “Beyond Vietnam” King’s formulation has further developed (or returned) to one that parallels Hanh’s explanation of the role of Buddhist monks in Viet Nam: moving from a claim that privileges an argument for abstracted purpose alive in reality to one grounded in the limits of historical being, as well as ethical obligations to whom King would call the “beloved community,” that all but force us to act in our capacities as spiritual beings in worldly struggle. Second, alongside this change from a “top-down” to a “bottom-up” perspective, King’s general metaphor of “life’s restless sea” in “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” comes into its fullest elaboration as the brutalities of imperialism and global capitalism, again parallel with the “sea of fire,” wherein King argues that “[a true revolution of values] will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.’”41 Challenging his own prior visions of justice as the achievement of liberal equality in a commonwealth of nations, and even of “a universe under control,” these passages begin to enunciate King’s more mature analysis that transgresses the limits of national identity, links racial apartheid with racial capitalism, and definitively positions the machinations of both systems in terms of global warfare with no guarantees of a happy end absent of a totalizing revolution, historical and spiritual.

Third, and perhaps of greatest consequence for this present discussion, King’s discourse of nonviolence presented in “Beyond Vietnam” marks a turn away from it centering in the efficacy and morality of nonviolence and/or the idealisms of the Christian conversion narrative, instead to call attention to (1) social conditions and structural agents of aggression, violence, and destruction; and (2) problems of both historical and ontological being under such circumstances—hence, nonviolence as a commitment to “a way of life.” King speaks directly to his decisive change in worldview and transformation in rhetorical position when he explains in “Beyond Vietnam”:

I have tried to offer [rejected and angry war protesters] my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettoes without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.42

The profundity of this turn must not be left unexamined, as the challenges that King confronts in dialogues over the problem of the war in Viet Nam bridge directly into a series of maneuvers through which King also revises his relation to discourses of Black pathology, vis-'a-vis the concept of violence. That is, in shifting his gaze from “the violence of the oppressed in the ghettoes” to “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King has ceased to reproduce the objectification of oppressed people or ghettoes as the site of the problem, instead to exert his critical energies fully toward naming and addressing the agents and dynamics of systematic violence that impose limits on historical condition.

Corresponding with his conclusion in “Beyond Vietnam,” then, in which “We in the West must support [Third World] revolutions,”43 King also spends the rest of 1967 developing new means of expressing “the case of Blackness” in the United States.44 Specifically, as if to presage what would evolve as the social scientific discourse of “social death”45 in decades to come, King’s Distinguished Address at the 1967 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association speaks directly to a “[w]hite America [that] has an appalling lack of knowledge concerning the reality of Negro life.”46 Delivered on September 1, 1967 in Washington, D.C., and published posthumously as “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement,” King’s address begins with identifying the condemnation of whiteness as the primary task of the social scientist, arguing that “[w]hite America needs to understand that it is poisoned to its soul by racism and the understanding needs to be carefully documented and consequently more difficult to reject.”47 In thus establishing the discursive conditions to understand whiteness as social death, King moves on to clarify his revised position on “urban riots”: redirecting the terms of criminality in his assertion that any “derivative crimes”—namely “looting,” as an assault on property rights in “this society [that] cherishes property above people”—are “born of the greater crimes of the white society.”48 After an interlude that connects urban riots and U.S. unemployment with U.S. imperialism in Viet Nam and throughout the Pacific, and as if to allude to or develop arguments originally presented by Hanh and the La Boi collective, King proceeds to address popular charges of the rioting Negroes’ pathological “suicide instinct.” Following the rhetorical strategy and epistemological standpoint of locating the problem of historical being in a “sea of fire,” King upends the frame of suicide with the claim that “[s]ocial scientists should also disclose the suicide instinct that governs the administration and Congress.”49 Importantly, King’s judgment here of the maladies of U.S. political and economic elites extends to a critique of the Black middle class, with whom for much of his earlier career King himself had identified. Finally, then, King concludes with his criticism of a “technical nomenclature” often used to describe the world’s marginalized peoples and “probably used more than any other word in psychology”—that is, the word “maladjusted.”50 Again desedimenting the discourses of pathology applied to Blackness, to poverty, to radicalism, communism, and so on, King asserts that the problem, “gigantic in extent, and chaotic in detail … will [not] be solved until there is a kind of cosmic discontent. … [T]here are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted.”51 Consistent with his principled career in civil disobedience and yet transgressing somewhat oversimplified frameworks of moral righteousness and respectability, King’s paradigm of “creative maladjustment” simultaneously accepts and refuses (or, put another way, neither affirms nor rejects) the discursive constraints attendant on the totalizing systems of white supremacy. Instead, rather than ultimately reproducing the power of pathologizing discourses through negative modalities of either censure or denial, King at once claims the term “maladjustment” while also investing it with (Black) life. In this spirit, then, we are left with an ambiguity as to whether King is being literal or cheeky in one of his final comments, that “it may well be that our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment.”52

It is precisely these paradoxes—whether the example be in formulations of civic life as social death and of creative maladjustment, or in his tone characteristic of what Clyde Woods has identified as a Blues ontology, both grave and at play53— that register King’s fullest appreciation of nonviolence as a commitment, beyond political strategy, binary articulations, or representational optics, to the preservation not only of a way of life but of life as such.

Conclusion: New Questions

At last, in the matter of “cosmic discontent” against racial capitalism, this discontent’s allusion to or manifestation in Black life, we have thus returned to the ultimate concern also raised by the self-immolation of Buddhist monks in Viet Nam: that is, as elaborated by Hanh and the La Boi collective, the relationship between nonviolence as ontology or a way of life, on the one hand; and on the other, a para-ontology discernible yet unfathomable in the fact of death. Throughout this discussion, I have also posed this dilemma as one that involves contemplation of connections between the rational and supra-rational, as well as an epistemological recentering of dialectics as dynamic relationality within total conditions of interdependence.54 I will thus conclude by way of raising two points for further consideration, specifically as this query into the Hanh–King dialogue may bear on contemporary directions in our thinking on necroor biopolitics, or the relationship of power to life and death. First, this cursory investigation makes available certain questions regarding the effects of this encounter on King’s concomitant orientation to death at the end of his own life. While much remains to be studied on this point, such analysis would surely include a close reading of what would be his last public speech, delivered April 3, 1968 and referred to alternately as “I See the Promised Land” and “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” for the ways it announces King’s relation to death differently than what we may observe of his prior life cycles. For the moment, it may be enough to note, as a last provocation, a kind of synesthesia at work between the Prologue to Dialogue that started this discussion and the conclusion of “I See the Promised Land” that will end it. That is, the La Boi collective’s metaphor of sound (“the unexpressed call which resounds from one end of the earth to another, and which is silent after reaching the depths of our souls”) pairs interestingly with King’s last words that rely on a metaphor of sight:

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. … Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.55

Both of these framings, in their own way, play with the relationship between sentience and extra-sensorial phenomena to allude to death: both ultimately reaching toward an emphasis on the yet unknown and on dialectics of presence and absence that animate the relationship between historical, ontological, and para-ontological (non)being.

Finally, then, at the heart of my current studies reside questions about the undertheorized potential of this dialogical encounter to provide greater insights into the ontological crises we face today. In this regard, I see promise in the foundations established through this historical precedent—even if not yet fully developed or energetically harnessed—to provide alternative or supplemental direction to several salient discourses attendant on social justice today. For example, in this article I have suggested that the encounter between engaged Buddhism and Black nonviolent resistance, vis-'a-vis the Hanh–King dialogue, provides another context to situate our thinking on the abjection of “social death.” Homologously, more sustained contemplation of discourses of “suicide” instantiated by this dialogue may also renew our ideas and language to consider and respond to dramatic changes in necropolitics in the Age of Terror, particularly in the profound complexities surrounding transitions from left-wing to right-wing global “radicalism” and the phenomenon and interpretation of suicide bombings.56 As a last and most recent example, fleshing out the worldviews enunciated in the Hanh–King encounter, as they overlap with rearticulated concepts of pathology, rationality, and bodily integrity, may help widen the scope of vision guiding a new generation of youth and student activists who, as Robin D.G. Kelley has pointed out, rely heavily on frameworks of “trauma” in their movements for “Black Lives Matter” and equity in higher education on U.S. college campuses.57 Across such disparate contexts weighing on daily life today, in the final analysis, my investment in deeper examinations of this past encounter between engaged Buddhism and Black nonviolent resistance lies in the opportunity the inquiry may afford to reclaim the elegance of a spirit of struggle, inseparable from the cultivation of an unknowable peace, that can inform our praxis of a way of life: conceding to the perils of a shared fate on earth as well as abiding possibilities of a world otherwise.

Acknowledgments

An early sketch of this essay was presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Studies Association in Chicago, IL. Many thanks for comments and support from Ashon Crawley, Imani Johnson, Tasneem Siddiqui, and the audience there, as well as generative suggestions from the external reviewer and editors at Souls.