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

Abstract

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, motivated by the eventual goal of articulating a different approach toward 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 toward both anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist political commitments, formally enunciated in his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam,” I interrogate how this encounter develops and globalizes a distinctive epistemology of death, justice, and nonviolence—one that absolutely cannot be accessed without an avowal or faith in something beyond those ontologies 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 terroristic martyrdom or the limits of white ontology precipitating Black “social death.”