True Peace.

• Author: Hammill, Sam
• Position: Poem - Poem

Half broken on that smoky night, hunched over sake in a serviceman's dive somewhere in Naha, Okinawa, nearly fifty years ago, I read of the Saigon Buddhist monks who stopped the traffic on a downtown thoroughfare so their master, Thich Quang Dúc, could take up the lotus posture in the middle of the street. And they baptized him there with gas and kerosene, and he struck a match and burst into flame. That was June, nineteen-sixty-three, and I was twenty, a U.S. Marine. The master did not move, did not squirm, he did not scream in pain as his body was consumed. Neither child nor yet a man, I wondered to my Okinawan friend, what can it possibly mean to make such a sacrifice, to give one's life with such horror, but with dignity and conviction. How can any man endure such pain and never cry and never blink. And my friend said simply, "Thich Quang Dúc had achieved true peace." And I knew that night true peace for me would never come. Not for me, Nirvana. This suffering world is mine, mine to suffer in...