Self-immolation
What you take with the fire
Welcome back to The Expiration Date! It’s been a while since you (and me) have been here, hasn’t it? I promised I would try and upload monthly essays, yet I haven’t. There are a few reasons for me letting you all down. Some of them are even legitimate. But you don’t need to know why because I don’t even know who some of you are. Some of you are my friends and family, or vague acquaintances, so you’re already familiar with my continued over-promising, over-committing laziness but some of you are complete and utter strangers. Who are you? Why are you here? Your continued existence is definitely welcome, but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a little strange to me. You've been invited to this party, and I’m happy to have you, but you’ve mostly been standing awkwardly in the corner picking at your skin whilst we’re all dancing and doing drugs. You’re welcome to join the fun, which you can do through telling me how much you love and need my writing, like a shaking junkie, by emailing me at elliot.fox-adams@hotmail.com, or you can let your parents at The Sydney Morning Herald know there’s a fabulous, breathtaking, exhilarating young writer who will work for them! You can make this party the time of my life by giving me praise or helping me on the pathway to payment. Just don’t overdose in the ensuite whilst you’re at it.
If you’re one of the people who actually knows me in real life, you might be aware I recently blew all my money in the amazing country of Vietnam! It was a great time, and I have been trying to write about it, but I’ve come up against a roadblock, one I never knew you could encounter in writing - I have too much to say. Really, I do. I want to talk about all the beauty and the poverty in that country. The scars of war. Communism. Ancient bronze drums. Ritualistic animal sacrifice and worship. Plastic (again). Ethnic groups like The Black Hmong and The Red Dao. How a country constructs its national identity. Fake French streets. Real French people. Smoking monks and rusted guns. I have to stop now. I’ve become overwhelmed already. Eventually you will read about my time in what was simultaneously the most bewildering and favourite country I’ve visited so far on Earth. But it’ll have to wait. I need some time. It will probably be split into multiple parts. There’ll probably be a mix of prophecy and poetry amidst the essays. It will come, but it will take time. Until then, you can read something a bit more digestible, which is a straightforward essay about why I don’t think the political act of lighting yourself on fire is all that political, and how the decision to self-immolate existed long before politics.
Aaron Bushnell died by fire. Only two weeks ago, Bushnell was an active member of the U.S. Air Force and just 25 years old when he doused himself in flammable liquid and set himself alight. He did it in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C., shouting “Free Palestine!”. He was rushed to a hospital and would die as a result of his injuries. The whole incident was livestreamed on his phone, and the blurred images still circulate rapidly across the internet as I write this. It is truly shocking, but there’s something about the act of burning oneself alive I can’t seem to get out of my mind, something greater than it being just an extreme form of protest. Maybe, self-immolation isn’t a form of protest at all.
I find this incident, as we all should, deeply and utterly tragic. This man was only three years older than me. Before you can even begin to unpack an act like this, especially when someone so young has decided to light themselves on fire, you must feel horrified. Horrified that someone has chosen to take their own life, and in such a way. It may feel tempting to bring your hungry politics into this moment, but I simply ask you to stop. This is an act of extreme violence someone has committed only to themselves. Feel for them, as someone who was deeply suffering themselves, before you open up the wider issue as to why.
It’s important to know what this piece isn’t about. I’m not going to talk about Israel or Palestine. Even though I’ve talked about it before, I’ll simply protest instead, as that’s all I can really do. I’m also not going to speculate on Bushnell’s mental state. There’s nothing for me to talk about there because I don’t know what his mental state was, apart from being deeply disturbed, before he killed himself. There’s more qualified and knowledgeable people who will write about it and I don’t find it interesting or fruitful to do so. I have no insights, except that I feel deeply saddened he did this, and I wish he had gone about protesting and living instead.
This essay is not an exercise in a connect-the-dots history of self-immolation as a form of political protest. Mainly I don’t think it is an act of protest, at least, not a form of protest we can understand in the modern sense (we’ll get there soon). The one thing I won’t do most of all is judge Bushnell’s ideas as either politically good or bad ones. The strength of his convictions don’t matter, because I think the method of suicide-by-fire is so fundamentally destructive, so consumingly violent and chaotic, that no message can survive the devastating delivery. No matter how moral or ethical your stances are, you burn those away with your body and soul when you choose to do this.
But what of Thích Quảng Đức, the Vietnamese monk who self-immolated in the early 60’s? Recently, I visited the temple he worked at and saw the car he used to drive into town on the day he killed himself. It was preserved in a garage with a glass door. A museum piece. Tourists were taking photos. His ideas have resonated within his own country but internationally his action is still misconstrued. Thích Quảng Đức was solely protesting the Southern government’s treatment of Buddhists. But he became an enduring symbol protesting the American invasion of Vietnam writ large. Now it’s even worse, he’s just a vague idea of “fight the powers that be!”. The Rage Against The Machine album cover is where his image will live, captured in a mid-death malaise, a symbol of resistance to everything at once, but nothing in particular. His sacrifice moved J.F.K., just not enough to stop supporting the government Quảng Đức fought against. His actions were internationally captivating because of three reasons, none of which applies to Bushnell. Quảng Đức was a direct victim of his own government. Western audiences had never seen anything like his form of protest before. But most crucially, people outside Vietnam were not consistently bombarded with images of the country suffering the way that they are now with Palestine.
The majority of online discourse around Bushnell revolves around whether his was the action of a brave hero valiantly resisting the system (‘they were on my side’) or a coward trying to get his 15 minutes of fame (‘they are on the other side’). To the people who think like this; fuck you, you selfish cunts. How could you either champion Bushnell’s martyrdom or mock his death? And to the former camp that see his action as noble, what attention does it bring that was not already there? Is the consistent 24/7 social media machine of chaos we see from Gaza not enough for you? To celebrate a man choosing to die because it highlights the many deaths of those that don’t choose, is pointless. It achieves no peace for anyone, not Bushnell nor Palestinians. It’s not as if the whole world was blind to the war before he self-immolated. Bushnell’s act was immensely self-destructive and equally useless. Quảng Đức’s spread the message. Bushnell died to tell everyone what they already knew.
It's also been almost 15 years since Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation transformed the Arab World. There’s no denying that. The Middle East was at the tipping point and his final act was the push that gave us the Arab Spring. He burnt himself alive in Tunisia and because of that, Egypt’s government collapsed and Syria erupted into one of worst civil wars ever seen. He’s another very sad outlier. Of the hundreds of recorded cases, he’s the only one that nearly changed the world, but, in heart-breaking fashion, it only made things much worse. There are many forms of protest, but not many include killing yourself. We must look at all the forms of protest to understand why self-immolation isn’t one.
Let’s say, because of climate change you’re concerned about the death of the entire world. That’s a fairly good concern to have. Let’s say, you’re concerned enough to do something about it. So, you stop buying so much plastic wrapped fruit. You could have a re-usable coffee cup and compost your food scraps. You could ride a bike to work instead, maybe buy a hybrid car, or walk. This type of protesting is the least harmful of all, the least concerning, the least drastic, and because of all that, it’s also the least effective. You do not inconvenience your neighbours who keep driving big coal guzzling behemoths and eat the legs and faces of animals. You do nothing to the equally behemoth oil and gas companies your neighbour loves, by harming their revenues in any way. The option to protest by switching your consumer choices is so easy and simple that the companies that destroy the world want you to do it. The only change you achieve is increasing a different shareholders earnings by an unnoticeable decimal point. To change the world, your actions have to upset people.
This is still as far as the great deal of people dare go. “Yes, we’re concerned about the world around us, but not so much as to change what we’re doing a whole great deal. Besides, we don’t want to bother anyone.” Say this is you. Now say your concern for the planet starts to outweigh your simple recycling. Say you don’t think it’s doing a whole lot about an issue that needs to be addressed right now. The urgency of our looming destruction means it’s time to take it up a step.
Now you’ve entered the area of protesting where you become slightly bothersome to people, but not entirely combative yet. You’re not out on the streets gluing yourself to the roads but you are taking part in marches when you can. You change your diet to be a vegetarian or a vegan. You share things on your social media pages and reply to the comments and DM’s you get, happy to sit in your bed all day and argue with strangers online. Your neighbours laugh at you and growl, but you haven’t changed their behaviour. You’ve just antagonised them. Can you achieve change at this stage? Only if the tide is strong enough. Only if there’s so many hundreds of thousands of you, so many passionate and loud voices that fill the streets with this choir of mass justice, that you can hope to achieve anything substantive at all. You know this type of protest can help, but only if the whole world does it with you.
And what do you do when the whole world doesn’t sing with you? This is a barrier very few people get past. But some still do. These people become the extreme protestors. These are the ones who do glue themselves to public infrastructure. Who yell at politicians from the back of a crowded room. The ones who throw a carton of milk at the bulletproof glass shielding a Rembrandt. You physically stop your neighbours from going on holiday. Force them to stick their bloated, red, swelling face out of their huge pickup and yell at you, “What the fuck are you doing, lying on the street? Can’t you see the misses and me and the girls are packed up? Hey, what the fuck is your mate doing?!” They yell because your equally extreme friend (you only hang around extreme people now) has smashed their jet skis to bits. The front of your house is wrapped in a bees-wax banner that reads in big red letters, “THE WHOLE WORLD IS DYING”. Maybe you even go to prison for a few weeks. Property damage.
This shows a deep political commitment. It’s very effective. The media attention is massive. Maybe you inspire others do the same. In parliaments and board meetings around the world your actions are discussed. This form of protest, from just one individual, can change society. It teeters between violent and non-violent protest. Your devoted to this cause. There is one step further to go however. One where the world changes because of you. This is the final step. It’s the one where you kill.
You start a militia. Or a terrorist organisation. You wear only black and work at night. You burn down an oil rig. Your neighbours, the meat-eating, petrol-guzzling fucks they were, have gotten what’s coming to them, as you slashed their throats and turned them into fertiliser. You chase down commercial fishing vessels and behead the whole crew, dangling them like ugly piñatas from the side of your pirate ship. You and your comrades smash down the doors of the BP executives Swiss offices after slaughtering the interns. They turn to you with pale faces and tear-filled eyes. “Their time has come” you think to yourself, before you pull out your submachine gun and fill their bodies with bullets. You are either killed in a police shoot out or go to prison forever. Either way, most will see you as evil and irredeemable. New laws are introduced. You destabilise some governments. A few civil wars erupt. The entirety of policing changes. So do oil companies. And open nickel mines. And dairy farmers. And the whole world.
You can say forming a violent gang to commit violent acts in the name of changing the world is a bad and evil thing to do and you’re probably right. What you can’t argue about is their effectiveness. 19 Saudis changed the world this way when they crashed planes into buildings. Gavrilo Princip was just 19 years old, by himself, when he shot an Austrian man in his car, and that gave us the first World War! Were all of these actions foreseen by the perpetrators? Not at all. If you’re one of the select few in history who are able to change the world, you never decide what the consequences will be. You can change the world, just not by buying vegan leather Doc Martens.
The effect of your protest is decided by how far you go. Mostly you do this with others in your Democratic People’s Armed Front where you go out and shoot people. You try not to get hurt in this form of protest, because then you can’t keep doing it, but sometimes you die and become a martyr. Yet people do choose to hurt themselves to make change. They go on a hunger strikes, but those are only successful when they’re Irish prisoners with no other means. It’s a shame we live in a world with suicide bombers, but they’re not trying to change anything, really. Their faith is so strong they think they’ll go to heaven and be rewarded with a harem of virgins by killing themselves and others. It’s the heaven of a horny teenage boy, one they get to through an act of pride. There’s nothing humbling in that suicidal, evil grandiose act.
The protest-by-suicide is the ultimate act of finality, death by belief, yet the issue continues. Is there any onus on Shell or BP to stop drilling oil if you hang yourself and blame them? You can’t protest anymore, you’re already dead. Transforming yourself, from someone with a functioning oesophagus and a recognisable face into a smouldering corpse, can’t be reconciled as a political act.
So what are you doing when you light yourself on fire?
This is the ultimate question of Aaron Bushnell, and so many others who have unfortunately come before him. He’s not even the first American to recently self-immolate because of a post-October 7th Israel, just the first to get large-scale media attention. To understand what’s happening when someone commits a blazing suicide we have to see it as not a protesting act but a ritualistic one. It’s not a difficult conclusion to draw from the Latin etymology of immolare, or its noun immolo, which was the special salted flour one would pour over animals before they were sacrificed. It doesn’t take much research to find the one group that lights themselves on fire more than any other — monks, Thích Quảng Đức’s tribe. The heavy prevalence of self-immolation in Chinese, Indian and Tibetan Buddhism is strong, and through their original scriptures we can come to understand this phenomena.
The argument usually goes that these monks self-immolate because of their spiritual commitment to non-violence and on the surface that makes sense. So, they’re very concerned about an issue, but unlike the climate activists in our little thought experiment they can’t go around shooting other people. But they don’t shoot themselves. They light themselves on fire and they’ve been doing it for a very long time. I don’t think they choose this option as their commitment to non-violent (but excessively self-violent) protest because it’s one of the most gruesome ways to die. They do this, not because it’s the most attention grabbing method of self-execution but because they destroy their whole being with the one action. They are taking control away from death. When you die by the fire, you’re trying to take a whole world with you.
In one of the Jātaka tales, we are introduced to Mahâsattva who is out for a walk with his two brothers, Mahâpraÿada and Mahâdeva. Being the sons of the wealthiest king in all mythical Asia, all their material desires were met. However, just like Siddhartha, being rich didn’t mean the brothers were spiritually fulfilled. So they trekked through a field of bamboo in order to find a higher purpose. It did not take them long to find a tigress, who was laying down and breathing shallowly. The three boys approached. They noticed she was completely emaciated. Her ribs were almost piercing through her fur. Her tongue was visibly stirring behind her sunken cheeks. She met their eyes but did not have the energy to move. The boys heard a cry coming from within her shrunken form, down by the dirt at her stomach. Looking down they were amazed to find a litter of seven kittens, who were all born seven days ago. They had drunk their mother’s milk until she was almost completely gone. Without further sustenance, all the brothers knew the whole litter and mother would soon die.
For all three boys it was a very moving site, but none admired the tigress’s devotion more than Mahâsattva. He was enamoured with the courage of the mother, who had given almost her entire life away for her children. He was so enraptured by this animal’s sacrifice, he found within it a spiritual purpose. If he were to give his body to this starving cat, he would be saving the lives of eight creatures, and surely this was the best thing he could do in the world. He stayed whilst his brothers moved along, trying to find something that would do for them what they could see this tigress had done for Mahâsattva. Once alone, he stripped naked and made a vow —
“I do this now for the benefit of all beings, to attain the supreme unsurpassable awakening, and to save all beings in the three realms.”
He waved his hand in front of the hungry mother’s nose but she was too weak to bite. So he snapped of a bit of bamboo, which came away from the plant with a perfectly sharp edge. He proceeded to cut a part of his flesh off before offering it again to the dying animal. Still, she was too exhausted to open her mouth and could only meet him with a deep gaze, a gaze filled with permanent hunger.
Then a voice came to Mahâsattva.
It was a deep and ancient one. It was the one that reverberates out with the dark crashing of tectonic plates. It’s the voice that whispers through the air when a volcano erupts and follows the shifting bones beneath the mud. It’s the voice, that the Buddha himself would not dare to mention in his recount of this story. It wasn’t God, or the Devil, but that third thing. It’s the one that spoke to Mahâsattva from his soul, bypassing his ears and brain and talking to him through the pump-pump-pumping of his blood. It told him that to save this life, he would have to give his own.
Mahâsattva took the sharp bamboo pole he had used to sever his flesh from the ground. Still drip-drip-dripping with his own blood, he brought the crimson point up to his neck before gliding it across. His soul escaped with a trembling gasp.
His body fell to the floor. The tigress recognised something in the sacrifice, this final act of giving, that gave her strength enough to slowly and shakily lap at his blood. As she was nursing herself back to life, the Buddha tells us of a few remarkable things that followed Mahâsattva’s suicide. The sky immediately turned black, and the sun was instantly extinguished from the universe. The world stopped spinning and it shook so violently the Himalayas almost came tumbling down. In the space where the sun once stood, beautiful flowers, millions of them, in billions of colours came floating to Earth. They contained all the beautiful scents of the world; honey, lavender, milk, fig, pear, vanilla and amber perfumes rolled across the continents. With the flowers came the Gods, who praised Mahâsattva’s action —
“Excellent, O Mahâsattva , because of your true great compassion for beings, you are able to discard that which is hard to discard. You will quickly attain pure Nirvâÿa.”
His brothers, having noticed that the sun had disappeared and that the world had changed forever, came racing back to where they had left Mahâsattva. What they found was a healthy tiger, full of life and vigour, that had entered a meditative sleep. The brothers looked around and it did not take them long to find Mahâsattva’s neatly folded clothes, next to his perfectly polished bones. The sight bereaved them so much they passed out. When they awoke, they travelled back to their home, to mourn their brother’s death with their father, the king. The whole kingdom mourned along with the royal family, and soon the cosmic flowers withered and died. The world would start to spin again. The great scents would slither back into the animals and fruits that birthed them. Finally, the sun would blink in the sky as night and day returned, going about its orbit as if nothing had ever changed its course.
This is what happens when give your body for another. It is not what happens when you burn it all away.
The Lotus Sutra is the last teachings of Siddhartha. Buried deep within this sprawling, magical, contradictory odyssey is the story of Bhaiṣajyarāja, who came many years before the Buddha, but many after Mahâsattva. He, like many monks, was trying to discover the path to reach ultimate enlightenment, but was born too early for the Buddha to teach him. But in Buddhism, the world is Samsara. It is a wheel which turns back in on itself, where those who die are reborn and continue. They may one day come to know all their past and futures, if as a monk, you follow one of the many paths to reach it.
Bhaiṣajyarāja was a good monk. He studied and prayed and meditated and after many years entered Samadhi. Samadhi in Buddhism, as it is in Hinduism, is the final form of spiritual conscious you reach in a mortal body. On the great karmic cycle of Samsara, it’s the final plane you reach before achieving the true status of a Bodhisattva, and spiritual enlightenment, in Nirvâÿa. When the good and faithful monk Bhaiṣajyarāja hit this realm, above the clouds of the workings of every day people and animals, he was in a world beyond what we could possibly comprehend, so I can’t tell you what it looked like. I can only tell you what happened there as he was greeted by the Buddha, who exists outside of time. So great is his level of spiritual accomplishment, that he found within himself generosity enough to write it down for us.
Bhaiṣajyarāja was a good monk. He wanted to show his appreciation to the Buddha’s teachings in this plane of Samadhi, so he used his new powers to rain flowers down from space. Fine grains of sandalwood would accompany the falling flowers. He showered the mystical world with his devotion, crowding “the shores” (the Buddha tells us Samadhi has shores) with millions of fine strips of incense. He offered the Buddha all the seeds of the world, six times over, to show how devoted to his teachings he was. However, he had not passed from Samadhi at this point. He was balancing over a delicate line, his soul existing in a place like Heaven, but his physical body still lumbering around in the muggy pit of Asia. Then that voice spoke to him.
It was the same voice that touched the ears of Mahâsattva all those years ago. The one that announces storms. The one you can’t hear in your brain, but only feel the message as it vibrates, softly, just under the layers of your skin. It’s a voice that we all interpret in many different ways. For Mahâsattva, the voice told him to give up his blood and flesh for the starving tigress. For Bhaiṣajyarāja, the voice told him to burn his body for the Buddha.
Having understood his mission, he left the plane of Samadhi from where he had conversed with The Buddha, and had set about burning himself. He swallowed incenses and resins of many different kinds — chandana, kunduruka, turushka, prikka, and aloeswood. For over 1200 years, he would survive on earth, drinking the oils from trees and flowers until they had gone all but extinct. Once his body and soul were filled with flammable liquids he would take of his clothes, cover himself in further oils, which he ground out from the bones of dead animals. He wrapped his oily body in red robes, decorated with arrows of silver and jewels, before adding a further, final layer, of oil to his outfit. He returned to the plane of Samadhi, where the Buddha was waiting for him.
Bhaiṣajyarāja’s body was weak and frail from this 1200 year task. The consistent drinking of oil from flowers was a burden. They produced just a few drops in their short floral life and he had walked the globe many times, waiting for new seasons and new blooms to start the extraction process again. He was old physically, but spiritually he was stronger than any monk alive. He was able to use the power of his mind, through vows and prayers, to send a light of pure fire from the world of the Gods to Earth, where his body would erupt into a blaze. The light from his burning body, within an instant, had become brighter than the sun. The beams that radiated from him brought light to the whole universe for a brief moment, igniting the many worlds of the karmic wheel into blinding golden hoops. The sheer force of his physical and spiritual fire would send his soul to Nirvâÿa. It is said he burnt for a further 1200 years until he was consumed utterly, without a speck of ash remaining. The Buddha was delighted by his devotion, and for the first time since Bhaiṣajyarāja had met him in Samadhi, he spoke —
“Good indeed! Good indeed! Good man, this is true vigour. This is called a true Dharma offering to the Thus Come One. Offerings of flowers, incense, beads, burning incense, ground incense, paste incense, Heavenly cloth, banners, canopies, ‘this shore’ incense, and all such offerings of various kinds cannot come up to it. If one gave away one’s countries, cities, wives, and children, that also could not match it. Good man, this is called foremost giving. Among all gifts, it is the most honoured and most supreme, because it is an offering of Dharma to the Thus Come Ones.”
The Buddha tells us Bhaiṣajyarāja and Mahâsattva discovered enlightenment through the ultimate “offerings of the body,” by not just renouncing material goods, but through giving themselves away. It also tells us that Buddha, like almost every prophet, was a selfish, spiteful and cruel bastard. With the discarding of one’s flesh according to his rules, your soul is able to achieve a permanent peace. To anyone who thinks Buddhism is the "kindest" religion, maybe these two scriptures will make you rethink. Because of Bhaiṣajyarāja’s ancient sacrifice, he has said to be reborn many times as an enlightened ghost, a healer of diseases, coming to those who were physically ill but spiritually pure. He is known as “The King of Medicine,” and all he had to do to become the patron saint of healing in Buddhism was to burn himself for over a thousand years.
There are many teachings where a Bodhisattva sacrifices their whole life and body to achieve enlightenment. Crucially, all the other stories recounting the sacrifice of Bodhisattva’s bodies differ from the act of self-immolation in one way — their flesh was offered to quell appetites. Mahâsattva achieves enlightenment, but only because he wanted to end a creature’s hunger, and all he could offer was himself. The differences between Mahâsattva’s and Bhaiṣajyarāja’s sacrifice is vital. Self-immolation, unlike sacrificing your body for a hungry beast, is not an act of alleviating others’ pain through your suffering, but a rebellion against suffering itself.
Bhaiṣajyarāja escaped the endless cycle of birth, death and re-birth but has somehow found a foothold within where he can take control over the mechanics of the universe. The continuous wheel of suffering would stop for a brief moment, as he would sacrifice himself, burning through an untold amount of worlds, and make his mark by saying “I have taken Death’s power away from the world and into my own hands.” Some admired the sacrifice of Bhaiṣajyarāja so much that they thought it was their only way to conquer the ultimate cycle. The Buddha may rejoice in Bhaiṣajyarāja as the first to self-immolate in devotion to his teachings, but the Buddha is wrong. What Bhaiṣajyarāja is doing is not finding ultimate peace in this wheel, but absolute fear. He knows the cycle continues, but he wants to get off the ride, so he takes control by not offering his body and soul up for anything or anyone else’s suffering but his own.
You burn yourself away in Buddhism because you want to leave the infinite, repeating worlds of pain. You aren’t sacrificing yourself for some enlightened truth or to make a political point. You leave no flesh to chew on. No skin to eat. Nothing on your bones left to pick at because there’s no bones at all. When Aaron Bushnell self-immolated he left nothing behind. He was not doing anything for the Palestinians or the Israelis. In the world of utter hopelessness and fear that he found himself in, he tried to wrestle everything away from Death or God or the Devil or that third voice by taking his fate into his own hands. The problem is that you can’t control fire. You can’t control its spread and its message, what it wipes away completely and what it leaves untouched, behind. When someone lights themselves on fire, they extinguish their world forever, whilst the one the rest of us are stuck in, keeps going.
Wow. What a powerful read.