I remember as a kid once, my parents watching a documentary about this Buddhist monk named

Tik Huang Duke.

His biography starts out in the predictable way.

Sombra kid moves to a monastery, and then a lot of mist and dew drops, and other monks

not talking.

Nothing a kid would find interesting.

And then all of a sudden, we're on a busy city street in Vietnam, and the monk is engulfed

in flames.

What have you seen a famous photograph or a video of the scene?

In 1963, Tik Huang Duke burned himself to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the South

Vietnamese government.

Two of his fellow monks provided him with a cushion, and then doused him with gasoline,

and then his whole community sat around in lotus position, and watched him burn.

That day, I was on the floor playing, but I saw the image of the monk reflected in the

glass of a painting hanging across from our TV.

The monk in flames doesn't move.

He's literally sitting still, like he's feeling the warmth of the sun.

I just stared at the image trying to solve it.

How do things get so extreme that a community decides this, this calm embrace of pain, is

the only way forward?

The monk popped into my head recently because of the story we're about to tell.

It's about a community that also resorted to extreme measures to get justice when nothing

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