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.”

中文翻译：

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《火海》：两波死亡与黑色相遇的佛教教义

本文呈现了对 1965 年至 1968 年美国“参与佛教”与黑人解放神学之间遭遇的更广泛调查的初步草图，其动机是最终目标是阐明对死亡政治的不同方法，或者现在学者们在这个界面上调用“necropolitics”。本研究着眼于一行禅师和马丁·路德·金之间改变世界的对话，开始于 Hanh 对越南帝国主义战争期间自焚实践的辩护，并通过他的“参与佛教”教学法进行调解及其在西方的认识论和历史阐述。决定了金向反帝国主义和反资本主义政治承诺的重大转变，在他 1967 年的演讲“超越越南，“我询问这次相遇如何发展和全球化一种独特的死亡、正义和非暴力认识论——如果不承认或相信超越现代世俗主义或任何公民社会形成的限制所假设的本体论，就绝对无法获得这种认识论。最终，我的目标是将这一较早的表述应用于当代关于生物政治或亡灵政治的论述，这些论述主要围绕恐怖主义殉难或导致黑人“社会死亡”的白人本体论的局限性展开。