The Buddhist Dead

7. Fire and the Sword: Some Connections between Self-Immolation and Religious Persecution in the History of Chinese Buddhism

7 Fire and the Sword Some Connections between Self-Immolation and Religious Persecution in the History of Chinese Buddhism James A. Benn This chapter addresses a very special form of death—the voluntary termination of life by Chinese Buddhists. Although ‘‘martyrdom ’’ is not a category that has much been applied to Buddhist materials , as we reflect on the deaths of certain exemplary individuals in the following pages, it may be useful to keep in mind the possible parallels with types of holy death known in Christianity and Islam. In particular, the concept of martyrdom may help us to understand better how some Chinese Buddhists defined themselves individually and institutionally against a political order that did not always share their interests. According to one standard definition, martyrs are those who ‘‘offer their lives voluntarily in solidarity with their group in contrast with another, ideologically contrasting group.’’1 The groups considered here are the Chinese imperial state and the monastic community (saṅgha). In the medieval Buddhist worldview , the ideal government was one that supported the dharma. When the state slipped from that ideal function, there was a perceived need to restore the cosmic order, and the actions of selfimmolators were incorporated into a larger Buddhist narrative in which rulers and the saṅgha worked together to promote the dharma. We may compare this process with that of the Christian martyrs who ‘‘persevered unto death’’ and died at the hands of an unjust state and whose courage was one granted to them by God.2 Although martyrdom is not an analytical category that is employed within the Buddhist tradition to define a type or method of death, by using it here, I wish to highlight those political and social aspects of self-immolation that are often obscured by the more passive cat234 egories that Buddhist authors employ, such as ‘‘relinquishing the body’’ or ‘‘abandoning the self.’’ Close attention to political, social, and religious contexts in the commemoration of self-immolators shows how their mythic dimension—imitation of certain scriptural ideals of extreme selflessness —intersected with the mundane realities of life and death in imperial China. Buddhist martyrdom was a form of death that disrupted the social order while at the same time reestablishing a cosmic order in which the saṅgha and the state could once again play their correct roles. These intersections and disruptions produced what may be regarded as indigenous Chinese Buddhist myths and indigenous heroes whose importance is crucial to understanding the religious tensions within traditional Chinese society. To borrow from the genre classification of religious biography developed by scholars of Christianity, in Chinese Buddhist literature the vita was always the dominant mode of writing about monks.3 The vita acts as a model of an exemplary life, one that can be admired and imitated by the faithful. The passio, or martyrology, on the other hand, provides a dramatic description of trial and death at the hands of secular persecutors. In the historical development of Christian hagiographical literature, the passio preceded the vita. The existence of a Chinese Buddhist martyrology has so far gone unnoticed, and it was surely never a fully developed genre, but still we may find some traces of a nascent form in the biographies discussed below. It may be that for Buddhists, as for Muslim mystics, martyrology is but part of a larger hagiographical tradition and provides a source of spiritual insight as much as an exemplary form of religious dedication.4 Christian martyrs were usually tried and killed by hostile forces. The majority of the monks I shall discuss terminated their lives voluntarily , although at least one was executed. Self-immolation in its strictest sense means ‘‘self-sacrifice,’’ derived ultimately from the Latin molare, ‘‘to make a sacrifice of grain.’’ It does not mean suicide by fire, although the term is now commonly used in that sense.5 Three Chinese terms in particular are encountered in the sources, and they are used more or less interchangeably: wangshen, yishen, and sheshen. They all mean to relinquish, or to abandon, the body. Here the word shen (body) also implies ‘‘self,’’ or the person as a whole. Self-immolation may be considered a particular expression Fire and the Sword 235 of the more generalized Buddhist ideal of detachment from the deluded notion of a self. Abandoning the body, or letting go of the self, took a variety of...