Burning for the Buddha

Conclusion

195 Conclusion ver the years that I have been studying and writing about self-immolation , the question I have most often been asked is “Why did they do that?” I hope this study has shown that there can never be a single answer to that question. Now that we have a better sense of the range of practices, variety of practitioners, and the vastly different times and places in which they acted, it will be apparent that both the “they” and “that” of the question are meaningless. We need to ask better questions of our sources. The reader who has reached this point in the book may be forgiven for asking why I have insisted on amassing so much detail relating to the biographies of self-immolators. Apart from my own never-ending sense of wonder at the possibility of recovering even a tiny fraction of the experience of men and women who lived long ago and far away, I would point to four reasons for doing so. First, it seemed necessary to show irrefutably that self-immolation was not a marginal or deviant practice indulged in by a handful of suicidal losers. The evidence I have presented shows, I believe, that it was not only relatively common but also enduring and respected. Second, the sources presented en masse reveal that self-immolation was not a single phenomenon, but a category that allowed Chinese Buddhists to think about a diverse range of practices, ideals, and aspirations that were open to constant negotiation and interpretation. Third, I am interested in making apparent the ways in which self-immolators interacted with others and affected the world around them, especially the various institutions and worldviews of Chinese Buddhism and premodern Chinese society. Fourth, I believe it is important for us, as scholars who seek to understand religions through texts, to confront at length material that makes us most uncomfortable: Writing about what people do to and with their own bodies. Most premodern Chinese Buddhists lived in a world in which the body and its actions were intensely meaningful. If we cannot learn to appreciate how and why that was so, what can we hope to say about Chinese Buddhism as a whole? Self-immolation was not con¤ned to the monastery. It affected the state and had rami¤cations for China’s intellectual and political history: Han Yu’s O 196 Burning for the Buddha essay about the body practices indulged in by devotees celebrating the Buddha ’s relic became a famous and in¶uential text. Modes of “Confucian” ¤lial piety, such as slicing the thigh, were indebted to Buddhist practices and ideas. Auto-cremation was sometimes co-opted by of¤cials in late imperial China: Some local magistrates, and even a Song emperor, threatened to burn themselves to bring rain.1 Thus, I have avoided imposing uniformity on what was always a diverse set of practices and ideals—from burning the body to dying spontaneously in the marketplace. I have endeavored to seek the deeper meaning in the details by carefully unravelling the scriptural and historical precedents for apparently bizarre and inexplicable behavior such as feeding the body to insects or burning the ¤ngers. By concentrating on the biographies of selfimmolators , their scriptural models, and learned defenders, I have aimed to show that the category “self-immolation” is a virtual one. It was the compilers of biographies who determined what practices should constitute that model. At times, the category could include types of death that were scarcely even intentional (death in monastery ¤res, for example); at other times compilers such as Daoxuan could select biographies strategically to construct a larger narrative with a polemic or didactic intent. I have also been hesitant to present self-immolation as a subset of some larger interpretive category. For example, I remain to be convinced that in China self-immolation was primarily an ascetic tradition. In the early accounts at least, the preparation of the body seems to emphasize its positive aspects: It was not something to be subdued but rather cultivated and transformed . Despite references to terms such as dhûta or kuxing (austerities) in the biographies, I have not found strong evidence of self-immolation as part of a larger and fully articulated program of asceticism. Paying close attention to the biographical sources brings out the gulf between the ideal Indian models, which were known through scripture and artistic representation, and the realities faced by Chinese monastics. This is particularly noticeable with regard to...