Burning for the Buddha

Acknowledgments

xi Acknowledgments o acknowledge fully the debt I owe to friends and colleagues who have helped me along the way would be to risk turning what is already a hefty tome into a multivolume work. For now, I can only offer these few lines. None of my work would have been possible without the foundation (knowing what and how to read) and inspiration (knowing what and how to write) provided by my great teacher, T. H. Barrett. I really hope he likes this book. I should like to thank the members of my doctoral committee at the University of California, Los Angeles (Robert Buswell, William Bodiford, Benjamin Elman, David Schaberg, and Richard von Glahn), for their careful reading of my dissertation (on which this work is based) and for their many suggestions for its improvement. I am particularly grateful to my adviser, Robert Buswell, for his encouragement and support over the last ten years. I may not have always taken his advice, but I have always appreciated having it. The story of how Chen Jinhua and I met at the Italian School of East Asian Studies in Kyoto is well documented in the opening pages of both my dissertation and his book on Tanqian and need not be repeated here. For the last six years he has been my closest and most critical reader, my most trusted guide through the textual labyrinth of medieval China, and, above all, my friend. He has read drafts of this book not just once but several times, has offered sage advice, and has shared his own research with me in the most sel¶ess manner. His enthusiasm and high standards of scholarship forced me to write a much better book than I could have managed otherwise. The time I spent in Kyoto was particularly crucial for my research, and I look back with fondness on those days and on my friends and colleagues there (Hubert Durt, the late Antonino Forte, Aramaki Noritoshi, Robert Duquenne , Catherine Ludvik, Shayne Clarke). Although I did not meet him in Kyoto, Chen Jinhua put me in touch with Funayama Tôru of the Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University, who generously shared with me his then-unpublished article on self-immolation, and whom I later had the pleasure of meeting in person at the University of British Columbia. I bene¤ted greatly from the wisdom of those who read my manuscript with an experienced eye. Koichi Shinohara, Robert Campany, John Strong, and two anonymous readers for the Kuroda Institute offered indispensable T xii Acknowledgments advice and encouraged me to think and write with greater clarity. I should like to thank everyone who invited me to give talks and conference presentations on self-immolation and related matters over the last few years. I am most grateful for those opportunities to share and test my ideas. Although I cannot name them all here, I should like to thank my students at Lewis and Clark College and Arizona State University, especially participants in seminars relating to the topic of “Religion and the Body.” They raised questions and problems that would otherwise never have occurred to me. I’m not sure whether Stuart Young is my student in any formal sense, but he has certainly been one of my most insightful readers and has offered many useful suggestions. I have been the fortunate recipient of the kindness and wisdom of Raoul Birnbaum, who has always urged me to think harder about the nature of Buddhist practice in China and to never lose sight of the human element. I am particularly grateful to the following people for their assistance and advice : Robert Sharf, Buzzy Teiser, Eugene Wang, James Robson, John Kieschnick , Gregory Schopen, and Daniel Stevenson. I also spent many happy hours discussing the ins and outs of Buddhist studies with my comrades-inarms George Keyworth and Rick McBride. If there are any good ideas in this book, they undoubtedly have their origin in the minds of others—all I can claim are the errors and omissions. The Faculty of Social Sciences at McMaster University provided generous¤nancial support for this publication. I should like to thank Peter N. Gregory of the Kuroda Institute and Patricia Crosby, Ann Ludeman, and Stephanie Chun of the University of Hawai‘i Press for taking this book seriously. Ever since we met, my wife, Emi, has had to share me with a host of dead monks. I’m sure she looks forward to waving them goodbye...