Burning for the Buddha

Chapter 1. “Mounting the Smoke with Glittering Colors”: Self-Immolation in Early Medieval China

19 C H A P T E R 1 “Mounting the Smoke with Glittering Colors” Self-Immolation in Early Medieval China he biographies of religious practitioners in medieval Chinese are not just sources of valuable data for historians; they also gave shape to the contours of Buddhist practice and doctrine. In China, unlike India or Tibet, the biographies of monks formed a distinct genre that became an important part of Buddhist literature.1 As collections of biographies entered the canon and were widely read, accounts of the conduct of monks and nuns recorded Buddhist practice and shaped it as well. From the sixth century onwards monastics could ¤nd exemplary models of conduct in the history of their own community in China as well as in scriptures translated from Indian languages . For self-immolators of later periods in Chinese history and the thinkers who defended them in their writings, the fact that eminent monks of the past had made offerings of their bodies conferred legitimacy on the practice. Thus a close look at the earliest sources we have for self-immolation will not only reveal much about its early history, but also show how these accounts provided inspiration and authority to monks and nuns of later generations who were aware of their illustrious predecessors. There were three signi¤cant early collections of biographies. Two are devoted to the lives of monks: the Mingseng zhuan 名僧傳 (Biographies of Famous Monks), compiled by Baochang 寶唱 (463–after 514) and the Gaoseng zhuan 高僧傳 (Biographies of Eminent Monks) by Huijiao 慧皎 (497–554).2 Baochang also compiled nuns’ biographies to form the collection Biqiuni zhuan 比丘尼傳 (Biographies of Bhikºuÿîs).3 The individual accounts collected in these early sources are really quite diverse because they come from different locations and times and were written by people of varied backgrounds (often laymen, in fact) who were ruled by an assortment of regimes in the North and South during the ¤rst few hundred years of the Buddhist presence in China. The biographies were not written from a single point of view, and when read en masse they offer us multiple perspectives on the Buddhist order in China. Sometimes these perspectives converge to bring aspects of Chinese Buddhism into clearer view, but at other times they diverge sharply, leaving us no more than fragmentary impressions. T 20 Burning for the Buddha How, then, are we to comprehend self-immolation as represented in the biographies of medieval Chinese monks and nuns? We should not assume that because these sources now appear in three “books” they form no more than a collection of hagiographical clichés, legends, or literary tropes—although individual biographies may contain one or more of these elements. Equally, we cannot assume that they are historically veri¤able in every detail. We must give some weight to the fact that they record something and that most people who read these accounts in traditional China, whether they were sympathetic to the acts described therein or not, responded as if they recorded what had truly occurred. When we examine the biographies of men and women who performed extreme acts of devotion with their bodies, it is important to remember that we are not faced with accounts that are particularly anomalous or obscure. On the contrary, the circumstances of these events are as well supported by textual and epigraphical evidence as any other aspect of medieval Chinese life in which modern scholarship has shown an interest. If contemporary scholarship has tended to relegate self-immolation to the margins, then that tendency reveals more about nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructions of Buddhism as a rational middle way than it does about how Chinese Buddhists viewed (and continue to view) aspects of their own practice. Many of the works studied in this and subsequent chapters are collections that concern “eminent monks” (gaoseng 高僧), and we should always bear in mind how very eminent these monks were, not only within the monastic community , but above all in their relations with secular authority. They were not unlettered peasants, but the con¤dants and advisers to rulers and generals. Local governors and aristocrats composed their memorial inscriptions and praised them in verse. Their deaths were witnessed by great crowds of all classes, including emperors and princes, empresses and concubines, as well as their fellow monks, nuns, and peasants. In the case of the Gaoseng zhuan in particular, the prominence of the social elite was no doubt connected to Huijiao’s own experience in his native area, Kuaiji 會稽—a place...