Burning for the Buddha: Self-Immolation in Chinese Buddhism (Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism 19). By James A. Benn. . University of Hawai'i Press, 2007. 360 pages. $48.00.
摘要
In Burning for the Buddha, James Benn offers a fascinating account of bodily sacrifice in Chinese Buddhism. Not only is this interesting material on its own, but in undertaking this sort of study, Benn suggests new directions for understanding Chinese Buddhism. Benn's work moves away from a focus on a single text or historical figure—what was once the dominant model in Buddhist Studies—and offers instead a diachronic analysis of a specific set of practices. His primary sources are thematically grouped collections of biographies, and this allows him to demonstrate how Chinese Buddhism shaped itself through sacrifices of the body, creating a “somatic path” to religious ends. Both because of the sources he has used and the necessarily material aspect of his subject, Benn's work recalls John Kieschnick's studies of biographical collections and the material accouterments of Chinese Buddhism.
The catchy title of the book is somewhat misleading, suggesting that the sole focus of the work is auto-cremation. As Benn himself explains in the introduction, while burning the body may be the most spectacular mode of self-immolation—and indeed “immolation” is often mistakenly thought to refer only to burning—Chinese authors included a number of other practices within this same category (8–9). Benn also explains that the primary sources for his study are the collections of biographies of eminent monks compiled from the fifth century onward. Narrowing his study to these biographical collections means that Benn is looking at the same types of sources for different time periods, and thus has limited the impact of generic differences. Benn is aware that these practices can seem weird or macabre to the modern Western reader, and using collections in which the editors and compilers themselves have identified accounts of self-immolators as worthy of inclusion and transmission allows him to avoid an outsider's construction of …
