《Burning for the Buddha》简介：

Burning for the Buddha is the first book-length study of the theory and practice of "abandoning the body"(self-immolation) in Chinese Buddhism. It examines the hagiographical accounts of all those who made offerings of their own bodies and places them in historical, social, cultural, and doctrinal context. Rather than privilege the doctrinal and exegetical interpretations of the tradition, which assume the central importance of the mind and its cultivation, James Benn focuses on the ways in which the heroic ideals of the bodhisattva present in scriptural materials such as the Lotus Sutra played out in the realm of religious practice on the ground.

《Burning for the Buddha》摘录：

Given the fact that our materials were composed by medieval authors with a strong interest and belief in the miraculous, it would now be impossible to discover any meaningful “objective” viewpoint or to reconstruct events in a way that could satisfy the sensibilities of the twenty-¤rst-century reader. We can, however, try to understand the ways in which Daodu’s contemporaries and later medieval Buddhists thought about what had happened, and how they made sense of these events. Daodu’s death certainly did make sense to those who wrote and read about it: This was not the random act of a disturbed individual, but rather a single manifestation of a deeply rooted set of ideas and ideals in Chinese Buddhism that blossomed again and again in the history of premodern China.

《Burning for the Buddha》目录：

Intro
Contents
Introduction
“Mounting the Smoke with Glittering Colors”
The Lotus Sûtra, Auto-Cremation, and the Indestructible Tongue
Samgha and the State
Is Self-Immolation a “Good Practice”?
Local Heroes in a Fragmenting Empire
One Thousand Years of Self- Immolation
Conclusion
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Notes
Bibliography
Index
· · · · · ·