James A. Benn has given us the first book-length study of a fascinating aspect of Buddhist practice. His careful combing of selected Chinese Buddhist materials has recovered a cache of relics for scholarly perusal: the records of Chinese Buddhists who offered their bodies as an expression of their commitment to the Buddhist path. Benn's study is admirably well written and well researched—for both style and content, it deserves to stand among the major contributions to Buddhist studies of recent decades.
The introductory chapter opens with a compelling account of the auto-cremation of the monk Daodu (462–527) on Mount Ruona in Yangzhou. Benn locates this event within multiple contexts: Chinese metaphysical theories of sympathetic resonance (ganying), the history of self-immolation (provided in subsequent chapters), and a survey of the sources from which the accounts are drawn. (Two long appendices provide translations of all the biographies and critical evaluations of...
