INTRODUCTION
　　　　  At first glance, burning, branding, and other forms of what we might
　　　　  today call "body modification" would appear to have little to do
　　　　  with Buddhism, a religion whose avowed focus is on the mind. In
　　　　  fact, burning the body is one of the most obvious and commonplace
　　　　  features of Sinitic Buddhism, since all Chinese and Korean monks and
　　　　  nuns are burned at ordination, or at least were until recently.(1)
　　　　  The scars of these burns are highly visible in the Chinese case,
　　　　  since it is the head that is burned. This article investigates the
　　　　  recommendation of burning the body (shao shen) in two apocryphal
　　　　  texts that were well known and extremely influential in the Chinese
　　　　  Buddhist tradition--the Fanwang jing (The Book of Brahma's Net)(2)
　　　　  and the Shouleng'yan jing (Suramgama-sutra, The Book of the
　　　　  Heroic-march Absorption)(3)--and demonstrates that these two texts,
　　　　  used in combination, not only justified such extreme acts as
　　　　  autocremation and the burning of fingers but were also used to
　　　　  establish burning at ordination.(4) Focusing on such practices not
　　　　  only adds to our knowledge of Buddhism as a way of fife in China,
　　　　  but it may also allow us to identify some specific reasons for the
　　　　  creation of apocryphal texts. To date, the study of Chinese Buddhist
　　　　  apocrypha has consisted, for the most part, of identifying and
　　　　  analyzing the contents of such works. Scholars have hardly begun to
　　　　  search for specific reasons for their creation.(5)
　　　　  The use of passages from these two texts to justify self-immolation
　　　　  (she shen) first came to my attention in a defense of
　　　　  self-immolation written by the eminent and influential tenth-century
　　　　  Chinese monk Yongming Yanshou (904-75).(6) Upon further readings in
　　　　  the primary sources, it became evident that the use of these two
　　　　  texts by Yanshou was no accident: in no surviving Chinese scripture
　　　　  other than the Fanwang jing and the Shouleng'yan jing do we find
　　　　  burning the body defined and endorsed as a practice for Buddhist
　　　　  monks and nuns, as opposed to advanced mahasattvas (great beings).
　　　　  The term shao shen, while it may in some contexts indicate cremation
　　　　  of the corpse--most notably, of course, that of the Buddha
　　　　  himself--also covers a range of practices applied to the living
　　　　  bodies of Buddhist monks and nuns in East Asia. These practices
　　　　  extend from the least common and most spectacular--autocremation of
　　　　  the living body, through the burning off or branding of limbs
　　　　  (usually the arms), and the burning off of fingers--to the most