the Kaiyuan shijiao lu (Kaiyuan Catalogue of Buddhist Teachings)(69)
　　　　  states that his travel record, Nanhai jigui neifa zhuan (An Account
　　　　  of the Dharma Sent Back from the Southern Seas) was compiled between
　　　　  700 and 710, there is evidence from within the text that Yijing must
　　　　  have completed it before 705. At the end of the text he sends his
　　　　  respects to "the worthies of the Great Zhou," Da Zhou.(70) The Zhou
　　　　  was of course the name of Empress Wu's dynasty, and it would not
　　　　  have been used after she abdicated on February 22, 705. Moreover,
　　　　  Wang Bangwei's recent study of the text confidently ascribes the
　　　　  text to 692, the year in which it was "sent back" to China.(71) We
　　　　  can be fairly sure then that the text was in circulation before the
　　　　  alleged translation of the Shouleng'yan jing.
　　　　  The last section of his work, which is only partly a travel diary
　　　　  and partly a discourse on the minutiae of the Vinaya, consists of a
　　　　  sustained attack on the illegitimacy of burning the body. We have
　　　　  seen his first line of attack above, and Yijing goes on to argue as
　　　　  follows. Human rebirth is hard to attain, and one should not give up
　　　　  the body before one has really begun to study.(72) Second, suicide
　　　　  is not permitted in the Vinaya.(73) The Buddha did not even permit
　　　　  castration but encouraged the "releasing of living beings" (e.g.,
　　　　  releasing fish into ponds).(74) If one takes refuge in this
　　　　  practice, one contravenes the teachings of the Buddha, although this
　　　　  does not apply to those who follow the bodhisattva path without
　　　　  being ordained to the Vinaya.(75) Those who burn their bodies are
　　　　  guilty of a sthulatyaya offense, but those who then imitate them are
　　　　  guilty of parajika (since their intention is worse).(76) There were
　　　　  suicides in India at the time of the Buddha, and he declared them
　　　　  "heretics" (waidao).(77) The rest of his argument, which takes some
　　　　  seven frames of Taisho text, can be summed up quite succinctly as
　　　　  follows: my teachers were all wise and virtuous men; they never
　　　　  burned their bodies and they told me it was wrong.(78)
　　　　  We should not suppose that Yijing's diary was merely a curiosity to
　　　　  his Tang audience; where earlier Chinese pilgrims had been keen to
　　　　  seek out new and better texts from India, Yijing's purpose was to
　　　　  find out exactly what Indian Buddhists did and to relay that
　　　　  knowledge to an expectant audience in China.(79) The fact that
　　　　  Indian Buddhists did not burn themselves would have been a matter of
　　　　  no small impact on his contemporaries, and we have already seen that