and he will be eternally free of all outflow (lou, Skt. asrava).
　　　　  Even if he has not yet understood the supreme path of awakening,
　　　　  such a person has already focused his mind on the dharma. But if he
　　　　  does not have this secret underlying cause for sacrificing the body,
　　　　  then even if he attains the unconditioned he must be reborn again as
　　　　  a human in order to repay the debts from his previous lives. Just as
　　　　  when I [had to] eat horse-fodder.'(17)
　　　　  The above passage provides an excellent example of the typically
　　　　  reductive nature of Sinitic apocrypha in the positing of a single
　　　　  practice that leads to enlightenment-described here in terms of
　　　　  being free from rebirth and from the outflows.(18) By extension, a
　　　　  body that is free from outflows or "cankers" is the perfect body of
　　　　  a buddha. The scholar of Chinese religions will see here immediate
　　　　  parallels with "deliverance from the corpse" and "postmortem
　　　　  immortality" in Taoism, but I fear this line of inquiry must await a
　　　　  fuller exploration elsewhere.(19)
　　　　  It is evident from the above that even before we consult the
　　　　  commentarial literature, these two passages explicitly permit or
　　　　  require the burning of the body by renunciates, be they renunciate
　　　　  bodhisattvas (chujia pusa) or fully ordained monks (biqiu, bhiksu).
　　　　  It is tempting to leap straight from what we know about ordination
　　　　  now--where "incense" (in fact moxa as we shall see) is burned on the
　　　　  head or arm--back to a point in time when these two texts first came
　　　　  together and to conclude that ordination practice is based on the
　　　　  simple conjunction of these two texts, that is, that burning incense
　　　　  on the body is equivalent to burning the body and is symbolic of the
　　　　  ascetic practices of the bodhisattva. While this may in fact be
　　　　  true, the story of how this came about is perhaps a little more
　　　　  complicated than it might first appear.
　　　　  BURNING AT ORDINATION
　　　　  We must perforce begin with an account of burning at ordination as
　　　　  we know it today. There may well exist earlier Chinese accounts of
　　　　  ordination that give the kind of procedural and ritual detail
　　　　  beloved of the anthropologist, but if they do exist I have so far
　　　　  been unable to locate them.(20) However, for ordination as practiced
　　　　  from the late nineteenth century onward we do have some very useful
　　　　  descriptions from outside observers such as J. J. M. de Groot,
　　　　  Johannes Prip-Moller, and Holmes Welch and for modern-day Korea, the
　　　　  unique insights of a participant-observer, Robert Buswell, who was