What Was That Fire Burning?

7.3 What Was That Fire Burning?

In the Lotus Sūtra there is a chapter called "The Former Deeds of the Bodhisattva Bhaiṣajyarāja." What it recounts makes the heart seize to read.

Long ago, there was a bodhisattva named Sarvasattvapriyadarśana, "Seen with Joy by All Beings." To make offering to the Buddha and to the Dharma, he did something that shook heaven and earth: before the Buddha, he burned his own body as an offering.

Reading this, nearly everyone's heart clenches hard, and the same question springs up:

Is this asking people to burn their own bodies?

Let this question be answered first, cleanly and without a trace of wavering:

It is not.

This chapter of the sūtra was never a call to burn the body. The patriarchs of the generations—great masters like Zhiyi and Zhanran—long ago saw this fire with utter clarity, and drew, plainly and firmly, the line that says: this is not to be done by the letter. In this chapter we follow them and settle two things: first, what this fire was truly burning; second, why a person who burns the body by the letter has, on the contrary, got it entirely wrong.

The Real Fire Is the Wisdom-Fire That Burns Affliction

Master Zhiyi of Tiantai, explaining the phrase "the true offering of Dharma" (the sūtra calls Bhaiṣajyarāja's burning of the body "the true offering of Dharma"), gives not an explanation about the flesh, but an explanation about the mind. He says:

"'The true offering of Dharma' means inwardly setting the contemplation of wisdom in motion, observing the causes and effects of affliction, and sweeping them all away with the wisdom of emptiness—therefore it is called true Dharma."

It means: the "true offering of Dharma" is to set the illumination of wisdom working in the mind, to see affliction through—where it comes from, where it leads—and with that wisdom of "emptiness" to sweep affliction clean, piece by piece. This is what "true Dharma" is.

You see—Zhiyi reads that "fire burning the body" back into the mind, whole: what is truly burning is not this fleshly body but the wisdom-fire that burns affliction away. What is to be burned is greed, is anger, is the clinging that clenches the "I" tight; and that fire is prajñā.

Zhiyi then goes one layer deeper: in the moment of burning, if you truly look with wisdom—this body being burned, this fire, this "I who offers," this "thing offered"—search them through carefully, and "the one who offers and that which is offered are both unobtainable." No solid "I am burning" can be found; no solid "body being burned" can be found. Is this not the "three wheels empty" that the five parts before this one have spoken of again and again? In Zhiyi's eyes, that scene of Bhaiṣajyarāja becomes an extreme demonstration of the three wheels—giver, receiver, gift—all empty, pushed onto the flesh itself.

The Line the Patriarchs Drew: Without Inner Illumination, Burning the Body Is Only Suffering for Nothing

Then what if someone, not understanding this layer, took it literally and went to burn his body?

Master Zhanran drew this line the heaviest and the clearest. He said:

"If it is not so, it becomes useless asceticism."

It means: without that inner illumination of wisdom (the "contemplation of non-duality" Zhanran has just spoken of)—if one simply, blindly, clingingly burns one's own body—then it becomes "useless asceticism": tormenting yourself for nothing, to no benefit whatsoever. Zhanran adds that the Buddha gave a solemn admonition against such things, and this must be thought through first.

Hold this sentence firmly in mind: in the patriarchs' eyes, burning the body without inner illumination is not an offering; it is an asceticism of suffering for nothing—the very thing the Buddha admonished against and told people to keep far from.

This is the most important, and the most protective, line in the whole chapter. It tells everyone who reads the sūtra: the worth of Bhaiṣajyarāja's fire never lay in "the flesh being burned"; it lay in "affliction being seen through, the 'I' being loosened." The former, without the latter, is nothing but meaningless self-harm—the patriarchs saw this plainly, without a hair's breadth of ambiguity.

The Sūtra Itself Left the Antidote Early

In truth, the Lotus Sūtra itself, within this very chapter, left several signposts that say: do not read this by the letter.

One: an earlier translation has a line saying that when this bodhisattva burned his body, "because of his one-pointed mind, he had no pain or distress"—because he abode in deepest meditative concentration (the one mind), there was no suffering. Look at this picture: it is not a picture of screaming, of agony, of torn flesh—it is a picture of one settled in profound samādhi, at ease and without pain. What the text means to hand on is the ease within concentration, not the torment of the flesh. To read it as an agonizing torture to be imitated is to read it exactly backward.

Another: the sūtra says the bodhisattva was "making the body a lamp"—taking the body as a lamp. And what is a lamp? It is light; it is illumination. The image points to this: the letting-go of one's own body becomes light that shines on living beings—not "preparing a pile of combustible firewood." It is a symbol of light, of illumining.

And the most important signpost of all: in this same chapter, the Buddha says directly afterward—if someone can receive and uphold this Lotus Sūtra, "even a four-line gāthā" (even just four lines of it), their blessing is the greatest of all. The text itself takes the awe surrounding "burning the body" and gently redirects it toward something everyone can do: receive and uphold this sūtra well, remember even four lines of it, practice by it. This, and not the fire, is the offering the text asks you to "do." The burning of the body is an extreme symbol; upholding a four-line verse is the work that lands in your hands.

What That Fire Burned Was the "I"

Put the patriarchs' words and the sūtra's words together, and what this fire was burning becomes clear.

What it burned was the "I."

For a person to loosen the grip on "my" possessions is not easy; to loosen "my" reputation is harder; but the hardest of all to loosen, the most tightly clenched, is "this body of mine"—the last line of defense of the "I," the innermost core of "mine." That scene of Bhaiṣajyarāja takes this book's main thread—loosening what is "mine"—and pushes it to its absolute end: even this "body," one is willing to loosen, willing to give over in offering.

So that fire is a symbol: the losing of "I" pushed to the very end of the flesh. What is burned away is nothing else but the thing called "I" itself—the self-clinging that must mark everything in the world "mine," that grips even its own body in a death-hold. It burns in the mind, not on the body. It is the fiercest possible picture of letting go completely.

Understand this layer, and the chapter's teaching for ordinary people like us lands: you need not—and you must never—burn your body; that is the great error of reading by the letter. What you are to do is let that fire of wisdom burn, inside your mind, at the "I": burn away greed, burn away anger, burn away that little glow of "I am giving; how remarkable I am," burn away even the subtlest thought of "I am a giver." Not a hair on your hand is harmed; yet the "I" in your mind, inch by inch, loosens in the fire. This, and nothing else, is what the chapter of Bhaiṣajyarāja's former deeds truly places in your hands.

Part Seven, to This Point

With this, the three scenes of Part Seven have pushed the offering of body and Dharma to the limit.

The first scene, the offering of Dharma—someone carries the Dharma and lives it out; the person is the offering. The second, the offering of reverence—Sadāparibhūta bows to everyone he meets, bowing to the Buddha all people possess from the start. The third, the offering of the body—Bhaiṣajyarāja burns his body, and that fire burns the "I": the losing of "I" pushed to the very end of the flesh.

Put the three together, and you will find: however high, however fierce the offering is pushed, at its end stands the same one thing—losing the "I," loosening the clenched heart. What burns in the fire, what is given in the bow, what is let go in carrying the Dharma—all of it is that "I."

And yet Bhaiṣajyarāja's offering, heroic as it is, is still finite: what it offers to is one Buddha; what it uses is one body; when it happens is one time.

Then is there an offering with no edge, no end, no exhaustion?—an offering to all Buddhas throughout empty space and across the dharma-realm, thought after thought continuing, never interrupted, not stopping even when the realm of beings is exhausted, when the realm of space is exhausted?

There is. This book bears the title From Pāli Roots to the Dharmadhātu. We have walked all the way from the plainest Pāli "letting-go"; now, at last, we are about to walk to that far end—the "dharma-realm offering." In the next part we enter the Avataṃsaka Sūtra and watch Samantabhadra's "vast cultivation of offerings." Bhaiṣajyarāja's one finite fire will find its true completion in Samantabhadra's offering without limit.