Chapter 23 of the Lotus Sutra tells a story about previous lives of Medicine King Bodhisattva, when he was a bodhisattva called Seen with Joy by All the Living, a bodhisattva who burned his whole body as a sacrifice to a buddha and later burned just his arms as a sacrifice to a buddha. It then praises the Dharma Flower Sutra and those who follow it.

Like the Sutra as a whole, this chapter has had enormous impact on East Asian Buddhism. Many will remember the sight of Vietnamese monks burning themselves to death in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, beginning with the monk Thich Quang Duc in 1963. It has been said that these monks and nuns used their bodies as torches to illuminate the suffering of the Vietnamese people so that the world might see what was happening in Vietnam. Theirs was an extremely powerful message. And it is a fact that the story and pictures of Thich Quang Duc burning himself were soon seen all over the world. And within a few months the regime of President Diem was overthrown and his anti-Buddhist policies ended.

A great many Chinese monks right down to the middle of the twentieth century followed the practice of burning off one or more of their fingers as a sign of dedication and devotion. Until very recently, virtually all Chinese monks and nuns, and I believe those in Vietnam as well, when receiving final ordination, used moxa, a kind of herb used in traditional Chinese medicine, to burn small places on their scalps, where the scars usually remained for life. This ritual burning was taken to be a sign of complete devotion to the three treasures – the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

While deeply sympathetic with those who show such great devotion by sacrificing their bodies by fire, it is not a practice I can recommend to anyone. It is much better, I believe, to sacrifice our bodies through dedicated work, in a sense burning our bodies much more slowly. Since Chapter 23 is naturally read as advocating self-immolation, it has been my least favorite chapter in the Lotus Sutra, one that I some times wish had not been included. And yet the last part of the chapter contains some of the most beautiful aphoristic poetry in the Dharma Flower Sutra.