James A. Benn received his PhD from UCLA in 2001 and is now Professor of
Buddhism and East Asian Religions at McMaster University. He studies
Buddhism and Daoism in medieval China. To date, he has focused on three
major areas of research:
bodily practice in Chinese Religions; the ways in which people create
and transmit new religious practices and doctrines; and the religious
dimensions of commodity culture. He has published on self-immolation,
spontaneous human combustion, Buddhist apocryphal
scriptures, and tea and alcohol in medieval China in journals such as
History of Religions, T’oung Pao, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and
Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. He is the author of
Burning for the Buddha: Self-immolation in Chinese Buddhism (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007) and
Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007). He is currently working on a translation and study of the
Śūramgama sutra, a Chinese Buddhist apocryphon.