The custom of burning ordination scars is said to have originated in the Yuan Dynasty. At that time, a monk named Zhide was respected by the ancestor of the Yuan Dynasty. When he passed on the ordination, he stipulated that each person who received the ordination should burn incense on his head. Burn three sticks of incense, or twelve sticks of incense for those who have been ordained as monks, as a lifelong vow. Such a small invention spread quietly and was passed down from generation to generation. This is of course a bad habit that harms the body and is a small souvenir of Han Buddhist culture. From here we can also see some characteristics of the Buddhist cultural circle in Han Dynasty. Simply put, in the later stages of the development of Buddhism, the "popular belief" has a much stronger influence than the "elite culture" composed of a very small number of thinkers (Buddhists). energy. Yuan Seng Zhide, who invented the Incense Burning Scar (commonly known as the "Incense Burning Cave"), was not a Buddhist scholar at all. However, the spread and far-reaching spread of his little invention was unmatched by the teachings of any famous eminent monk after Huineng.
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A few scars are burned on the monk's bald head with incense, which is called burning ring. Anyone who wishes to escape into Buddhism will be a formal disciple of Buddhism after being ordained and burning the ordination. The strange thing is that monks in India, the birthplace of Buddhism, never burn orbs, and they are spared this physical pain when they enter Buddhism.
It turns out that Chinese monks burned ordnances since Emperor Wu of Liang in the Liang Dynasty of the Southern Dynasties. Emperor Wu of Liang was a fanatical Buddhist. He sacrificed his life in Buddhist temples to become a monk three times, and was redeemed by ministers with large sums of money to the temples three times. At that time, he pardoned all the prisoners on death row and made them believe in Buddhism and become monks. But he was afraid that they would escape from the monastery and commit crimes again, so he used Qianxing (a kind of criminal law of tattooing on the face) as a model and burned ring scars on their heads for easy identification and capture. This is the beginning of ring burning among Chinese Buddhists. . Later, burning the ordination was considered to be the beginning of penance in Buddhism, and gradually became applicable to all monks. It continues to this day and has become one of the marks of a monk in the eyes of secular people.