This is an oft mis-understood and miscommunicated chapter on the depth of resolve required to overcome one's samsaric ego on the path to one's Buddha-Wisdom and full/complete enlightenment. To this day there are monks who set their bodies ablaze as if this act of immolation will substantiate their enlightenment. 

In the Surangama Sutra, Ananda and Shakyamuni discuss the "Location of the Mind". In the Lankavatara and Diamond sutra, the Perfection of Wisdom and others, deeply discuss the false ideation of mind as body or more accurately, that the body contains the mind. It does not. Nor does the mind contain the body. The body is simply a samsaric vehicle for the perception of mind. Also, since Buddhism is a profound study of the mind through the faculties of the "body", this study is a science of mind and not of the body. The body is a small point in the chain of events within the mind for manifesting cause. therefore, burning or immolating the body is an act of violence and destruction of merit in many ways. Not least of those negative causes is the cessation of the samsaric vehicle for the propagation of the Tathagata's wisdom. This is a direct affront to the entrustment of the Law as stated in the 22 chapter of the Lotus Sutra. Immolation, or "self-destruction" is antithetical to the teachings of Buddhism. To use the term in another way; to "self" destruct is to validate the existence of the "self" and therefore anti-Buddhist. Obsessions of the body are found in all manner of religion, but not in Buddhism. The body, again, serves only as samsaric interface to the object of actual study and realization, the mind.