As the field of Daoist studies has developed over the past half century, some specialists have increasingly made efforts to place Daoism within the broader conversation of world religions and religious studies. These efforts are not without their detractors, especially regarding the issue over whether or not to use theoretical categories developed in studies of other religious traditions to describe Daoism. Such a debate began over the use of the category "asceticism" by scholar Stephen Eskildsen, who recently published a book entitled Asceticism in Early Taoist Religion. Eskildsen's critics argue that the very word "asceticism" and the concepts it implies are inappropriate to Daoist studies. This paper is a result of my efforts to determine for myself whether "asceticism" useful or, conversely, inappropriate and unhelpful to understanding Daoism. Due to the vastness of the subject, I have focused my research in Daoism on a single, foundational text of the Lingbao tradition, the Scripture of Salvation. I examine the scripture's concepts of the body as a central feature to both Lingbao and ascetic theory and find that conscious and careful use of "asceticism" as a theoretical category does in fact shed light on important aspects of Lingbao and can contribute to our understanding of Daoism as whole. Using Gavin Flood's theories of asceticism and "ascetic self," I argue that the Scripture of Salvation prescribes a form of asceticism as entextualization of the medieval Lingbao body.