IN SOME ways, Ram Bahadur Bomjan is a typical teenager: he loves his cricket, he sits with shoulders slumped, hair falling into his eyes, uninterested in the world.

In other ways, he is definitely not. For the past nine months, the 15-year-old has sat, meditating at the base of a peepal tree in Nepal's Bara District, without food, water, sleep or the need to use the toilet. If that was not remarkable enough, on January 19, he spontaneously combusted, burning off the clothes he has worn for nine months but leaving no scars. Lest there be doubters, his followers caught that combustion on video and plan to present the footage, seen by The Age, at a news conference in Kathmandu, soon.

The Buddha Boy, as he is known in Nepal, is a source of equal scepticism and reverence. To the doubters, it is an elaborate scam, which has drawn thousands of pilgrims, domestic and international, to a dirt poor area of Nepal's terrai region.