Way to Go: the Sky, your Cemetery.

Wow, wow, wowowowowo: it’s Tibetan Sky Burial. Talk about powerful.

Photos here, plus good info.

Via Reddit/Imgur: “Tibetan sky burial. the first time i saw this was in kundun, and i’ve always thought it was beautiful. (x-post r/wtf, for some reason) ”

Ven. Henrik Mathisen: “For Westerners in general the idea of sky-burial doesn’t sound very good, but for the Tibetans it seems to be the most natural thing to do. Many people were watching, young and old, some helping out with the ritual, the old ones standing toothless with their walking sticks and malas, reciting manis; others keeping the vultures away with long sticks. It’s a holy site, and therefore photography was not allowed.

Sky-burial involves a deep ritual, whose aim is to help the dead. In the end a few monks cut up the body and give it to the vultures, who almost can’t wait for the meal to be ready and fight over the food while ripping it to pieces. Death is natural, nothing is hidden, everything is laid bare. I must say, a very good meditation on impermanence.”

Arjia Rinpoche: “… we followed Gyayak Rinpoche’s instructions to move my teacher’s body to an open area on a mountain about eight hours away for a sky burial. In Tibet, a sky burial is the traditional way to dispose of the earthly body. The deceased is brought up to a mountain, where the body is cut into pieces and left for the vultures. This is the final act of generosity, offering the body that is no longer needed to sustain the lives of other creatures.

Unfortunately, because of increasing human activity, vultures had become rare in these mountains, so we stayed with the body and waited. Gyayak Rinpoche had told us that if sky burial was not possible, we should cremate the body. We decided to perform the cremation the next evening, after we prepared the site.

That night a strange thing happened. Sometime after midnight, Lobsang Gyatso woke us up, pulling us out of our tents. Pointing to my teacher’s body he said, “Look at the fire, the fire!” We all clearly saw flames dancing above Tsultrim Lhaksem’s body. We wanted to get closer, but Lobsang Gyatso held us back. The flames formed an orange fireball that lasted three hours, but the next day, when we checked my teacher’s body, we found no charring, no sign at all of what happened the previous night. Filled with awe, we recited prayers and sutras as we cremated Tsultrim Lhaksem’s body in a hollow we had dug into the side of the mountain. In this way my first mentor departed from me.

When we returned to the monastery and reported the strange flames to Gyayak Rinpoche, he said calmly, “It was not fire, but rays of emanations leaving his body.” From that day on, I no longer felt uneasy about death.” ~ Surviving the Dragon: A Tibetan Lama’s Account of 40 Years under Chinese Rule.

For more green burial.

A comment, via Reddit:

I’m glad that other people feel this way. 🙂 It’s in /r/wtf because Western societies have developed a whole system around condensing and compartmentalizing death. You’re not supposed to see the body in a natural state. Someone takes it away, prepares it to mock life, and then it goes through different rituals before it’s either burned or buried. There’s an illusion present there that death is somehow cleaner that way. People would probably be just as wtf if they were more aware of what’s actually involved in Western cremation embalming and cremation.

With the sky burial, the participants are very up close with the body – cutting it to prepare it for consumption and then grinding the bones for further consumption. Even just the idea of an animal eating the body is too disturbing for some. Personally, as someone who’s seen a lot of dead things, I’d take an animal over bugs and chemicals. That’s just me. 🙂

There are a lot of practicalities to Tibetan burial practices. The environment is cold and the earth hard, making decomposition a very slow process and burial impractical. Sky burials also aren’t the only form of burial: http://www.tripbus.com/TibetIntroduction/9444029.html

Finding a Western equivalent might be difficult, but I actually know an avenue. If you want to donate your body to science and be consumed by animals, Texas State University has vultures at their forensic anthropology center: http://www.txstate.edu/anthropology/facts/donations.html

I personally observed American Black vultures consume donated individuals as part of the decomposition process while researching there (with the permission of the donors and/or their families of course). If you do donate, be very specific that you want your body to be used for animal research, as the norm is to cage the bodies so that animals do not have access. It may not be as spiritual as the burial pictured, but it does contribute towards education. After decomposition, bones are interred into the university skeletal collection, contributing to data collection for scientific studies and teaching students about human anatomy in perpetuity.