DEATH

As in all religions, death is an event of monumental importance for Buddhism. From one point of view death may appear as a nonissue in Buddhism because the assumption of transmigration guarantees that death is not final. Death nevertheless reminds the Buddhist that human life is the best existence from which to pursue liberation, but it is relatively short; moreover, as an unusual reward of meritorious karma (action), human life cannot be taken for granted as one's next rebirth and may not come again for a long time. Death also reminds the Buddhist that repeated rebirths do not guarantee progress toward realizing nirv??a; in fact each existence in sa?s?ra is difficult to control and so permeated by du?kha (suffering) in one form or another that it is exceedingly difficult to cease producing karma and escape. Belief in transmigration thus does not remove the sense of insecurity that accompanies death, and for that reason the goal of nirvana is often described as "deathless" (am?ta) because it eliminates all such anxieties. The journey of the prince Siddh?rtha outside the palace walls in the biographies of the Buddha similarly show the centrality of death as a religious problem: It is after seeing a corpse that Siddh?rtha grows morose and troubled, setting up the next and final encounter with a mendicant who not only shows him the possibility of pursuing a spiritual life, but explains his own motivation as seeking "that most blessed state in which extinction is unknown."

Considering the complexity of the impact death has on Buddhism, it may be helpful to approach the matter in four thematic ways: (1) in doctrine, (2) in praxis, (3) in memorializing the death of the Buddha, and (4) in funerary culture.

Doctrinal death and mythical roots

Philosophical associations with death abound in the various credos that Buddhism has produced over the centuries. In the early tradition, the four nobletruths define humankind's central problem as du?kha and indicate how it can be overcome. But the tradition also analyzes du?kha itself as fourfold: birth, aging, disease, and death. Similarly, the last of the twelve "limbs" in the prat?tyasamutp?da (dependent origination) formula is "aging and death," indicating the inevitable dissolution of all sentient life. Even the "three characteristics" of all conditioned existence—anitya (impermanence), du?kha, and an?tman (nonsubstantiality)—imply the centrality of death because the deepest resonance of this truth is not the desire for permanent sources of happiness, but a permanent source of our own existence.

Death itself is described in various ways throughout the canon. The Dhammapada and Suttanip?ta frame it poetically ("just as ripe fruit falls quickly from the tree" or "like a cow being led to slaughter"), but the later nik?yas and abhidharma literature are more analytical. Here death is explained as the cessation of the continuity of the five skandha (aggregates), the crumbling of the body, and the ending of the ?yus (life span) or j?vitendriya (faculty of living). Generally the j?vitendriya is the force that sustains human life through the continuous changes to the five aggregates, and is held to be of predetermined length. This is death in "due time," and it is contrasted with "untimely" death caused by encountering unexpected circumstances, such as being murdered, being eaten by a wild animal, succumbing to illness, and so on. In the Therav?da commentarial tradition, final moments of consciousness are described in some detail, when past karmic deeds or signs of such "settle" on the individual, and then a vision of one's future destiny occurs, such as the appearance of fire signifying hell, a mother's womb indicating rebirth in the human realm, or pleasure groves and divine palaces for a future in a heavenly realm. Then comes a momentary "death awareness" (cuticitta) followed immediately by "rebirth linking consciousness" (pa?isandhiviññ??a) signifying the next life. The relationship between these two is said to be one of neither identity nor otherness; likened to an echo it is caused by previous events but not identical to them.

As the skandhas are formed from a collectivity of causes and conditions that are temporary in nature, the skandhas themselves are impermanent, constantly arising and ceasing. Death from the point of view of this "momentariness" doctrine is in fact something that recurs moment after moment. In this and the "end of a lifetime" notions of death, how the karmic identity continues is a key question. The dissolution of the self never means the dissolution of karma.

Some schools speak of four stages of life: birth, the period between birth and death, death, and the period between death and rebirth. According to the Abhidharmako?abh??ya and Yog?c?ra literature, one explanation of this process is that in the presence of a life span the j?vitendriya holds onto bodily warmth and consciousness symbiotically and unceasingly until the "due time." At that point all three—life, warmth, and consciousness—abandon the body and death ensues, described as akin to throwing off a piece of wood, whereupon karma forces the three to seek another body. Here it would seem that the physical body is something other than these three animating functions and that only in combination is a finite lifetime produced. Another doctrine posits the antar?bhava, an intermediate state between death and the next life wherein one is transformed into an entity called a gandharva, originally a semidivine being associated with fertility and the god Soma in pre-Buddhist Indian myths. Possessing subtle versions of all five aggregates reflective of one's next birth, for most people in this state some perception is possible but willpower is limited to finding an appropriate womb to descend into, and the common view gives the gandharva forty-nine days to accomplish this task. Advanced practitioners known as nonreturners, however, can attain nirvana from this state. This conception was readily accepted into the Mah?y?na, where it gave rise to a variety of beliefs and practices designed to help the recently deceased alter their destined rebirth.

The gods Yama and M?ra reflect another mythical aspect of the Buddhist concept of death. Son of a gandharva, Yama is depicted in the ?g Veda as the first mortal; deciding to remain among the dead, Yama becomes the lord of that realm. In the Atharva Veda he acquires a messenger, M?tyu, who later appears in the K?lacakra as death lurking within the body of sentient beings. Otherwise, King Yama's role is generally restricted to the unseen world of the dead, where he becomes the judge before whom the deceased must stand to receive karmic sentencing to determine their status in the next birth. Yama is thus a negative symbol of sa?s?ra itself, and he can be seen holding the six-realm wheel of life in the Vajray?na, which also includes a deity, Yam?ntaka, who represents his defeat. If Buddhists fear Yama in the next world, they fear M?ra, also called the "king of death" (Suttanip?ta), in this one. From his attempts to dissuade the bodhisattva from attaining enlightenment via the enticement of lust and the fear of attack, M?ra symbolizes personal death, the death of Buddhism as a religion, and the evils of destruction and uncontrolled desire. Derived from a verb meaning to die or kill (m?), there are various forms of M?ra, residing within the aggregates, in the kle?as (defilements), in one of the heavens of the desire-realm (k?maloka), and so on. Although in one sense M?ra is death itself, he is most commonly depicted as a deity who is resentful of the dharma and devoted to hindering the spiritual progress of the practitioner.

Death as a theme of praxis

Meditations on death run throughout the Buddhist tradition. This comes from the fact that the Buddha identified death as the ultimate and therefore most potentially instructive form of du?kha. Death as a theme in focused ritual or meditation is similarly called the key to the "gate of deathlessness." From very early there have been two famous forms of death-praxis, known as death-mindfulness (mara?asm?ti) and meditation on pollution (as?ubhabh?van?). These are mentioned in various places in the P?li canon, but their fullest descriptions are found in the Visuddhimagga by Buddhaghosa.

Mindfulness of death is aimed at fostering existential acceptance of the reality of death and allowing that realization to influence one's life fully. The Buddha was appalled at how common it was for people to go through life as if they were not going to die, and this form of meditation uses eight topics for the practitioner to contemplate:

1. death as executioner,
2. death as ruinous of all forms of happiness and success,
3. death as inevitable for everyone regardless of their power,
4. death as coming about by an infinite number of causes,
5. death as close at hand,
6. death as signless, or coming without warning signs,
7. death as the end of a life span that is in fact short,
8. death as a constant in life.

This practice aims at liberating individuals from natural attachments to their own existence, and thus leads to mindfulness of the three marks of existence: anitya, du?kha, and an?tman.

Meditation on pollution is similarly aimed at deepening one's acceptance of the reality of death, but in this practice the point is driven home by actually going to look at decaying human corpses. As described in the Suttanip?ta (202–203), when the practitioner sees the corpse, he "sees the body as it (really) is" and thinks, "As is this (body of mine), so is that (corpse); as is that, so is this." Statements like this express one strain in Buddhist thought that regards the body as essentially foul and not the locale of one's identity. But despite one's proximity to corpses in various degrees of decay—a remarkably bold concept considering the contagious nature of pollution in Hinduism—Buddhaghosa tells us that ultimately the meditator comes away from this exercise feeling not angst but joy because now that he has accepted the reality of death, he knows he is on the path to defeat it. In Thailand this meditation is often performed at morgues.

Belief that one's state of mind at the moment of death not only passively reflects but can actively influence what happens after death led to the corresponding belief that the true purpose of all praxis is preparation for that final moment. For example, the Dantabh?mi-sutta points to this final "act of time" (k?lakriy?) as something "tamed" or "untamed."

In East Asia, a variation of death-mindfulness is the use of death as an existential k?an in the Chanschool. This is apparent in the charismatic Chinese teacher Yanshou (904–975), who believed that suicide "reciprocated the kindness of the dharma" if done with the proper state of mind. He saw this as a way to actualize the perfection of giving (d?nap?ramit?) and thereby attain enlightenment. Yanshou reflects Buddhist ambivalence about suicide, manifesting the principle that one's life is only a tool that can be manipulated or even given away when necessary. Death also shows up prominently in the rhetoric of Japanese Zen during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). Suzuki Sh?san (1579–1655), for example, was motivated to pursue Zen practice by an obsession with death, and he felt grateful to death for having deepened his practice. The great Rinzai teacher Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1768) is famous for teaching the imperative of an explosive spiritual breakthrough he called the "great death." In a similar vein, Shid? Bunan (1603–1676) wrote:

Die while alive, and be completely dead,

Then do whatever you will, all is good.

About which the modern Zen master Shibayama Zenkei (1894–1974) comments, "The aim of Zen training is to die while alive, that is, to actually become the self of no-mind, and no-form, and then to revive as the True Self of no-mind and no-form" (p. 46). In this form of spiritual death, one's known identity is dissolved, rather abruptly according to Hakuin, yielding a new, more genuine self untainted by discursive, judgmental thinking and totally free to think and act as one pleases.

Memorializing the death of the Buddha

The Mah?parinibb?na-sutta (DN 2:140–142) describes in some detail the circumstances of the Buddha's passing, how he viewed his upcoming death, and how his body was treated afterward. Despite his admonition against attaching value to his corpse—"What is there in seeing this wretched body? Whoever sees dharma, sees me."—the Buddha instructed his attendant ?nanda to give him a funeral like a "king of kings," explained as wrapping the body in five hundred layers of cloth, placing it inside an iron vessel, and then burning it on a funeral pyre. He also authorized the building of one st?pa at a crossroads to house his remains, extolling the welfare it would bring believers who visited and paid their respects. But even this bow to relic worship was not enough: There was such a clamoring for his ?ar?ra (relics) by the eight kings of the region that all were given portions after the cremation, leading initially to the construction of eight st?pas containing them, with two more later erected that enshrined the bowl used to collect the relics and the ashes from the pyre. The s?tra also promises rebirth in heaven for anyone who makes pilgrimage "with hearts of reverence" to four sites memorializing the Buddha's historical presence—where he was born, achieved enlightenment, delivered his first sermon, and passed away.

The s?tra is probably only canonizing pilgrimage routes that began immediately after the Buddha's death. St?pa worship increased during the third century b.c.e. under King A?oka, who is said to have opened up the original ten st?pas and distributed the relics therein among eighty-four thousand new St?pas built throughout the land. Images of the Buddha also served as public memorials to the founder after his death, though they appear in mass quantities somewhat later. Their similarity to st?pas in this regard can be seen in the fact that both often contain relics, symbols of their animation. St?pas and images thus became symbols of the corporeal presence of the Buddha and his enlightened followers; at times they evolved into mausoleums of architectural sophistication, as at the great st?pa complex at S?Ñc? in central India where the relics of ??riputra and Mah?maudgaly?yana are said to be enshrined and where buddha images from Mathur? were brought in. Relics for the consecrations of st?pas and images were exported to other Buddhist nations such as Sri Lanka and China, allowing a physical "presence" of the Buddha in death over an expanded area that could not have taken place while he was alive.

One oddity within the Mah?parinibb?na-sutta is how the narrative deals with the paradox of a buddha dying when he himself professed his ability to continue living until the end of the kalpa. The Tath?gata relates to ?nanda how M?ra has repeatedly appeared before him and requested that he relent and die on the spot, but he has consistently found excuses to put him off. This time, however, he has decided to go ahead and let his time run out. Almost akin to a pronouncement of suicide, the s?tra reads, "And now, ?nanda, the Tath?gata has today at Ch?p?la's shrine consciously and deliberately rejected the rest of his allotted time" (5:37). ?nanda swiftly responds by beseeching the Buddha three times to remain in the world, living until the end of the kalpa, but each time the Buddha refuses. He then describes no less than sixteen previous occasions when he remarked to ?nanda how much he liked a particular place and could remain there for the duration of the kalpa, hinting that ?nanda should ask him to do so. But each time ?nanda did not understand, and the Buddha now explains that without such an outside request, he is powerless to alter his historical fate. To beseech the Buddha now as he approaches death is too late: "The time for making such a request is past." ?nanda's dim-wittedness is thus made the scapegoat for humankind having to suffer century upon century without a buddha.

Funerary culture

Putting aside the death of the founder, which has unique historical significance, it may be useful in considering the various ways in which the living relate to the dead in Buddhist cultures throughout Asia to divide such expression into the care and treatment of the uncommon dead, the common dead, and the unknown dead. Under the rubric of uncommon dead, would be saints, kings, and lesser religious and political leaders who are typically memorialized in ways that manifest their power and influence. Relations between the common dead and the living is typically dominated by familial concerns regarding how kinfolk can assist the recently deceased in their postmortem "journey," and the flip side of this relationship, which is how the dead can either enhance or disrupt the lives of the living depending on how appropriately such assistance is rendered. The unknown dead appear most commonly in pious efforts to help all beings born in the lower realms of hell and what are usually referred to as hungry ghosts. In all cases, the care and treatment of corpses naturally reflect different attitudes about the expected relationship between the deceased and those left behind.

Two universal principles are often evident in all three categories of funerary culture. First is that in every society in Asia that may be considered traditionally Buddhist, indigenous belief structures regarding the dead that were operative before the assimilation of Buddhism persist and form an integral part of that assimilation. This has resulted in a hybridization of funerary practices under the guise of Buddhist rituals and rhetoric. Within each nation there is considerable diversity in how the dead are treated, and these differences in local culture expose any notion of ethnic homogeneity as political myth. This is particularly true in the care and treatment of the common dead, where the Buddhist input into that amalgam varies widely. There has been easy acceptance of the doctrine of transmigration in Tibet, for example. By contrast, in China deep traditions of family obligations beyond the grave have meant less than full acceptance of the presumption that each rebirth places the individual into a new family wherein the previous family is completely forgotten. It was thus normative in China to use the surname of the Buddha upon taking the tonsure, signifying a public shift of filial affiliation to the sa?gha.

Monks are intimately connected with funerary culture in all Buddhist countries, usually in ways that combine Buddhist and non-Buddhist beliefs about death, and it has been common for monasteries to derive significant revenue from related activities such as cremation, burial, and services for the family. While cremation has been the norm in India since before the birth of Buddhism, this was not so for the rest of Asia, and although there is no scriptural demand for cremation in Buddhism, its adoption on the continent came with the dissemination of Buddhist culture. Thus did the arrival of Buddhism bring cremation as a common approach to the care and treatment of the dead in much of the Buddhist world. But burial has remained the norm in Mongolia, and in Tibet the body is brought to a mountaintop, broken up, and fed to birds. In China cremation appears to have been widespread

only during the Song and Yuan dynasties and the period since the Communist revolution in 1949; here resistance stems from the ancient belief that the dead emerge in the afterlife with a kind of ethereal body that needs to be fully intact to function properly.

The second principle is that when we speak of how the dead are viewed by the living, we should recognize that they are merely one part of another reality wherein are also found a host of supernatural entities such as celestial beings, spirits, fairies, gods of one sort of another, M?ra, Yama, future and past buddhas, bodhisattvas, and so forth. This other world is not separate from ours but for the most part is hidden to us. We can glimpse traces of it, however, through unorthodox states of mind experienced in meditative trance, dreams, portents, miraculous manifestations, and occasional encounters with individuals from that realm.

The Mah?parinibb?na-sutta defines four types of uncommon dead by identifying who deserves to be memorialized by means of building sacred st?pas over their graves: buddhas, pratyekabuddhas, ?r?vakas, and righteous wheel-turning kings (cakravartin). The s?tra states that these four groups are worthy of memorial st?pas because when a believer looks upon their grave-mound and thinks "This is the st?pa of …," the heart of that person will be made calm and happy, and when that believer dies this personal experience will result in rebirth in a heavenly realm. The s?tra thus canonizes the belief that st?pas built to mark the graves of sacred historical persons will be embodied with the power to transform believing pilgrims who make contact with those st?pas such that their karmic status will be so purified that rebirth in heaven is assured. This is just one example of the fact that belief in the religious power of material expressions of the uncommon dead begins very early in Buddhism. In Mah?y?na countries, cremated remains of eminent monks were often inspected to find relics in the form of jewels or shining bone nuggets, confirming their status as bodhisattvas and prompting burial under st?pas. In China there are numerous stories of the cremated bones of saints found linked in a chain.

Many have pointed to the presence of relics in St?pas and other funerary paraphernalia as the basis of their power, and indeed relics have played a prominent role in sanctifying not only st?pas, but monasteries, shrines, statues, and so forth. The extreme form of sanctifying the corporeal remains of a saint is to display the mummified body on an altar. This tradition was not uncommon in Mah?y?na countries, reflecting the belief that an "attained" individual leaves behind a "diamond-like" body that remains erect. This view is of a piece with the early belief that buddhas were inevitably marked with thirty-two major and eighty minor physical abnormalities, such as long ears and tongues or webbed hands and feet, stemming from the principle that spiritual achievement brought corporeal manifestations, much like the stigmata in Europe. Numerous mummified monks can still be viewed in China and Japan today, and in 2002 a deceased rin po che (teacher) in Mongolia was discovered in this form. We know that the drinking of lacquer, a poison that ended the saint's life but also stiffened his joints, preceded some of these mummified deaths.

But a tomb does not need a relic to be considered sacred. In Japan, where the relics of famous monks are frequently kept on the altars of monasteries, the uncommon dead typically have multiple tombs with or without something material of the individual interred therein. For example, the fact that the body of Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582), the general who reunited the country after a hundred years of war, was never recovered did not impede the establishment of at least sixteen "empty" burial sites to honor him. While such gravesite mimes are not universal, the st?pa or pagoda, its architectural variant, did become a universal burial marker for the uncommon dead throughout Buddhist Asia. Typically these house relics of the deceased in the form of ?ar?ra, bone fragments remaining after cremation. As with the Buddha, such burial edifices frequently have become both the objects of pilgrimage and centers for monastic communities.

The burial sites of the uncommon dead may also serve as focal points of sectarian identity. When this occurs, other expressions of collective identity, such as larger mausoleums and the pilgrimage routes, typically accompany it. In Japan, this pattern is particularly striking, having led to the custom of interring the common dead at the burial sites of saints, such as K?kai and Shinran, both founders of their major denominations. The recent dead are thereby thought to be purified by their proximity to the sacred dead, improving their karmic status for achieving rebirth in Tu?ita Heaven or Amit?bha's Pure Land. Since family members in Japan often want the remains of their loved ones to be kept nearby yet also desire to help them after death, what is left of the body (ashes and bits of bone after cremation, whole bones when the flesh has disappeared after an earth burial) may be divided and two graves created—one at a local cemetery, and another at the site of the saint. The Honganji branch of Shinran's denomination has been selling spots for interment at the grave of Shinran since at least the sixteenth century, a policy that has created both revenue and a deep sense of fealty among the branch's non-clergy members.

It should also be noted that rebirth in the Pure Land of Amit?bha has slowly grown into a kind of normative objective of postmortem ritual for most of the Mah?y?na world, from Tibet to Japan, since the seventh century, cutting across a range of schools, beliefs, and sectarian identities. The rhetoric of attaining the Pure Land promises nonbacksliding status and swift progress to buddhahood, yet it also includes the imperative to postpone buddhahood in order to return to sa?s?ra to help others attain a similar postmortem peace.

One of the important principles guiding relations between the dead and their deceased kin or intimates is that of merit transfer (pariva??a, pari??ma), a fundamental theme in funerary rituals devoted to raising the recently deceased to the Pure Land, for example. Adopted from earlier Brahmanic rites for the dead called ?raddha that elevated the status of the recently deceased from unstable ghost (preta) to divinity (deva), Buddhism similarly began with tales of ghosts who are incapable of initiating action to improve their situation. In the Therav?da text Petavatthu, the ghost of a deceased person may appear to someone in his or her family requesting that offerings be made to the san ? gha with the merit ritually transferred to the ghost. If the ghost is morally capable of appreciating the goodness of the act, he or she can be transformed into a deity, just as in Brahmanism.

In the Mah?y?na, the practice of merit transfer is greatly expanded, but it shares with Therav?da a presumption that the efficacy depends upon the ability of the deceased to perceive religious messages ritually sent to him or her and to appreciate their meaning. It is widely believed in Mah?y?na countries that in the intermediate state one has the potential to refuse the samsaric body offered and, if one can steer clear of distractions, awaken to the truth and proceed directly to nirvana. The so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead is meant to guide the dead when confronted with different choices as to what path to follow in that realm. Kinfolk and close friends gather repeatedly to

chant s?tras and make donations to the sa?gha, producing a store of merit that is ritually transferred to the deceased.

Care of the unknown or nonkin dead typically occurs on an individual basis, such as when a pilgrim dies on the road, but there is also a famous institutional example in the Chinese Ghost Festival. Here Chinese notions of ravenous ghosts and Indian concepts of preta fused into the hungry ghost image—beings in the preta realm that are obsessed with hunger as they try to fill a large belly with a tiny mouth; the hungry ghost can never get enough to feel satisfied. Based on the indigenous Yulanpen jing, a ritual tradition began in the medieval period for a yearly festival to transfer merit to all beings in the preta realm by making donations to the sa?gha. This festival is still practiced throughout East Asia, and is particularly vibrant in Japan.

See also:Abortion; Ancestors; Buddha, Life of the; Cosmology; Ghosts and Spirits; Hells; Mah?parinirv??a-s?tra; Merit and Merit-Making; Rebirth; Relics and Relics Cults

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Mark L. Blum