Sky Burials

Sky Burials
Most tourists quickly hear stories about Tibetan sky burials, as the custom is one of the most – to Westerners – unusual and graphic ways to dispose of loved ones who have passed on. Basically, Tibetan Buddhists believe that when someone dies, the soul has left and so the body is no longer really the person. Children and animals are “returned” to rivers from whence they came (this explains why Tibetans are strongly opposed to eating fish). Adults are given sky burials, if the family can afford it.
After a brief mourning period, the body is ready to be “returned” to the sky. Sky burial sites are in remote locations, usually close to a monastery. Specialized monks attend to the body, chanting and praying. Then, the monks begin to cut the body up into small pieces while the family (and some tourists) watch. Once it is dissected, the monks begin the arduous process of separating skin, muscle and fat from bone. Every part of the body needs to be eaten by vultures, so they grind the bone with barley flour to make it digestible.
To Westerners, this sounds brutal and gruesome. But in Tibet it is of the highest honor to receive a sky burial. And, as you can imagine, tourists flock to see the ceremony. In recent years the government has, rightly so, made it illegal for tourists to attend sky burials. But it used to be quite common. Greg and I met several tourists who have attended sky burials in the past and described the experience in varying ways. One man said he’d never seen anything so horrific, while a woman we talked to described the ceremony as “incredibly spiritual.” However it is seen, tourists still sometimes go to these ceremonies even though they are not supposed to (just imagine a Tibetan tourist sauntering into an American funeral parlor and taking pictures of an open casket during the ceremony).
Needless to say, Greg and I did not attend a sky burial ceremony, but learning about the ceremony helped me understand a little more about the Tibetan concept of dying. Buddhists are really not afraid of death, and have a pretty healthy perspective on aging. Rather than invade a sky burial ceremony, if tourists are interested in Buddhist concepts of dying, there is a book “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,” by Sogyal Rinpoche, which is reccommended over attending a sky burial.