How to Bury Crazy Uncle
After we returned from Lhasa for the Tibetan New Year celebration, one month had past without any news. Yesterday, when I was sitting at the newly-built library to read some ancient manuscripts, the bell calling for a village emergent meeting was tolled. The last emergent meeting was held half a year ago regarding the hailstorm, since then, no emergent meeting was ever called again. I felt very upset upon hearing the sound of that bronze bell and went to the meeting hall located at the central monastery immediately.
I met my friend Kedao at the entrance of the monastery and asked him if he had any idea of what this meeting was about. He told me that some travellers in this early morning went to a cave in the nearby mountain, and they discovered an old man wearing a lama’s robe dead inside there. They wrapped the corpse of the lama-like man by using a white blanket they brought with them and carried it back to the village. The village head could not recognize the man, so some very old villagers who were over 80 years old were called to make the identification. It was said that all the old men were surprised upon seeing the body; it was a man known as “Crazy Uncle” who disappeared from the village fifty years ago. Since this man used to be a village member, so, according to the local custom, he should be properly buried in the village.
I became a little bit confused since I still could not see why this meeting should be held; it was just a dead old man that requires proper burial, we had a bunch of ritualists inside the village could do that. But Kedao said this was precisely the problem — although the oldest villagers could identify the corpse as Crazy Uncle, no one knew the identity of this Crazy Uncle, so the ritualists were not sure on how to bury him, since the burial ritual for a lama or a Tantric practitioner, for example, was very different from that of an ordinary man. And if Crazy Uncle could not be properly buried, his soul would lose the way towards rebirth and thus cause troubles.
While we were talking, we entered the meeting hall and found us a seat. Our village head repeated what Kedao had just told me and asked for our opinion on how to bury him. After a short period of private discussion, a group of scholars proposed that since Crazy Uncle wore a lama-like robe, we should assume that, if he was not a lama, he should at least be a Tantric practitioner, so we should not waste our time in considering how to specially treat his body; we could simply bury him in a very normal way — digging a grave and put his body in. Their logic was that Tantric Buddhism belongs to the Mahayana teaching, and according to Mahayana Buddhism, nirvana and samsara was fundamentally the same. The reason behind this was that all beings lacked self-nature, so they were all empty. The way they appeared to us in this phenomenal world was due to their dependent co-existence. By dependent co-existence, or pratityasamutpada, it means everything exists relative to each other. Being said this, nirvana needs the existence of samsara in order to exist; conversely, samsara needs the existence of nirvana in order to exist. But fundamentally speaking, both of them were empty in nature, since if one of them ceased to exist, the other one could not exist independently either. So, according to the Mahayana teaching, nirvana and samsara were ontologically the same, it was just a matter of how people perceive it. If people could gain enlightenment and thus perceive nirvana and samsara in an enlightened way, we would see that the samsara they were occupying was nirvana, i.e. they were in nirvana right now. So, the scholars concluded that we should respect the belief and life-long meditation of Crazy Uncle; his had already entered nirvana, so this physical body he left was no more than an empty vessel that used to carry his soul. They could see no reason that we should be bothered by it.
However, I, together with most ritualists, disagreed with the scholars’ opinion. Although Crazy Uncle wore a lama’s robe, we should not rashly assume that he was a Tantric practitioner. Just as the village head had said, even the oldest villagers could not confirm the exact identity of Crazy Uncle; the identity of Crazy Uncle probably could never be determined. So, instead of burying him in a very specific way, we should bury him in the way that could minimize the danger of improper burial. Therefore, we proposed that Crazy Uncle should be buried by following the most common burial procedure in the village. First of all, a lama should be invited to cut Crazy Uncle’s hair and put a crown on his head, so to allow his soul to transmit to another body for rebirth. Then, the lama would chant prayers that could send Crazy Uncle’s soul to a realm known as Dewachen, which was a heavenly paradise presided over by a Buddha. Then, since Crazy Uncle did not have any family members, we, as his village-mates, would wrap his body in a white funerary shroud and arrange in a seat position inside a house for all the villagers to come and pray for him. Finally, on the second day, his body would leave the house and be cremated. Death, after all, was not an end; it was just another beginning of a new life.
There were other opinions regarding on how to bury Crazy Uncle, some people even suggested that we should simply put his corpse back to the cave where he was found and left him there. Decision thus could not be easily made due to unclearness of Crazy Uncle’s identity. After all, this meeting was aimed to discuss on how Crazy Uncle should be buried instead of reaching a conclusion. Such tough task was left to our villager head.
On the way back to home, I started to recall all the events I had encountered since I came to the village from the Daoist temple in the south of China. It had been nearly half a year now, probably it was a good time to say goodbye to my fellow villagers and return to my master and wife.
