Sad news in the village

Death is the only thing we all have in common. No matter your gender, social class, hair color, religion or place in the world, you have Death in common with every other living being on earth. It is a sobering thought and something we are forced to remember from time to time. Today, we are forced to remember this.

Crazy Uncle has passed. I did not know him well (nobody in our village did) but I did like him. He kept to himself and did not ask for anyone’s assistance despite his old age. No one is sure about what he has been doing in his cave the last few years and we are just as unsure about his past given that our elders can’t even remember what he was like or what he did. This puts us all in a very peculiar situation because now we don’t know what to do with the body.

He is said to have been a tantric practitioner. If that is the case and he had perfected his practice then he was prepared for this death. It is a yogin’s task to prepare him or herself for death (or to overcome death) by meditating on the deities who represent the sun and the moon so as to overcome their internal ‘time mechanism’. In doing so they pass into an eternal subtle body and thus, never truly die. Tantric yogi or not, we still have a body on our hands.

In traditional Buddhist belief, bodies are ominous and polluting. They are corpses where malevolent spirits can enter and create trouble for those who are living. Whatever we decide we must act fast — this village does not need more things to cause it bad luck. Last year was a difficult enough year as it was. This year must go better.

I would recommend putting the body in a temple cemetery or graveyard but this poses as a problem for me. People are generally placed in temples and burial groupings according to their ancestral lineage. When you die, your body goes to where the rest of your family lies but in Crazy Uncle’s case, where does his body go? We are not only unsure of what temple he belongs to (as stories of his past vary and no one has spoken to him in a very long time) but we also don’t have temple cemeteries in the village to begin with.

Usually when someone passes, their families take care of the arrangement. That means the hiring of the monk for performing the funerary rites, the making and installation of the tombstone, the visitations and honoring of the gravesite and above all, the payment for all of these. Who is to do that in Crazy Uncle’s case? No one in the village is related to him. Gravestones are generally used as a way of telling descendants where their loved ones are so they know where to go to pay their respects. With no descendants or anyone who is responsible for his post-mortem wellbeing, what use does a gravestone have?

No, I don’t think burying the body is a good idea. Where would we put it? The village is small and we have so little space to spare for burial grounds. I also do not recommend abandoning the body in the mountains around us. As unfamiliar as he was to everyone in the village, his body deserves to be honored as anyone else’s body would be honored.

This means a monk must perform the rites as soon as possible (if this has not yet been done) and in the equinoctial weeks as well. We must wait at least eight hours for the body’s warmth to escape as this is a sign of consciousness that has not yet left the body. After it has become cold, we can encoffin it so as to facilitate the village paying respects to Crazy Uncle.

It is also the responsibility of all of us to accrue merit and transfer the merit to Crazy Uncle. Even if we did not know him and he kept to himself, he is still a part of our legacy and an elder so we must do our best to honor him and ensure he has a safe passage to his next life. This is especially crucial because we don’t know what his level of attainment is. Perhaps he is a high-level tantric practitioner and does not need our transferred merit to have a birth in a higher realm. Perhaps he is in danger of being borin into the three evil realms and desperately needs our help. We do not know but we cannot take chances.

We can cast and distribute tsha tshas (small, circular pressed sacred images made from the ashes of the dead) which are designed to generate merit continuously. Offerings to our monks and nuns must be made, sacrifices must be made. Everyone needs to concentrate and improve their practices and lifestyle even if for a little while so as to help the hermit as much as we can.

There’s so much more we could have done had we been there at his time of death. The moment right before death is the moment you can reverse a lifetime of sin and gain enough merit to avoid falling into the three evil realms by thinking purely about the Buddha. It is also the moment where you can reverse living a life of pure Buddhahood by having one negative or betraying thought. It’s a very, very crucial moment that often requires the help of fellow monks and friends so it stays on track and goes as it should. For example, positioning him behind a west facing Buddha image whilst holding onto a pennant tied to that image so that his thoughts of Buddha followed him into the next realm could have been done. We could have made sure he did not have deviated thoughts that would push him into a lower rebirth.

I wonder what he was thinking at his time of death. Was he in the middle of practicing yoga? He was known to be a tantric practitioner, after all. it’s very likely that he was aware of his oncoming death. But that is dependent on his level of success with tantric practice. If he had recognized the outer and inner signs of the world and had reached a level of enlightenment high enough to pass onto a more peaceful and pure realm then there was not much more that we could have done to ensure his rebirth into a higher realm.

I have realized that my recommendation has not been made yet. My, how the death of someone else can affect the inner workings of your mind. It truly is an eye-opening event. I wonder how my children feel about this all. They are still quite young and death has not yet played a part in their understanding of life but this is the perfect opportunity to introduce them to the reality of their impermanence. I am positive they understand the concept of impermanence through their education and continuous exposure to Buddhism but have they connected it to their own mortality? Who knows.

As for Crazy Uncle, I recommend that we scatter his ashes rather than opt for a burial. This is because burials lie in a more traditional setting where people are buried in family-centered graves and facilitate the visiting of living family members. Not only is it more expensive but I also think that cremation encompasses the tantric ideals more than burial itself does.

How? Well, it’s no secret that tantric practitioners see the body as a mirror of the universe. The milky way is our spine, our insides are composed of the moon and the sun, our breathing and the inner workings of our bodies happen according to our winds just as the earth does. Cremation has our ashes burnt, returned to the earth and in turn, put back into the whole universe. The bodies will be back where they used to be; with the skies, the oceans, the creatures, etc. Encoffining the hermit is akin to trapping pieces of the earth, keeping them attached to us by keeping them away from whence they came.

That’s where burial lies, anyway, does it not? In attachment? We hold onto the bodies so we have something to refer to, something to signify the life that was spent in them for however many years the body was in use. But that does not resonate in Buddhist belief. The body that is left behind by Crazy Uncle is not Crazy Uncle, it is just a body. It is a part of nature, a product of earthly creations. Returning his remains as an offering to the earth and its creatures is not only the logical thing to do but it also increases his merit (something we don’t know if he’s in need of).

Scattering may leave nothing behind to value, no site for memorialization, no place where we can come pay our respects but it is not our job to pay respects or memorialize him. The argument against scattering from my neighbors may come from the fact that scattering breaks down family lineage and destroys the bonds but the hermit does not have any descendents and thus no bonds that are in danger of being broken.

But this is an unpopular opinion. Buddhists have been practicing these burying rituals and have encapsulated the tradition of graveyard usage for centuries. It has become a routine — the priests take the soul of the deceased, they return it to the other world, they destroy its sins and transform it into a buddha before the memorial services are performed. Some temples rely on the costs that come with this as well as other fees when it comes to dealing with deceased members of a family or community.

I have said my piece on the matter. May Crazy Uncle be born into a higher rebirth and (perhaps) enjoy the beauty of the Pure Realm. I hope the village decides to cremate and scatter his ashes rather than bury him in a coffin and keep his body away from the roots and life of the earth. After all, Sakyamuni was cremated himself and where would we all be without him?