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Buddhist rituals of death and rebirth: Contemporary Sri Lankan practice and its origins
Abstract
In Buddhist thought and practice, death has always been a central concept. This book provides a careful and thorough analysis of the rituals and social customs surrounding death in the Theravada tradition of Sri Lanka. Rita Langer describes the rituals of death and rebirth and investigates their ancient origins, analyzing social issues of the relationship between monks and lay people in this context. This aspect is of particular interest as death rituals are the only life cycle ritual in which Theravada Buddhist monks are actively involved. Drawing on early Vedic sutras and Pali texts as well as archaeological and epigraphical material, Buddhist Rituals of Death and Rebirth establishes that Sri Lankan rituals are deeply rooted in their pre-Buddhist, Vedic precursors. Whilst beliefs and doctrines have undergone considerable changes over the centuries, it becomes evident that the underlying practices have largely remained stable. The first comprehensive study of death rituals in Theravada Buddhist practice, this is an important contribution to the fields of Buddhist studies, indology, anthropology and religious studies.
... Sometimes, it's read when the person is near death to generate good thoughts for a peaceful passing. According to Langer, this custom originated from King Dutugamunu, 3 who had a record of his meritorious deeds read to him in his final hours (Langer, 2007). ...
... While danē can take many forms, in this article, it is understood primarily as giving cooked food and gifts such as dry rations, clothes, and money. danē is considered the most important of the ten moral actions (dasa kusala karma) for accruing merit, aiming to lead to a life with less suffering, a good death, and a good rebirth (Langer, 2007;Obeyesekere, 2002;Samuels, 2008). ...
... To delve deeper into the economy of merit, we must examine an aspect of filial piety known as jīva danē, wherein children transfer merit to their parents for all they have done for them, and in return gain merit from their parents for appreciating them. Langer (2007) describes jīva danē as a practice performed in preparation for death, where elders express a wish to perform a last danē before passing away. However, in Divulvaeva, the practice is more about a transfer of merit between children and their elderly parents. ...
This paper explores the relationship between aging, care, and death in a rural village in Sri Lanka from an anthropological perspective. It examines how the Buddhist concept of merit acts as a link between these elements. Through a 14-month ethnographic study, I observed how elders, and their younger caregivers engage in a reciprocal exchange of care and merit. Elders in the village engage in various pious activities to accumulate merit, which in turn leads to the care they receive from others as a meritorious deed. The responsibility of caring for the elderly primarily falls on women, who seek to accumulate more merit to alleviate their suffering. Both elders and caregivers believe that accumulating merit reduces suffering, leads to a good death, and ensures a good rebirth. These beliefs are reinforced and evaluated by Buddhist clergy in funeral sermons. This article illustrates how Buddhist ideas of accumulating merit give rise to an emerging ‘economy of merit,’ wherein elders are cared for by their families and communities. This finding has significant implications for understanding and addressing the challenges of an aging population in Sri Lanka.
... This chapter aims to connect theoretically with the extended form of Arnould and Thompson (2005, 2007, 2018)'s work on Consumer Culture Theory (CCT). Although Moisander, Peñaloza, and Valtonen (2009) address the lack of interpretive consumer culture studies by non-Western (American) ethnic minority researchers within the CCT community, practical and theoretical problems and issues still remain. ...
... Theravāda Buddhism (the School of the Elders) is the oldest branch of Buddhism practised in Southeast Asia, and is prevalent in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Burma (Gethin 1998;Langer 2007), in contrast to later schools of Buddhism such as Mahāyāna (the great vehicle) and Vajrayāna (the diamond vehicle) (Gethin, 1998). Theravāda Buddhism evolved from the Buddhist canon of the Tipiṭaka (or the triple baskets of early Buddhist scriptures, which were written in the now-extinct Pali language) consisting of the Vinaya (the Book of Discipline for the monks or sangha), the Suttanta, Discourses and the Abhidhamma (the higher teachings or exposition of realities) (Gorkom 1996). ...
... In Theravāda Buddhism, the quality of the last conscious moments at the time of death is important as it can determine the circumstances of the next rebirth. There are good and bad deaths in Theravāda Buddhism (Langer 2007). If one practises and understands the Buddha's teachings, this should lead to a good death. ...
Thai Theravāda Buddhist death rituals are explored in this book chapter as vivid examples of how rituals around death can offer rich potential sources for consumer cultural insight. The chapter explores Ricoeur's and Obeyesekere's "cultural hermeneutics" (1965) and the "work of culture" (1990) within the context of Thai death rituals and death consumption to extend CCT research into these under-explored areas. The death rituals reflect a sense of immortality, identity, and continuity as part of collective cultural identities that link the living with the dead. The chapter uses an autoethnographic practice theory perspective to demonstrate how Theravāda Buddhist death rituals entail the symbolic exchange between the living and the dead within the liminal spaces of a selection of death rituals and festivals. Death can be seen as a culturally defined concept given the ontological finality of the Western notion of death. The roles of Thai death rituals and the language related to death and death rituals contribute to the living's sense of self-consciousness and identity, and connect to consumer culture. By engaging with death through death rituals, the cultural identity of the dead can be continued. The focus of the chapter is not what might be regarded as doctrinally correct Theravāda Buddhism, nor is it the historical provenance of the myth and folklore that intermingle seamlessly with daily religious practice in Thailand. Rather, the focus of the chapter falls on the everyday practice and experience of religious belief for Thai people as it manifests in selected ritual practices. 2
... Baan et al. (2022) explore burial traditions among the Torajan of Indonesia. Langer (2007) provides a detailed study of Buddhist death ceremonies in Sri Lanka. These studies demonstrate the profound integration of funerary art within cultural customs and traditions, functioning as a vehicle for the expression, conservation, and transmission of cultural values. ...
... In Samuels's study, one can perceive the particular, highly contextual and emotional context in which any Buddhist doctrine or teaching becomes an event. Rita Langer (2007, 2013 has more directly engaged with the contextualized use of text, in an effort to establish a subdiscipline of sermon studies within the academic study of Buddhism. Maria Heim (2007Heim ( 2021 calls us to consider the emotional aspects of Buddhist religion. ...
... 31 The study of Buddhist preaching is still in its infancy, yet it seems clear that materials that are now considered canonical literature often related to such contexts. For discussions of preaching, see Deegalle (2006) and Langer (2007Langer ( , 2013 Aside from the qualities of the wisdom-king, see the description of Pasenadi's character by the Buddha in discourse #14-"a good friend, a good ally, a good companion" (kalyān . amitto kalyān . ...
The Sagāthāvagga, the “Book with Verses”, is presented here as a collection of early Buddhist wisdom literature. As the first book of the Pāli Saṃyutta-nikāya, the Book with Verses seems as an anomaly—the other four books contain some of the denser articulations of early Buddhist philosophy in the canon. Thus, scholars question whether the first book, which normally introduces verses with stories, is a real part of the collection. Scholars are also inclined to assume that the verses are the heart of the text and have shown less interest in the work’s compelling literary style. This article has three aims: First, it shows how the book and most distinctly its third chapter, is a form of wisdom literature, with protagonist King Pasenadi of Kosala being comparable to wisdom-kings like King Solomon or Alexander the Great, and anticipating the classic Buddhist wisdom-king Aśoka. Second, it shows how this collection was designed for a performance by storytellers or preachers, suggesting that this is a feature of the Buddhist genre of a prose story that introduces verses. Third, it demonstrates the organic connection between the first book and the other books of the Saṃyutta.
... Though the Buddha is considered to no longer be active in the world, or exercises any power, the Buddha's power and authority are still effective through deities to whom the Buddha has given warrants ( varan ) to protect Buddhist sāsana and the Buddhists of Sri Lanka (Obeyesekere 1963(Obeyesekere , 1977(Obeyesekere , 1984Gombrich & Obeyesekere, 1988). Though doctrinal Buddhism devalues the worshipping of deities (Obeyesekere, 1977: 377), the worshipping of deities has become a major religious and ritualistic practice for all Sinhalese in Sri Lanka (Kapferer, 1983;Langer, 2007). Deities are considered to be good beings who follow the path of the Buddha and orient toward the ultimate goal of Buddhism (Obeyesekere, 1977;Kapferer 1983). ...
Sri Lankan popular Sinhala Buddhist pantheon represents the long-term hybrid nature of Buddhism, ancient Sri Lankan feudal social structure, sacred geographical locations, and class and caste association. This article aims to present the transformation of the Sri Lankan popular Sinhala Buddhist pantheon to a universal Buddhist pantheon in postwar Sri Lanka. The Mahamevnawa monastic movement as a recent popular, innovative and radical Buddhist movement departs from the popular Sinhala Buddhist pantheon, and presents a universal Buddhist pantheon that is based on the Buddhist sacred text the Tripitakaya. Unlike the deities of the popular Sinhala Buddhist pantheon, the deities of the universal Buddhist pantheon are not restricted to any particular geographical or sacred location which presents a radical departure from Sri Lankan ancient feudal social structure to a more modern and larger upward social mobility-based Sinhala Buddhists social order. This paper argues that the universal Buddhist pantheon is a result of Buddhist purifying processes, nationalist orientation and the impact of the social composition of the Mahamevnawa monastic movement in postwar Sri Lanka.
... Given that the production of any entity is senseless, in the same way it is senseless to support the annihilation of any entity. 14 The Buddha often speaks of Dhamma in the singular, distinguishing it from the plural dhammā. It is quite evident that there are two distinct things in his speech. ...
Buddhism refers to the characteristic of Impermanence as the nature of all phenomena, whether physical or psychological. Thus, how is the ontology of Buddhist philosophical doctrine determined when everything is always changing, impermanent (relational/connected to exist), without a definite self-existent nature?
Buddhist philosophy establishes philosophy: With the principle of dependence (conditions, causes and conditions), and everything is always changing and changing in connection, there is no definite selfexistent self-nature, which is the essence of Buddhist
ontological philosophy. This difficult question awakens self-awareness and self-questioning in the readers. In this study, the author used consulting skills in language, nihilistic philosophy and Buddhist philosophy to pose problems for reference. An
interesting and useful subject for reference in the academic field of philosophy.
The purpose of this essay is to compare the story of Er in Plato's Republic's tenth book with the concept of antarābhava in the Vedic World and the ancient schools of Buddhism. First, the story of Er, a warrior who was believed to have died in battle and returned to life shortly before his body was burnt on the pyre, will be told. Er describes the vision he had before returning to life: he saw the actions and fate of the disembodied souls in the state and stage before their reincarnation. Next, the Indian doctrine of antarābhava , the intermediate state between death and rebirth, according to the Vedic religion and ancient schools of Buddhism, will be discussed. Finally, we will say a few concluding words to make a historical-religious comparison between the two in order to better understand both these doctrines and visions of the afterlife.
In the Chinese Malaysian Buddhist community, when a person dies, funeral rites are performed to ensure the well-being of the deceased. On reflection, some of these funeral rites are not common to Buddhist practices in part due to the intermingling of philosophies of Daoism (Dàojiào), Confucianism (Rújiā), and Chinese traditional beliefs (zhōnghuájiào). It is a deeply rooted cultural and religious belief that only through such rituals can help the deceased achieve liberation from the misery of death. The observance of rites and rituals for the deceased through ignorance and fear is not founded on moral or ethical values, but míxìn (superstition) has no relation to the philosophical doctrine preached by the Buddha. The principles that underlie míxìn (superstition) rituals are not based upon the four noble truths and the eightfold path of textual Buddhism. Although a few may have heard of such concepts, these have no bearing on their daily religious life. The rooted beliefs that only such rituals can help the deceased achieve liberation from death's misery are incompatible with the central Theravāda Buddhist doctrines of kamma. The objective of this chapter is to take due cognizance of some prevalent funeral rites incompatible with Buddhist teachings of the nature of death and kamma. This chapter scrutinizes some relevant texts in the Pāli Canon on the significance of Buddhism’s concept of merit and its direct consequence on the well-being of the deceased. The findings are expected to generate a basic reappraisal of rites and rituals and to bring about a sense of security in knowledge to Chinese Buddhists who wish to perform a Theravadin Buddhist funeral. In the end, a proper Buddhist funeral is about respect and gratitude for the deceased.
How can comparative categories be used with vigorous attention to historical context and cultural variation? My example is the concept of prayer applied to various forms of premodern Buddhism. After analyzing past attempts to square theocentric notions with Buddhism, I propose a more circumspect mode of comparison. Adopting a performative approach to the study of religious language, I stipulate prayer as “speech acts directed toward seen and unseen sentient beings.” This strategy broadens the addressees in prayer discourse to include Buddhas, bodhisattvas, minor gods, ghosts, spirits, and other beings. It also covers a wide range of Buddhist practice and focuses on exchange, morality, and bodily engagement. The article then analyzes a specific ritual, the supreme offering, found in many articulations across Buddhist cultures. The conclusion argues that this approach offers several insights. Engaging a wide range of beings in the cosmos, the supreme offering envisages a hierarchical moral community. The different steps in prayer highlight the importance of karma in Buddhist ritual. As a regimen of practice, the supreme offering aims at forming ethical dispositions and cultivating character.
The symbolist painter Nikolai Roerich tried to create a personal style combining Eastern and Western cultural traits and aesthetics, understood in an idealistic and utopian way. A journey through Asia was crucial for the process of building the artist’s visual language and symbolic code, thus giving his style its most recognizable form. Although the expedition had scientific, anthropologic and artistic purposes, the esoteric interests of the Roerich and his wife meant that it also had an occultist aim: a spiritualist agenda influenced by Theosophy and a number of Buddhist concepts, figures and myths, such as Maitreya and Shambhala.
Funerals play a key role in grief and mourning, but little is known about the culturally scripted processes after a disaster. Cambodia has faced multiple disasters, from the Khmer Rouge killing fields to COVID-19. Drawing upon a case study of the 2010 Diamond Island stampede, which killed 347 people, this article focuses on the period leading up to the funeral ceremony, while a companion article discusses events that unfold in the months that follow.
An ethnographic study was carried out in Phnom Penh and nine provinces with members of the families of those who were killed, villagers, and monks and Buddhist lay officiants.
Buddhist ceremonies conducted at the cremation and at seven- and hundred-days, helped families accept the irreversibility of loss and allow the dead to be reborn. Complications comprised the misidentification of bodies, managing the dangerous ghosts of ‘bad death’, getting the souls safely from the mortuary to the cremation site and dealing with disruptions along the way, convincing the souls that they are really dead, and ambiguous losses in the case of ‘counterfeit funerals’ conducted without the corpse.
The mourning hinges on the maintenance of continuing bonds as evidenced by the ‘dream work’ by the bereft families, enabled by the ‘emergency Buddhist disaster relief’ provided by the monks. It is proposed that understanding the cultural deathscapes can provide insights into developing culturally-responsive interventions after a disaster.
Although the cultural deathscapes of acute grief in the early days after a disaster are well-understood, there is a gap in the literature on the role of ritual ceremonies over the months that follow the initial funeral. Drawing upon a case study of the 2010 Diamond Island stampede in Cambodia, which killed 347 people, this article considers the meaning and value of the ritual ceremonies over the first year after the funeral in comforting the living and connecting them to the dead. A companion article focuses on the events that unfold in the first week after loss.
An ethnographic study was carried out in Phnom Penh and 9 provinces with 38 members of the families of those who were killed and 42 key informants including monks and Buddhist lay officiants. In this article several in-depth case studies are presented.
Shortly after the cremation, the ritual of ‘changing the body’ helped families who were not ready to let go. The 7- and 100-day ceremonies provided comfort that their loved ones would be successfully reincarnated, and thus helped them accept the irreversibility of their unanticipated loss. Some ameliorated their grief by ‘continuing bonds’ with the dead, who were believed to have been reborn to unwitting ‘surrogate’ mothers who were also members of the grieving families.
The continuing process provides disaster relief in the form of ‘emergency cultural grief therapy’ which averts the threat of ‘reincarnation failure’ and provides a socio-moral framework for public mourning and a system of meaning for private grieving. The findings provide insights into developing a culturally responsive framework for ongoing interventions after disasters.
This study challenges the long-standing scholarly conception that ascetic practice was incompatible with the institutional imperatives of the Indian Buddhist monastery in the “middle period.” Drawing upon the rich narrative tradition in Indian Buddhist law codes (Vinaya), I employ a new hermeneutical approach in order to demonstrate that cemetery (śmaśāna) asceticism remained central to the Buddhist monastic lifestyle. I begin with an extended methodological discussion that locates my approach—what I call materialist historiography—in a genealogy of scholarship that reads literary texts for an anthropology of everyday life. I then draw from a wide range of Vinaya narratives to argue that, despite the increasingly vocal presence of a Brahmanical purity party, the ascetic practices of residing in the cemetery, meditating on corpses, scavenging for goods on the charnel ground, and stripping corpses of their funeral shrouds remained an everyday affair in the monastery.
This paper will compare the ritual performance in two transnational Buddhist organizations in contemporary Taiwan in attempt to investigate the influencing factors in shaping transnational Buddhism. The traditions of both Buddhist organizations studied in this paper are foreign in Taiwan: one is of Sri Lankan Theravada tradition and the other is of Vietnamese Mahayana tradition. The ritual performance chosen for the discussion is commonly translated into English as “Ghost Festival”, though as to be shown later, the translation is somehow inappropriate. I will provide the ethnographic accounts of the Ghost Festival performed by the two organizations for discussion and comparison. Two influencing factors emerge from the comparative study are the role of ritual participants and the perception of the sacred. My discussion will show how these two factors shape Buddhist discourse in transnational context.
Buddhism is the fourth largest global religion, practiced by some 500 million people, roughly 7% of the world’s population. The Buddhist teachings or, in Sanskrit, Buddhadharma, spread from fifth century BCE India throughout Asia, and then more recently to Europe and the Americas. The three main branches of Buddhism are Theravada (practiced in the “Southern” Buddhist countries of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, Burma, and Vietnam), Mahayana (practiced in “Northern” countries such as Japan, Korea, and China) and Vajrayana (practiced in Tibet and Mongolia). Today, in the United States, Canada, and Europe, one can find these three traditional streams represented by, respectively, Insight Meditation centers, Zen centers, and Tibetan Buddhist meditation centers.
This article examines the role of food in the religious cosmology of Sri Lankan Buddhists, combining textual and ethnographic research and drawing on original material, including untranslated pamphlets and interviews. Looking at food as an agent rather than an instrument reveals a creative and transformative power that is tangible in individual ritual contexts. One such context is the offering of dishes rich in milk to seven “milk mothers,” who are representatives of the Buddhist goddess Pattini. Despite its great popularity this ritual has so far received little scholarly attention. The milk mothers are often invited in fulfilment of a vow to Pattini who is associated with fertility, childbirth and childhood diseases, but also more generally with prosperity and health. The article demonstrates how milk is crucial for the success of this popular ritual as it creates the necessary ritual frame and, from an ayurvedic perspective, has the power to transform mothers into milk mothers.
This article investigates the concept of intermediate existence in the early Buddhist theory of rebirth. The main sources investigated for this article are the Pāli canonical and commentarial literature. My main thesis is that early Buddhist discourses contain instances that suggest a spatial-temporal gap between death and rebirth known as ‘intermediate existence’ (antarābhava), in contrast to the idea of Theravāda Buddhist theory that rebirth takes place immediately without a spatial-temporal gap. In order to prove this, I argue that the ‘one who liberates in interval’ (anarāparinibbāyī) attains Nibbāna in the intermediate existence and the concept of gandhabbā in early Buddhist discourses refers to a being in intermediate existence, not to a dying consciousness (cuti-viññāna), and there are indirect inferences to an spatiotemporal gap between death and rebirth in the early Buddhist discourses.
A death radically rearranges kinship, debt, obligation, and responsibility, and it also triggers prescribed routines for mourning and material disposal of the corpse. It is into this complex and fraught unfolding of events that the rhetorics of corporeal
Few issues apply universally to people as poignantly as death and dying. All religions address concerns with death from the handling of human remains, to defining death, to suggesting what happens after life. The Routledge Companion to Death and Dying provides readers with an overview of the study of death and dying. Questions of death, mortality, and more recently of end-of-life care, have long been important ones and scholars from a range of fields have approached the topic in a number of ways. Comprising over fifty-two chapters from a team of international contributors, the companioncovers: funerary and mourning practices; concepts of the afterlife; psychical issues associated with death and dying; clinical and ethical issues; philosophical issues; death and dying as represented in popular culture. This comprehensive collection of essays will bring together perspectives from fields as diverse as history, philosophy, literature, psychology, archaeology and religious studies, while including various religious traditions, including established religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism as well as new or less widely known traditions such as the Spiritualist Movement, the Church of Latter Day Saints, and Raëlianism. The Routledge Companion to Death and Dying is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, philosophy and literature. © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Christopher M. Moreman. All rights reserved.
In this paper I make proposals regarding
further advances in the studies of Theravada
Buddhism along the lines suggested by
Justin McDaniel in his The Lovelorn Ghost and
the Magical Monk (2011). The benefits of Mc-
Daniel’s approach lie in his de-emphasis of doctrinal
tradition and his focus on local frames of
reference in explaining Thai Buddhism. Its faults
lie in a disregard for the developments outside
the socio-cultural paradigm. I argue for the
integration of socio-cultural and naturalist approaches
to the study of religion. Balancing the
over-accentuation of the explanatory power of
either socio-cultural or cognitive concepts, such
integration would also permit a move from the
socio-cultural metaphorical models to causal
and more controlled explanations of religious
phenomena.
I illustrate my suggestions through an example
of a Thai wat (shrine/monastery). One of these
suggestions, implied by the de-emphasis of the
doctrinal tradition, is to recognize the predominantly
advertising and ritualistic function of
wats’ visuals, effigies, and architecture rather
than reading them as symbolic expressions of
doctrinal tenets.
When a tsunami hit Sri Lanka in two merciless waves between 9.30 and 10.30 a.m. on December 26, 2004, an estimated 30,000 were killed, 800,000 were made homeless, and 70 percent of the island’s coastline was devastated.1 Two distinct areas of the country were affected: the predominantly Sinhala and Buddhist south coast, and the predominantly Tamil and Muslim north and east coasts, the east being the worst devastated. It sparked the largest international aid programme in modern Sri Lankan history in an already charged situation of ethnic conflict and interreligious tension.
Introduction there is no ancient prescriptive text outlining in detail how a Theravāda funeral is to be conducted. Nevertheless, contemporary Theravāda funerals seem to follow a recognisable pattern. Some information on funerals in the countries of South and Southeast Asia is available in regional studies and anthropological surveys, but these contain very little on the Pāli chants, which form an integral part of the ceremonies. Considering that Pāli is the sacred language shared by the Theravāda countries, these texts might provide a clue to a better understanding of how a Theravāda funeral is constructed. In the first part of this chapter funeral chanting is approached in terms of a “ bricolage ’ – a patchwork of heterogeneous elements with the monk as “bricoleur’, the skilled craftsman. The main part of the chapter is based on a number of ritual “snapshots’ – recordings of ceremonies in Sri Lanka, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. The chanting sequences of these ceremonies are analysed one by one and their composition is investigated. A chart of chanting sequences (Table 2.1) and a verse index (Table 2.2) are added to facilitate comparison and to provide a complete record and reference. The final part of the chapter offers some tentative suggestions as to why, against all odds, the pattern of Theravāda funeral chants is not more varied than it is, along with open questions and possible avenues of further inquiries concluding the study.
Introduction Data presented in this article is based on fieldwork conducted between 1998 and 2001 at Mrauk U, the ancient capital of the former Buddhist Kingdom of Arakan, now a Burmese state. Thus hypotheses were developed neither in response to pre-existent questions, nor in relation to Buddhist texts or dogma; rather my first aim has been to understand the meaning of mortuary ritual in this Burmese Buddhist society starting with this ethnographic data, describing “the Buddhism at the village’ (Condominas [1968] 1998). Funerals resulting from “normal’ death are detailed and analysed, and are compared with those associated with bad death. Funerals governed by village rules ( gama paññat ) constitute the most prominent manifestation of the village as a social unit, showing the value of good neighbourly relations in this society devoid of ancestor or founder cults. In this aspect, as shown by Hertz, death is eminently a social fact (Hertz 1928). Members of this local society, part of wider Burma, redefine their living space through ritual practices (as seen here in funerary ritual) and this constitutes one of their peculiarities.
Introduction Before the Bangkok period (1782–present), funeral scenes were not commonly portrayed in Thai art. However, around the end of the eighteenth century, pre- and post-scenes of the Buddha’s cremation, which were drawn from the Pāli version of the Mahāparinibbānasutta text and Buddhaghosa’s Commentary, respectively, became important parts of scenes from the life of the Buddha as depicted in Thai mural paintings and manuscripts. By around the first quarter of the nineteenth century, although there are only a small number of examples, other funeral subjects, such as cremations, funeral processions and monks performing funeral rituals, appeared in mural painting and manuscripts. The subjects were drawn from different textual sources and appear to reflect important contemporary ritual practices of that time. While some practices continue to be conducted at present, others are no longer extant. Thus the illustrations in mural paintings and manuscripts help us to understand Thai funeral rituals of the past.This chapter discusses a specific aspect of these depictions of Thai funeral culture, the paṃsukūla and the rituals linked to it. I shall here focus on the paṃsukūla as an aspect of the materiality of Thai funeral culture, but also its embeddedness into ritual practices and the ideas attached to it. The paṃsukūla ceremony is considered one of the most important parts of a Thai Buddhist funeral. It is believed that when a monk removes the paṃsukūla cloth (made of white cotton) from the corpse (or in contemporary practice from the coffin or a table placed close to the coffin) and chants a verse from the Mahāparinibbānasutta , great merit is transferred to the deceased. At the same time, it also helps bring awareness to the living of their own impermanence.
Introduction. In modern-day Taiwan, the official document of the Bureau of Three Treasures ( Sanbaosi dieben 三寶司牒本) to the Underworld Bureau endorsed by the Amitābha Buddha is a model text for a commonly used Buddhist funeral. The document is similar in form to an imperial Chinese travel document and, in Buddhist funerals, is addressed by a Buddhist priest to the otherworld bureau for the arrival of the deceased. Along with other Buddhist and Daoist ceremonial model texts, the official document of the Bureau of Three Treasures is sold in ritual shops or religious bookstores like the Ruicheng Bookstore 瑞成書局 in my home town, Taichung. Buddhist and Daoist priests use these model texts for the religious ceremony.The main function of the official document of the Bureau of Three Treasures is to ensure the smooth processing of the soul of the deceased through the netherworld. It is filled in with the personal data of the deceased, including the address of the deceased’s family and the tisme and date of birth and death of the deceased. The completed petition is chanted by the Buddhist priests at the beginning of the funeral ceremony and then burned. In the petition, the role of the Buddhist priest is twofold. First, the priest conducts the purgatory rite for the deceased. Assisted by the efficacy of the sacred Buddhist scriptures, the priest performs the funeral ceremony on behalf of the deceased with the aim of making him or her repent of any wrongdoings committed during his or her lifetime. Second, he represents the deceased and related family members in mediation with the Underworld Bureau. The process of mediation is spelt out in the same way as in the secular bureaucracy, with the priest acting as an advocate or lawyer. The Lord of Western Paradise, Amitābha Buddha, is the authority of the other world and the efficacy of the document is endorsed by his authority.
The centrality of death rituals has rarely been documented in anthropologically informed studies of Buddhism. Bringing together a range of perspectives including ethnographic, textual, historical and theoretically informed accounts, this edited volume presents the diversity of the Buddhist funeral cultures of mainland Southeast Asia and China. While the contributions show that the ideas and ritual practices related to death are continuously transformed in local contexts through political and social changes, they also highlight the continuities of funeral cultures. The studies are based on long-term fieldwork and covering material from Theravāda Buddhism in Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and various regions of Chinese Buddhism, both on the mainland and in the Southeast Asian diasporas. Topics such as bad death, the feeding of ghosts, pollution through death, and the ritual regeneration of life show how Buddhist cultures deal with death as a universal phenomenon of human culture.
Introduction a monk’s robe made of a shroud rests at the heart of the Theravādan Buddhist funeral of Southeast Asia. This robe, called the paṃsukūla , (Khmer: bangsukol ) refers to two objects. The first is the physical object of the paṃsukūla , a cloth offering given as part of the central action during a Khmer funeral ritual, invested with a surfeit of meaning. The second is the ritual practice termed paṃsukūla in everyday Khmer speech. This paṃsukūla , while related to the physical cloth termed paṃsukūla , is not identical. Instead, it refers to a subritual within the funeral process in which Buddhist monks intone a chant that refers to the Abhidhamma, one of the divisions of the Pāli canon, and perform important associated actions. The material robe connects to the funerary imagination in a way that highlights the importance of grounding our observations in the materiality of funerary cultures. I will connect these two paṃsukūla s, and proceed to concentrate on the centrality of the paṃsukūla in Southeast Asian Buddhism, and the basis of this centrality in the Cambodian ritual imagination. My argument has three parts. First, the ritual actions of the paṃsukūla are mirrored in ritual and technical actions performed in other contexts, in which non-Buddhist spirits are controlled and made useful by Buddhist monks. Second, these actions are based on, and receive their social force from, the agricultural work, inclusive of agricultural rituals, involved in the farming of rice in Khmer Southeast Asia. Finally, the previous two points position the Buddhist monk as a master and “farmer’ of the dead, capable of containing and controlling the world of spirits, on the basis of the monks’ ability to resist death’s contagion. I will take up the last point first.
The aim of this essay is threefold. I would like first to propose a more refined choice of analytical vocabulary for the study of Buddhist giving and related practices, by taking into consideration recent contributions by Testart and F. Weber, who have forcefully argued that the Maussian category of ‘the gift’ is in need of conceptual clarification: we need a typology of forms of ‘transfers’, to use Testart's term. I will argue for the analytical importance of the distinction between ‘gifts’ strictly speaking and patterns of transfers that are more akin to an exchange or transaction, such as the provision of ritual services and their remuneration. Second, I address the question of the extent to which we can we speak of ‘reciprocity’ in the case of actual Buddhist gifts (e.g. alms or donations made outside of contexts in which monks are asked for religious services). The scholarly literature displays here a remarkable lack of consensus and, to some extent, of clarity; I will offer an attempt at clarification. The third aim is to reconsider critically the common assumption that the gift is a central if not an outright essential and defining component in Buddhist laity-sangha relations. I will draw here on data from a Tibetan society in which Buddhist gift-giving is only of minor importance and transactions centred on ritual services are much more central to laity-sangha relations, and contrast this with the data from mainstream Thai(-Lao) and Burmese Theravada contexts. This may serve as a useful corrective to scholarly accounts that echo perhaps too closely emic emphases on the gift, or might have been misled by ill-fitting theoretical models. The overall aim is to contribute, through the angle of the gift and its variants, to an emerging comparative anthropology of Buddhism.
All societies have their own customs and beliefs surrounding death. In the West, traditional ways of mourning are disappearing, and although Western science has had a major impact on how people die, it has taught us little about the way to die or to grieve. Many whose work brings them into contact with the dying and the bereaved from Western and other cultures are at a loss to know how to offer appropriate and sensitive support. Death and Bereavement Across Cultures 2nd Edition is a handbook which meets the needs of doctors, nurses, social workers, hospital chaplains, counsellors and volunteers caring for patients with life-threatening illness and their families before and after bereavement. It is a practical guide explaining the religious and other differences commonly met with in multi-cultural societies when someone is dying or bereaved. In doing so readers may be surprised to find how much we can learn from other cultures about our own attitudes and assumptions about death. Written by international experts in the field the book: Describes the rituals and beliefs of major world religions. Explains their psychological and historical context. Shows how customs are changed by contact with the West. Considers the implications for the future. The second edition includes new chapters that: explore how members of the health care professions perform roles formerly conducted by priests and shamans can cross the cultural gaps between different cultures and religions; consider the relevance of attitudes and assumptions about death for our understanding of religious and nationalist extremism and its consequences; discuss the Buddhist, Islamic and Christian ways of death. Death raises questions which science cannot answer. Whatever our personal beliefs we can all gain from learning how others view these ultimate problems. This book explores the richness of mourning traditions around the world with the aim of increasing the sensitivity and understanding which we all bring to the issue of death and bereavement. © 2015 Colin Murray Parkes, Pittu Laungani and Bill Young. All rights reserved.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Asian consumer culture by exploring how hungry ghost death ritual in the Buddhist world reconciles spiritual asceticism and materialism.
Design/methodology/approach
– This is an interpretive study that incorporates elements of visual semiotics, ethnography and qualitative data analysis. The native-speaking first author interviewed local ritual leaders of the Pee Ta Khon festival in Dansai, Thailand, while both authors witnessed examples of other Buddhist death rituals in Thailand and visited temples and markets selling death ritual paraphernalia. Data include translated semi-structured interview transcripts, field notes, photographs and videos, the personal introspection of the first author and also news articles and website information.
Findings
– The paper reveals how hungry ghost death ritual resolves cultural contradictions by connecting materialism and spirituality through consumption practices of carnival celebration with feasting, music, drinking, costumes and spirit offerings of symbols of material wealth, such as paper money and branded goods.
Research limitations/implications
– Further research in the form of full ethnographic studies of the same and other rituals would add additional detail and depth to the understanding of the ritual in Asian consumer culture.
Originality/value
– The paper extends existing qualitative consumer research into death ritual into a new area and sheds light on the way managers must locate Asian marketing initiatives within distinctively local contexts.
The question of higher ordination for Theravāda women is a complicated one. Although thousands of Buddhist women in a number of different Theravāda countries pursue a life of homelessness and renunciation, the majority are not recognized as ordained renunciants by their surrounding male monastic orders. This paper explores some of the reasons behind the general reticence concerning higher ordination felt by many of the silmātas interviewed, and focuses specifically on some of the socio-economic factors that may be affecting their decision-making process
The study of ghosts and spirits, and the ethnographic evidence associated with this, is a fertile area for developing methodologies. By employing theories of materiality and the anthropological study of ontologies, I argue that looking at the traces of spirits and ghosts in the material domain can reveal crucial insights into their nature, position and relationships with the living. Two ethnographic case studies from the Buddhist ethnic Lao are used to demonstrate how material traces can explain the 'ontic shifting' of certain ghosts. I will then explore how through the modernization and rationalization of Buddhist cosmology there have evolved competing ideas of the nature of ancestral spirits addressed in Buddhist rites. While in an older interpretation these spirits are accessible through objects and the exchanges between layperson, monk and spirit, 'modernist' Buddhist monks advocate that the dead cannot be reached through objects. Finally, I argue that the material traces of spirits and their different readings hint to important transformations regarding the conceptualization of ghosts and spirits through the socialist revolution and the rationalization of Buddhism.
Both Thai and Western academia have recently paid increasing attention to the changing roles of Thai Buddhist women. Still conspicuously missing, however, are more in-depth studies of female Buddhist saints in Thailand and the attendant symbolism, which would provide a more adequate depiction of the contemporary Thai Buddhist landscape. Similar to the prominent role of the mae chi in monastic education, the emergence of hagiographies and the veneration of female Buddhist saints has not, to date, been given sufficient attention in academic studies. To help remedy this situation, this paper provides a life account of one of the most outstanding female practitioners of modern Thai Buddhism: Mae Chi Kaew Sianglam (1901–1991). A summary of an increasing number of available biographical materials on Mae Chi Kaew's life is followed by a thematic analysis in which the author examines various aspects of her life accounts and her veneration. The purpose is to study the enormous significance of Mae Chi Kaew's biographies and attendant symbolic representations in the context of the religious landscape of Thai Buddhism. The author shows that many hagiographical elements in the sacred biographies of Mae Chi Kaew approximate the hagiographical paradigms not only of the Buddha and other Pali canonical figures, but also of modern saints of the Thai forest tradition. At the same time, however, significant hagiographical and venerational particularities can be observed.
The process whereby existing rituals are taken up and re-envisaged is a well known phenomenon in ritual studies. The offering of a piece of white of cloth to the officiating monks during the Theravāda Buddhist funeral ceremony provides a particularly good example. This custom originates in pre-Buddhist funerary rituals, which included the symbolic covering of the dead body with a new, uncut piece of white cloth intended as a new garment for the deceased, but which was afterwards donated to the officiating priests. The present article examines how in the Buddhist funeral the donation of the cloth came to be associated with the monks’ ascetic practice of making their robes from discarded rags (paṃsukūla). A comparison of the lists of “rags” in the Theravāda and Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinayas and in the Visuddhimagga and Vimuttimagga, alongside a historical exploration of the attitude of the Buddhist laity towards monks who adopted ascetic practices, sheds new light on the significance of the paṃsukūla offering. Further, the manner in which an old pre-existing ritual is accommodated within a different conceptual framework provides a clear instance of the primacy of ritual continuity over ritual meaning.
This paper uses an ethnographic study of the Ghost Festival rite performed by a Sri Lankan Theravāda temple in Taipei to illustrate the relationship between religious syncretism and missionary work. It explains how this Chinese ritual has been transformed in a Theravāda setting and made acceptable to Theravāda sentiment, and how it is adopted to advance the agenda of Theravāda missionary. Ghost Festival has had a long history in the Chinese culture and is an important ritual in Chinese Buddhism. However, the Ghost Festival does not exist in Theravāda tradition. The Theravādization of Ghost Festival thus offers interesting insight into the increasing exchange among Buddhists across different traditions in Asia.
To visualize the accumulation of good and bad karma in terms of credit or debt in a bank account is a common feature in works on Buddhism and other Indian traditions. Applying conceptual metaphor theory, this article tracks the metaphorical framework of understanding karma as a kind of ‘heavenly bank account’ back to its roots in early European scholarship. Based on a comparison with metaphors for karma to be found in Pāli texts of the Theravāda tradition, namely, the analogies of ripening, inheritance, and the dark/bright dichotomy, this article argues that the ‘bank-account’ imagery differs in significant – if subtle – respects from these emic metaphors, displaying certain Judeo-Christian preconceptions of moral bookkeeping, sin, and salvation.
This article supplements Jens Schlieter's discussion of the cognitive metaphor of a karmic bank-account, adding selected points on karma monetary/fiscal metaphors as preserved chiefly in Pāli and Sanskrit sources. It explores various strands of the history of South Asian religions where distinct economic metaphors for karma come closer to the late ‘bank-account of karma’: i.e., the Vedic ‘three debts,’ a Hindu concept of God as accountant, the varieties of weighing the (mis)deeds, the Buddhist monastic status of debt and fiscal transactions, the equivalence of karma and debt as discussed by Madhyamaka thinkers, and others. While endorsing Schlieter's point, it also takes into account such modern Western sources as early theosophical discourse and ‘Protestant Buddhism.’
This article considers the litigation in Ghai v Newcastle City Council in which the legality of open air funeral pyres under the Cremation Act 1902, and under the right to freedom of religion and belief in article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, was considered. Ultimately the Court of Appeal held that open air funeral pyres within a walled enclosure were not unlawful. But at first instance the Administrative Court, which had assumed that domestic law prohibited such pyres, held that such a ban would not breach article 9 since it was legitimate to prevent causing offence to the majority of the population. It is the approach of the Administrative Court to article 9 (which was not considered by the Court of Appeal) that forms the basis of the critical analysis in this article. In particular it is argued that the Administrative Court undervalued the right to freedom of religion and belief, as against the need to prevent offence to others, and adopted a stance which was overly deferential to Government and Parliament.1
In my tours throughout the interior, I found ancient monuments, apparently defying decay, of which no one could tell the date or the founder; and temples and cities in ruins, whose destroyers were equally unknown. SIR JAMES EMERSON TENNANT(1859: xxv).
There are competing, yet interlinked, identities in Sri Lanka through which people ‘establish, maintain, and protect a sense of self-meaning, predictability, and purpose’ (Northrup 1989: 55). These have become established over hundreds of years, and communities are attributed labels including Sinhala, Tamil, Vadda, Buddhist and Hindu (Coningham & Lewer 1999: 857). Sri Lanka is now experiencing what Azar (1990) has called a ‘protracted social conflict’, wherein a section of the Tamil communities led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are engaged in a struggle to establish a Tamil honieland or Eelam . International links, especially with south India, have had important implications on the formation of identities in Sri Lanka. Here we will focus on a key influence which has deep archaeological and political implications, whose interpretation has informed and distorted the present understanding of the concept and evolution of identities. This theme, the Vijayan colonization of the island, illustrates the formulation of identities, especially as derived from a historical chronicle, the Mahavamsa , which was ‘rediscovered’ by colonial officials in AD 1826 and has played a major role in determining the dynamics of this conflict.
Tout en soulignant que les bouddhistes indiens ne partagent pas la meme pensee ontologique et metaphysique, l'A. suggere neanmoins qu'il existe une orientation generale qui tend a localiser la realite dans l'esprit. Il existe une tendance idealiste dans l'ensemble de la pensee bouddhiste indienne. L'A. met l'accent sur les idees cosmologiques qui concernent l'expansion et la contraction de l'univers et leurs consequences sur notre comprehension de la nature et de la signification de la quatrieme meditation dans le recit des etapes du chemin bouddhiste presentees dans les Nikāyas et l'Abhidharma
L'A. replace le conte Pāli de la stūpa de la none anonyme et le recit Mūlasarvāstivādin de la stūpa de Phalguna dans le contexte de ce qui a ete dit ailleurs des stūpas. Le Canon Pāli et la Vinaya Mūlasarvāstivādin demandent explicitement l'erection de stūpas par les moines pour leurs freres decedes, mais aucune demande similaire n'est formulee a l'egard des nones. Le conte Pāli de la stūpa de la none anonyme est le seul texte connu par l'A. ou il est fait reference a l'erection d'une stūpa pour une none. Il s'agit d'ailleurs d'une stūpa detruite par des moines qui ne recoivent aucune sanction pour leurs actes
This paper is an attempt to look at Indian Buddhism ‘on the ground’ and is an exercise in what might be called ‘the archeology of religions’. It focuses on one distinct aspect of Buddhist sacred sites in India: the fact that stūpas housing the physical remains of the Buddha or marking a spot where the Buddha was thought formerly to have been present are frequently surrounded by large numbers of smaller secondary stūpas. It attempts to show that these secondary stūpas have mortuary associations and suggests the resulting pattern parallels what is known in the Medieval West as burial ad sanctos. It then attempts—through known archeological parallels, inscriptions, and literary sources—to give meaning to this pattern and suggests that, in spite of doctrinal statements to the contrary, the historical Buddha remained a living presence in the midst of Indian Buddhist communities.