Heavenly burial
The sky burial is a form of air funeral one in several countries of Central Asia practiced burial . Objectively it is justified by the steppe earth that is too hard for a burial and the lack of firewood for a cremation . The ethical principles and religious reasons for this then emerged in tradition.
Tibet
This type of burial, which is otherwise unusual for Buddhism, can be traced back to the lack of firewood and the region's frozen ground in winter. This is how the heavenly burial was introduced into regional Buddhism. In Tibet this form is still carried out regularly today, alongside fire and earth burials . Heavenly burials take place in the "Valley of the Buddha". This is located near the Kailash , the Tibetan "seat of the gods".
Heaven burial is still the most common in Tibet today . The corpse will continue to be symbolically supplied with food in the house for a few days. During this time of three to five days, a lama reads to the dead from the Tibetan Book of the Dead in order to induce the soul of the dead person to leave the body. On the day of the burial, the corpse is brought to the burial site before sunrise after a final evocation by the lama. There the body is cut up by the undertakers, the ragyapas, and left to eat by the vultures that have been lured before . According to Tibetan ideas, these carry the deceased into the bardo , a state between death and rebirth.
Mongolia
Until the beginning of the 20th century, celestial burials were also common in Mongolia and the neighboring steppe peoples. It is a shamanistic custom, with a centuries-old tradition even before the introduction of Buddhism.
In contrast to Tibet, the body was not chopped up here, but rather placed in the steppe as a whole. During transport he was not allowed to be carried through the door of the yurt , as the threshold was an obstacle to his mind. Instead, the concertina gate on the wall next to the door was opened to create a passage. The speed with which birds and other wild animals removed the corpse was considered an indicator of the deceased's lifestyle. In the time of socialism this custom was fought in favor of burial in the European style. This became widely accepted as the usual form of burial in the course of the 20th century.
Persia and India
In Zoroastrianism , the sky burial was in the so-called "towers of silence" or Dachmas practiced today, for example, by parsing in Bombay . In “ Towers of Silence ” the dead are brought into towers open to the sky and left to vultures.
prehistory
In the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, a wall painting was found depicting headless corpses and vultures. This is interpreted as an intentional defecation by vultures, but the presence of a larger figure, which seems to attack the birds with a sling , speaks against it. Usually corpses were buried in mud benches inside the houses.
Klaus Schmidt , the head of the excavation of the settlement on the Göbekli Tepe ( PPNA ), thinks it is possible that the building was also used as a roof.
See also
literature
- Margaret Gouin: Tibetan Rituals of Death. Buddhist funerary practices (= Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism. Vol. 54). Routledge, London et al. 2010, ISBN 978-0-415-56636-0 .
- Dorothea Lüddeckens: oasis without vultures. In: Funeral Culture. No. 7, 2006, ISSN 1619-6090 , pp. 14-15.
- Manfred Gerner: cemetery culture. Hohenheim-Verlag, Stuttgart / Leipzig 2001, ISBN 3-89850-051-9 , p. 122f.
Web links
- Pamela Logan: Witness to a Tibetan Sky-Burial . Tibet 1997.
Individual evidence
- ^ Wentzel van Huyssteen: The historical Self: Memory and Religion at Çatal Höyük . In: Ian Hodder (Ed.): Religion at Work in a Neolithic society . Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2014, 114f., Ill. In the same volume p. 315.
- ^ Joris Peters, Klaus Schmidt: Animals in the symbolic world of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey: a preliminary assessment. ( Memento of the original from June 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 4.7 MB) In: Anthropozoologica. Vol. 39, No. 1, 2004, ISSN 0761-3032 , pp. 179-218.
