The Buddhist Dead

Here are a few well-known Buddhist fundamentals about death and the dead. Death is synonymous with impermanence and suffering and illustrative of the entire samsaric process; it occurs at each moment, in this life and future lives, until it is overcome through transformation and salvation. Following from this, specific Buddhist practices focus on contact with or thoughts about death to inspire religious effort. The performance of funerary and memorial rituals, in particular, has long been the social, institutional, and economic tie that binds the monastic community to the laity and the living to the dead. Finally, death is not an egalitarian enterprise. Rather, the Buddhist dead are divided, in the terminology of this volume, between the “ordinary dead” who continue to be tied to saṃsāra and the “special dead” who attain liberation (10). Digging deeper, these dictums also generate tensions or make obvious a set of contradictory Buddhist logics, for

Buddhism · Impermanence · Sociology · Theology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Philosophy