Buddhist Funeral Cultures: of Southeast Asia and China
Paul Williams, Patrice Ladwig
Subject: Buddhism, eastern religions, anthropology, general interest
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication date: 2012
Pages: 272
ISBN: 978-0-511-78225-1
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.
Prior to reading this document, I personally was not aware of how death is explained in Buddhism. I agree with the authors that death is indeed at the center of Buddhist culture after reading the philosophy behind how Buddhism defines death from the very beginning of its origin. It is very powerful to define death as a constant occurrence, reflecting how there is no enduring identity in nature, as everything constantly changes its form from moment to moment. As humans, we age each day, and our biological form of a human body is never the same from one day to another. However, as Buddhism explains, although death brings doctrinal absence, one’s anthropological presence continues to exist through forms of memory and cognition.
Reading and watching videos about funeral cultures of Southeast Asia, I began to realize how death often brings people together and makes us understand our relationships amongst each other and with other entities. Nature, therefore, becomes a symbolic force for us to cope with death and to understand it as a point of departure. Although each religion has different rituals and cultures, natural elements, such as water, fire, and animals, are shared in common when it relates to life and death. For instance, the burning of a paper house introduced in a short film we watched for this seminar provides a certain narrative as paper turns into ashes, showing how nothing in this world is permanent. The material transformation of paper represents the family’s wishes and gratitude for the dead. Even though the form of a paper no longer exists, the process of its disintegration relates to faith and memories for the family members during the funeral. I truly believe that studying various cultures and their different yet similar ways of understanding death is very important in designing a space for hospice and palliative care. As Dr. Wu said during her presentation, every patient has different needs and wants in preparing for death. There is something powerful that we all can learn from Buddhism to come up with a design solution to facilitate some of the shared experience from the patients, inspired by nature and its constant evolution.
- reflection written by Yunni Cho
