"I don't understand," I say, confused. "Which bodies?"
"The dead bodies, of the people," he says, and goes on to explain sky burials to me.
When a Tibetan dies, the family take the body to the mountainside where a monk breaks it into pieces with a knife and an axe. Eagles start to gather on the cliffs, while the monk's assistants use rocks to pound the flesh and bones to a pulp. Eventually the birds are summoned, and they fly down and take the lumps of flesh back into the sky with them, until there's nothing left.
I'm shocked. The prayer flags on the rocks whip in the wind, and I look up and watch three beautiful eagles gliding overhead.
"But this only happens to the monks and the lamas, right?" I say, eventually. "Not to people like you?"
"Yes, of course this will happen to me," says Sonan. "It happens to nearly all Tibetans when they die."
"In front of your own mother?" I exclaim. I just can't believe it. I can't believe someone would actually be fed to eagles in front of their own mother.
"Yes," he says. "In front of my own mother, if she's still alive." He looks at me curiously. "Why? What happens to you when you die?"
"I'll be put in a nice box and buried, thanks, or I'll be set on fire," I say, shaking my head. "Definitely no birds involved when I die."
Sonan laughs. "Okay," he says. "No birds for the Europeans."
"That's right," I say, looking back up at the eagles circling us in the sky.
There was a bit about sky burials in the human planet. They discreetly showed one taking place and it was fascinating.
ReplyDeleteAllegedly it's done partly because the ground is too hard I'm the mountains. Still, fascinating stuff.
I've been talking to Annie in Tibet -she's really touched by the comments that get left but unfortunately isn't able to access her blog so can't reply just yet.
ReplyDeleteParsis do the same thing with vultures although it's only done in certain private grounds and nobody can watch. If you think about it, it is super ecological.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mediamatic.net/page/72172/en
I read somewhere that bearded vultures - Lammergeiers - are skilled at taking bones and dropping them from a height to break open and they feed on the bone marrow. And that it's their main diet. So without the sky burials they'd starve ....
ReplyDeletefabulous journey, really enjoying this blog.
My goodness, I just keep trying to imagine watching someone's body go through this burial. If you grow up with it does it lose all feeling of being violent? Though the image of a bird carrying a loved one up to the sky is poetic - the process of getting to that point really boggles my silly little mind.
ReplyDeleteI read this with my daughter, because we recently watched the aforementioned program (which was brilliant! Wear your sun glasses, there's lots of UV up so high!). She agrees that she would not like the job of mushing bodies and plans to be buried in a coffin in a normal run of the mill graveyard (not her hippy ma's wood-graveyard plan).
ReplyDeleteI'd read about this back in the days when I read T Lobsang Rampa. It's not so much a burial as a dispersal. I suppose it doesn't matter whether one is eaten by worms or birds since worms end up in birds anyway. But the preparation for dispersal must be a real test of your non-attachment if your a relative.
ReplyDeleteoops that should be *you're*
ReplyDelete