Questions People Ask Me: Bones 4 comments
A new virtual friend of mine who happens to be a writer has the opportunity to explore Buddhism in China and Tibet this summer and wrote to ask me if I knew anything about the practice of using human bones in Tibetan Buddhism … Like, is it an official practice, or is it just an odd occurance, to give up your bones for ceremonial use after your body is dead?
I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean anything …
Some of Tibetan Buddhism is made up of science, a lot of it is made up from experience and observation, and some of Tibetan Buddhism is made up of superstition and ritual. Some of that superstition and ritual may only be made up to relieve an occasional streak of boredom. And, they don’t like to waste things. So just because I don’t personally know anything about it doesn’t mean that a Buddhist in China hasn’t designated his cranium to hold alms at the local gompa.
Maybe someone reading this knows more than I do? Anything at all?
Ed.Note: Changed the word suspicion to superstition.
4 Responses to 'Questions People Ask Me: Bones'
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Suspicion … No! My words are leaving me, I knew yesterday when I wrote that it wasn’t the word I wanted to use … I meant superstitious!
I have to put in an ED. note now, I can’t leave the post like that!
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Since I’m the virtual friend, I’ll chime in here! Last year I met a man in Thailand who had a cranium prayer bowl and this is pretty much what he told me–that the body was left to the vultures, but that a whole ritual surrounded the taking of the bones and using them. Also, that it mattered who the bones belonged to. In other words, there was karma attached to them and it wouldn’t do to have prayer beads or bowls from just any old corpse. This seemed important because the way I first heard about this was from a newspaper report about graverobbers in northwestern China. They were unearthing old graves to use the bones. The CCP blamed the Buddhists. The Buddhists said they didn’t condone graverobbing. And so it went.
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Graverobbing to get bones for buddhist ritual objects seems a bit dubious until you consider that there are a lot of nouveau buddhists from the ’states who don’t really know how to figure out the provenance of a ritual item. So I can just barely imagine that there could be a market for such a thing. As a westerner, buying any sort of bone implement when you aren’t *sure* of its provenance seems like a really dumb idea, but people do dumb things all the time.
Suspicion?
Yeah, once you’re done with the body it’s just something to be fed to the vultures. Traditional Tibetans have absolutely no sentimentality about the body once the mind that generated it has gone on to the next body. I don’t know how bone ritual objects are made, but I would certainly assume that they are a product of this practice.
It’s not that someone gives up their body to be used this way; rather, once you have left your body it’s not something that you can claim to own, and your family doesn’t want it, so whatever is done with it is done with it, and it’s not something that the family is going to want to dwell on.
At least one point of using bone implements (e.g., a bone rosary) is to remind the practitioner that s/he is dying. The very foundation of Buddhism is the realization that we are going to die, and the wish to make something of the time we have; bone implements serve as an inescapable reminder of that fact, because they come from the body of someone who has in fact died.
A Tibetan could probably give you a more personal (and more accurate) view of this – this is not something I have any experience of, since American buddhists from the Tibetan lineage don’t follow the same burial customs (they’re probably illegal in the U.S.). But this is what I have heard.