and his enlightened followers; at times they evolved
into mausoleums of architectural sophistication, as at
the great stupa complex at SAN
CIin central India where
the relics of S ́ARIPUTRAand MAHAMAUDGALYAYANAare
said to be enshrined and where BUDDHA IMAGESfrom
Mathurawere brought in. Relics for the consecrations
of stupas and images were exported to other Buddhist
nations such as Sri Lanka and China, allowing a phys-
ical “presence” of the Buddha in death over an ex-
panded area that could not have taken place while he
was alive.
One oddity within the Mahaparinibbana-suttais
how the narrative deals with the paradox of a buddha
dying when he himself professed his ability to con-
tinue living until the end of the kalpa. The Tathagata
relates to ANANDAhow Mara has repeatedly appeared
before him and requested that he relent and die on
the spot, but he has consistently found excuses to put
him off. This time, however, he has decided to go
ahead and let his time run out. Almost akin to a pro-
nouncement of suicide, the sutra reads, “And now,
Ananda, the Tathagata has today at Chapala’s shrine
consciously and deliberately rejected the rest of his al-
lotted time” (5:37). Ananda swiftly responds by be-
seeching the Buddha three times to remain in the
world, living until the end of the kalpa, but each time
the Buddha refuses. He then describes no less than six-
teen previous occasions when he remarked to Ananda
how much he liked a particular place and could remain
there for the duration of the kalpa, hinting that Ananda
should ask him to do so. But each time Ananda did
not understand, and the Buddha now explains that
without such an outside request, he is powerless to al-
ter his historical fate. To beseech the Buddha now as
he approaches death is too late: “The time for making
such a request is past.” Ananda’s dim-wittedness is
thus made the scapegoat for humankind having to suf-
fer century upon century without a buddha.
Funerary culture
Putting aside the death of the founder, which has
unique historical significance, it may be useful in con-
sidering the various ways in which the living relate to
the dead in Buddhist cultures throughout Asia to di-
vide such expression into the care and treatment of the
uncommon dead,the common dead,and the unknown
dead.Under the rubric of uncommon dead, would be
saints, kings, and lesser religious and political leaders
who are typically memorialized in ways that manifest
their power and influence. Relations between the
common dead and the living is typically dominated by
familial concerns regarding how kinfolk can assist the
recently deceased in their postmortem “journey,” and
the flip side of this relationship, which is how the dead
can either enhance or disrupt the lives of the living de-
pending on how appropriately such assistance is ren-
dered. The unknown dead appear most commonly in
pious efforts to help all beings born in the lower realms
of hell and what are usually referred to as hungry ghosts.
In all cases, the care and treatment of corpses naturally
reflect different attitudes about the expected relation-
ship between the deceased and those left behind.
Two universal principles are often evident in all
three categories of funerary culture. First is that in
every society in Asia that may be considered tradi-
tionally Buddhist, indigenous belief structures regard-
ing the dead that were operative before the assimilation
of Buddhism persist and form an integral part of that
assimilation. This has resulted in a hybridization of fu-
nerary practices under the guise of Buddhist rituals and
rhetoric. Within each nation there is considerable di-
versity in how the dead are treated, and these differ-
ences in local culture expose any notion of ethnic
homogeneity as political myth. This is particularly true
in the care and treatment of the common dead, where
the Buddhist input into that amalgam varies widely.
There has been easy acceptance of the doctrine of
transmigration in Tibet, for example. By contrast, in
China deep traditions of family obligations beyond the
grave have meant less than full acceptance of the pre-
sumption that each rebirth places the individual into
a new family wherein the previous family is completely
forgotten. It was thus normative in China to use the
surname of the Buddha upon taking the tonsure, sig-
nifying a public shift of filial affiliation to the SAN ̇GHA.
Monks are intimately connected with funerary cul-
ture in all Buddhist countries, usually in ways that
combine Buddhist and non-Buddhist beliefs about
death, and it has been common for monasteries to de-
rive significant revenue from related activities such as
cremation, burial, and services for the family. While
cremation has been the norm in India since before the
birth of Buddhism, this was not so for the rest of Asia,
and although there is no scriptural demand for cre-
mation in Buddhism, its adoption on the continent
came with the dissemination of Buddhist culture. Thus
did the arrival of Buddhism bring cremation as a com-
mon approach to the care and treatment of the dead
in much of the Buddhist world. But burial has re-
mained the norm in Mongolia, and in Tibet the body
is brought to a mountaintop, broken up, and fed to
birds. In China cremation appears to have been wide-DEATH