spread only during the Song and Yuan dynasties and
the period since the Communist revolution in 1949;
here resistance stems from the ancient belief that the
dead emerge in the afterlife with a kind of ethereal body
that needs to be fully intact to function properly.
The second principle is that when we speak of how
the dead are viewed by the living, we should recognize
that they are merely one part of another reality wherein
are also found a host of supernatural entities such as
celestial beings, spirits, fairies, gods of one sort of
another, Mara, Yama, future and past buddhas, bo-
dhisattvas, and so forth. This other world is not sepa-
rate from ours but for the most part is hidden to us.
We can glimpse traces of it, however, through un-
orthodox states of mind experienced in meditative
trance, dreams, portents, miraculous manifestations,
and occasional encounters with individuals from that
realm.
The Mahaparinibbana-suttadefines four types of
uncommon dead by identifying who deserves to be
memorialized by means of building sacred stupas over
their graves: buddhas, PRATYEKABUDDHAS, s ́ravakas,
and righteous wheel-turning kings (cakravartin). The
sutra states that these four groups are worthy of memo-
rial stupas because when a believer looks upon their
grave-mound and thinks “This is the stupa of... ,”
the heart of that person will be made calm and happy,
and when that believer dies this personal experience
will result in rebirth in a heavenly realm. The sutra thus
canonizes the belief that stupas built to mark the graves
of sacred historical persons will be embodied with the
power to transform believing pilgrims who make con-
tact with those stupas such that their karmic status will
be so purified that rebirth in heaven is assured. This is
just one example of the fact that belief in the religious
power of material expressions of the uncommon dead
begins very early in Buddhism. In Mahayana countries,
cremated remains of eminent monks were often in-
spected to find relics in the form of jewels or shining
bone nuggets, confirming their status as bodhisattvas
and prompting burial under stupas. In China there are
numerous stories of the cremated bones of saints
found linked in a chain.Many have pointed to the presence of relics
in stupas and other funerary paraphernalia as the ba-
sis of their power, and indeed relics have played aDEATHThe funeral and cremation of a revered Korean monk. © Nathan Benn/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.