Chapter 4 Tribal People 129will be buried in the late afternoon on an auspicious day, three to ten days later.
In the meantime, many tasks must be accomplished. Chandarsi (1976)
describes tasks that are assigned to relatives: preparation of the body; inform-
ing relatives in distant villages of his death; preparing enough food to feed the
many people who will come for as long as they stay; feeding the dead man
himself three times a day; firing three shots from a gun every time he is fed;
blowing the pipes and beating the death; making a coffin; obtaining the chick-
ens, pigs, and oxen that will be offered; settling the dead man’s debts; and
selecting the burial site. These tasks are the work of his clan and of people from
other clans who are related to him by marriage. The splendor of a man’s mortu-
ary rite is testimony to his greatness in life and of his family’s devotion to him.
This message is aimed not only at the living community but at the deceased
himself, who must be made willing to depart by provision of everything he
needs for the journey to the place of his ancestors. Otherwise, disappointed and
ashamed, he may stay around and cause trouble for the living, who will only
have to go to great expense later on to find the causes, and then make the offer-
ings necessary to induce the ghost to depart satisfied.
On the day of death the corpse is washed by the immediate family, dressed
in new clothes, and laid out on a stretcher inside the house, with his head
toward the main stove. At his head lies a chicken that has been killed by twist-
ing its neck. It will accompany him to the next world. Food, a crossbow, and
sword are laid nearby for the journey.
A long chant known as tergi helps the deceased realize that he has died and
serves as a kind of verbal map for his journey. It describes the way through the
spirit world that the deceased must follow, offering advice on how to prevent
being waylaid and what to do upon arrival at the place of the ancestors. It also
teaches the living about the nature of the afterlife.
Tergi begins by expressing the sorrow of the chanter who came to the great
stove at the dead man’s house and did not find him alive, as in the past, but
dead. The chant describes the preparations the family has made for the body.
They’ve made a basket for cooking sticky rice, constructed a stretcher to carry
him to the grave, killed a chicken (or a dog) to be his companion (“when you
eat this chicken you should go with it”), covered his face with a red cloth so he
will not be ashamed of being dead in front of others, put on shoes for the jour-
ney, and provided a thousand rupees for his expenses (paper money is burned).
Thus provisioned, next he should go to the village where he was born to
retrieve his placenta from under the main house post where it was buried on the
day of his birth. This is his clothing to be worn in the next world. After nine
days’ journey, he will come to two gates. He is instructed what to say to the
guards in order to be allowed through. Then he will come to villages where
Hmong are enjoying normal life. There will be man-eating stones and a tree
with eight branches, nine roots, and nine eyes. He should drink the milk of the
tree and call it mother and father to make all the sickness of his body disappear.
At a third gate he will be asked how he wants to be reborn. A little further is a