Anusaranaśāsanākiarti, Phra Khrū, and Charles Keyes “Funerary Rites and the Buddhist Meaning of Death: An Interpretative Text from Northern Thailand”

Buddhist Funeral Cultures of Southeast Asia and China, 2012

Bringing together a range of perspectives including ethnographic, textual, historical and theoretically informed accounts, this edited volume presents the diversity of the Buddhist funeral cultures of mainland Southeast Asia and China. While the contributions show that the ideas and ritual practices related to death are continuously transformed in local contexts through political and social changes, they also highlight the continuities of funeral cultures. The studies are based on long-term fieldwork and cover material on Theravāda Buddhism in Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and various regions of Chinese Buddhism, both on the mainland and in the Southeast Asian diasporas. Topics such as bad death, the feeding of ghosts, pollution through death and the ritual regeneration of life show how Buddhist cultures deal with death as a universal phenomenon of human culture.

unpublished Ph.D. dissertation University of Illinois, Urbana, Dept of Anth, , 1977

It is only reasonable to ask why do the northern Thai have so many proscriptions and rules and constraints about the conditions of dying? This is a culture that is obsessed with controlling the details and events surrounding death and dying. Why so much cultural emphasis is placed at this point in the lifecycle is worthy of continued serious investigation by students and scholars. If so much attention is given to the details of dying, how does this affect the individual and family of the dying? How does it affect the neighborhood? I believe if we can comprehend the culture of death and dying in northern Thailand we will confront this culture at its deepest level. The engine of the architecture, the symbolism, the ritual, and day dreams and yearnings of the northern Thai comes down to one concept: merit. To understand death in this society is to understand the mechanism that makes everything work. It is the supreme generator of all events, all happenings, all successes and failures, all diseases, all lottery wins, all births and all deaths. For the Westerner I dare say it is virtually unfathomable how extensive and penetrating is this notion of Buddhist merit, tied to karma. If merit and merit-making is the means to influence your karma then the project of accumulating merit is paramount. Death in northern Thailand invokes a massive cultural attempt to increase merit by all means possible and for the old and departing to beneficially dissolve into the great process of dying and being reborn. Let us look at some of the proscriptions and cultural details the Northern Thai have evolved to achieve a good death.

2012

The statement that ‘death is the origin and the center of culture’ (Assmann 2005: 1) might at first sight seem like a simple generalisation that misses out on many other aspects of culture. However, when the study of death is not simply reduced to a rite of passage, we believe that approaching Buddhist cultures through their ideas, imaginaries and practices related to death can help us to understand crucial facts that reach beyond the domain of death and dying. First, death offers a unique departure for understanding the relations between people, monks, ritual experts and other entities that are commonly labelled as ‘the dead’, but can in fact comprise a multitude of entities of various ontological statuses. Second, death reaches out into such diverse domains as agricultural fertility, human reproduction, political cults and the economy and therefore constitutes a total social fact (Mauss 1990). Jan Assmann’s statement also has a particular relevance for the history of Buddhism. Dea...

2016

Buddhist conceptions of the after-life, and prescribed rites in relation to the dead, were modified adaptations of brahmanical patterns of religious culture in ancient India. In this article, I demonstrate how Buddhist conceptions, rites and dispositions have been sustained and transformed in a contemporary annual ritual of rising importance in Cambodia, pchum ben. I analyze phcum ben to determine its funda-mental importance to the sustenance and coherence of the Khmer family and national identity. Pchum ben is a 15-day ritual celebrated toward the end of the three-month monastic rain retreat season each year. During these 15 days, Bud-dhist laity attend ritually to the dead, providing special care for their immediately departed kin and other more recently deceased ancestors. The basic aim of pchum ben involves making a successful transaction of karma transfer to one’s dead kin, in order to help assuage their experiences of suffering. The proximate catalyst for pchum ben’s current p...

Guruparamparā. Studies on Buddhism, India, Tibet and More in Honour of Professor Marek Mejor, edited by Katarzyna Marciniak, Stanisław Jan Kania, Małgorzata Wielińska-Soltwedel and Agata Bareja-Starzyńska, 65–78. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego., 2022

The paper is a first attempt of a complete translation and interpretation of two short and only partially preserved manuscripts, ITJ 489v and ITJ 562r. In terms of their contents, ITJ 489v and ITJ 562r belong to the collection of Buddhist texts that were composed to discredit funeral practices and afterlife beliefs attributed to non-Buddhist ritual specialists and their community. The manuscripts have to be treated in the broader context of the spread of Buddhism on the Tibetan Plateau and the methodical replacement of local rites and customs by their Buddhist equivalents in practice and on the linguistic level by new, Buddhist interpretations.

In Before Siam: Essays in Art and Archaeology , edited by Nicolas Revire and Stephen A. Murphy, 310-329. Bangkok: RiverBooks and The Siam Society., 2014

1981

Both the Buddhist savior-saint and mystical-saint ideals, including their ultimate forms as the Bodhisattva and Arhat ideals, derive from the exemplary model found in the life (and death) of the Buddha. The message of Buddhist triumph over death that concludes the accounts of the death of the two Buddhist saints from Thailand – Ācān Man and Khrūbā Sīwichai – whom I discuss in this paper contains both ideals. The mystical-saint/Arhat ideal is the way of hope for those who can look at the corpse of a saint and yet know that there have been and will be men who are so able to sublimate their passions and to focus their atten¬tion upon the Dhamma that they transcend their own humanity and therefore their own death. The savior-saint/Bodhisattva ideal is the way of hope for those who see the body of the dead saint and recognize it as a vehicle for gaining merit not only in the past-during the life of the saint-but also now that he has died. Again, death has been rendered ineffectual against the power of the sacred. The biographical accounts of the deaths of Ācān Man and Khrūbā Sīwichai have developed the themes related to these two types of saints with reference both to images drawn from the life of the Buddha and to actual acts of men who sought to emulate what they understood, albeit in different ways to be the truth of the Buddhist message.

Buddhist Funeral Cultures of Southeast Asia and China, 2012