The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discources, Representations

In its teachings, practices, and institutions, Buddhism in its varied Asian forms has been and continues to be centrally concerned with death and the dead. Yet surprisingly death inn Buddhism has received little sustained scholarly attention. The Buddhism dead offers the first comparative investigation of this topic across the major Buddhist cultures of India, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Tibet, and Burma. Its individual essays representing a ragas of methods shed light on a rich array of traditional Buddhist practices for the dead and dying; the sophisticated but often paradoxical discourses about death and the dad in Buddhist texts; and the varied representations of the dead and afterlife found in Buddhist funerary art and popular literature.

The paradigmatic figure of the historical Buddha his death the symbolism of his funeral and his relationship to the impurity of the dead are treated in the Gregory schopen. The death of later remarkable adepts, following the Buddhist communities are investigated by Koichi Shinohara, Jacqueline I. Stone Raoul Birnbaum, and Kurtis R. Schaeffer. A dramatic often controversial category of exemplary death the of giving up the body of Buddhist suicide is examined by James Benn and D. Max Moerman. Moving from celebrated masters to ordinary practitioners and devotees Bryan J. Cuevas, John Clitfford Holt, and Matthew T. Kapstein take up the subject of the ordinary dead and the intimate relation that often persist between them and those still living while hank classman mark rowe and Jason a. carbine shed light on Buddhist funerary practices and address the physical and social location of the Buddhist dead.

This important collection moves beyond the largely text and doctrine centered approaches characterizing an earlier generation of Buddhist scholarship and expands its treatment of death to include ritual devotional and material culture. Its foundational in sights are both culturally and historically grounded and at the same time offer a basis for further comparative conversations on death between scholars of Buddhism and other religious tradition.