The Amazing Natural Cremation Ritual “Sky Burial”
Chopping Of The Dead
Our world is a diverse place, where different creature resides with different natural rules, among them human is considered as the smartest as they got the analyzing and thinking ability, with time they civilized. So it is clear that they got their own living styles and rules, birth and death are supernatural rules which is beyond anyone’s control, but there are certain human-made rules and system which they have created for themselves as a social animal, religion is a kind of system made by humans, as there are variety of human they got variety of rules and regulations, their system to welcome the newly born one is different as well as different rule for the one who dies.
There is a kind of cremation system still in practice in a certain place of Asia, like Tibet, where the dead people are feed to scavengers well known as sky burial (jhator) in which the body of the deceased is fragmented and feed to vultures. To the outsider, this funeral process may seem unsympathetic or cruel. Yet within the spiritual and geographic contexts of Tibetan culture, it is the perfect fate for the body humans leave behind in death. In Tibet the vultures are not treated as a heinous or malicious creature rather they treat a “holy eagle” as a spirit (Dakini) a feminine sky spirit. If a man tries tom kill them they are not treated well by the locals
Tibetan Buddhists, however, believe that the corpse is nothing but a discarded shell, they consider the spirit of the death has already moved on, through death and toward anew incarnation.in this cremation process the dead body is kept in sitting position for 24 hours while a spiritual leader(lama Tibetan word) recites the necessary prayers from their spiritual scripts before the body is ready for the next step. They consider the body to be blessed by within the ritual process, then the crop is wrapped in white cloth. As time passes Finally, the corpse’s spine is broken. This allows the body to be folded into a smaller bundle, which becomes easy to carry the crop to the burial place by their relatives.
The journey to the sacred location begins at dawn and can be quite a long and tiring full journeys as they are typically situated in high places than normal plains and are far from residential areas generally Family members follow along on this journey, chanting and playing drums. The body then positioned face down on stones, while the chief priest keeps chanting the other priest cuts off the hair first and then begins slicing up the body, then chopping off the limbs. The process goes on among the swarm of feathery hungry creatures surrounding them.
The priest (breaker of bones) then crushed the remaining bones with a hammer, mixing them with barley flour, for easier consumption by the birds.
Monks sometimes save bone fragments for use in the manufacture of ritual bowls, and other sacred items.
As the western Tibet comprise of some highest peaks of Himalayan mountain settlement is roughly 16,500 feet (5,000 meters) above sea level where desert swept by chilling wind.It’s the highest ecosystem on Earth, a place where sky burial is perfectly logical.
After all, where should Tibetans bury their dead when much of the ground is rocky or frozen, it becomes cogent for that kind of place for sky burial, With what fuel should they cremate their dead when the wood is so scarce, Meanwhile, hungry scavengers like vultures haunt the air. Wolves roam the surroundings.
