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 in Buddhism'' has received   little sustained scholarly attention.  The Buddhist 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 range 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 dead in   Buddhist texts; and the varied representations of the dead and the   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 opening essays by John S. Strong and Gregory Schopen. The deaths of   later remarkable adepts, following the Buddha's model, and their   significance for Buddhist communities are investigated by Koichi Shinohara,   Jacqueline I. Stone, Raoul Birnbaum, and Kurtis R. Schaeffer. A dramatic,   often controversial category of exemplary death, that of ''giving up the   body'' or Buddhist suicide, is examined by James Benn and D. Max Moerman.   Moving from celebrated masters to ordinary practitioners and devotees,   Bryan J. Cuevas, John Clifford Holt, and Matthew T. Kapstein take up the   subject of the ''ordinary dead'' and the intimate relations that often   persist between them and those still living, while Hank Glassman, Mark   Rowe, and Jason A. Carbine shed light on Buddhist funerary practices and   address the physical and social locations 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 insights 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   traditions.

The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations PDF

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