The vultures gathered on the mountainside to watch.
On the grassy slope below, a Tibetan monk placed the
naked corpse of an old
woman in a sacred clearing and stepped away to sharpen
his knife on the
side of a rock. Mumbling a prayer, he marched once
around an old Buddhist
monument, and then he cut her body into pieces.
Performing a Tibetan tradition that has haunted these
grounds for
centuries, the monk stripped flesh from bone. He
followed with a
sledgehammer, crushing each bone into fragments so
small that they, too,
could be devoured by vultures.
In an hour, after the monk finished and the enormous
birds swarmed the area
and scrabbled over the last chunks of human flesh, no
trace of the woman's
body remained. Except the memory of it, fading slowly
in the eyes of half a
dozen witnesses.
The vultures, about 50 of them, ambled slowly up the
hill and took to the
air with evident difficulty, overfed as they are from
this daily ritual.
Tibetans call it "sky burial."
Deep in the mountains of the Tibetan plateau, even in
this part that spills
into half of Sichuan Province, Tibetans still carry
out ancient rituals
like sky burial every day. It bespeaks a timeless
adherence to old ways of
life and death, unaffected by the changes that are so
rapidly affecting the
rest of China.
Sky burial may seem barbaric to outsiders. Yet in a
desperately poor region
dominated by nearly impassable mountains, where many
Tibetans live without
electricity, roads or telephones, the essentials of
life seem to hew
closely to the brutal rhythms of nature.
=46or Tibetans, many of whom display religious fervor
despite decades of
Chinese rule that has at times tried to undermine it,
sky burial is a
widely accepted and ecologically sound way to dispose
of the dead.
"When the body dies, the spirit leaves, so there
is no need to keep the
body," said Garloji, a monk who came to observe
the ceremony. Like many
Tibetans, he uses one name. "The birds, they
think they are just eating.
Actually they are removing the body and completing
part of life's cycle."
Sky burial is one of three principal ways that
Tibetans traditionally
return their dead to the earth. The two others are
cremation and "water
burial."
Wood was so scarce in the mountainous desert of Tibet
that burning a corpse
was reserved for people of stature. Poor people who
could not afford
cremation or sky burial typically dropped a body into
a river.
Today all three methods are still used. In towns with
access to a river,
water burial is now often performed by cutting a
corpse into small pieces
that will disappear into the mouths of fish.
Chinese officials, who asserted their control over
this area of western
Sichuan as the army moved toward Lhasa, the Tibetan
capital, in 1950, still
seem to regard sky burial as a bizarre ritual of a
primitive people.
Although the officials banned sky burials together
with almost all
religious practices in the 1960s and 1970s, Tibetans
regained limited
rights to practice religious ceremonies in the 1980s.
"We encourage cremation, but we allow sky
burial," Nima Tsering, vice
governor of Tibet, said last year.
In Lhasa sky burial ceremonies are performed at dawn
and are closed to
outsiders. But an area like this one, deep in the vast
border region of the
Tibetan plateau and more than 500 miles by dirt road
from the nearest city,
is so remote and inaccessible that no one attending
the ceremony here was
aware of regulations.
On this day, the body of the 67-year-old woman was
stiff after three days
of transport by tractor from her home more than 200
miles away when it
arrived at a nearby Buddhist temple, where a short
ceremony was performed
at noon.
The dead woman's husband and her son, who accompanied
the body this far,
retreated to sit on a hilltop about half a mile away.
It is customary for
relatives to remain close by during the ceremony,
Garloji explained, but not so close that they can
actually witness it.
Lobsang, the monk who performed this sky burial, tied
a burlap bag around
his waist like an apron. Working methodically, with
the dispatch of a
professional, he stripped the flesh from each of the
woman's limbs. Cutting
open her abdomen with one motion, he stepped back
momentarily to let the
strong odour recede.
He took one bone after another, placing them on a flat
stone. Raising a
small sledgehammer over his head, he smashed them into
small pieces,
separating the yield into two small piles, flesh and
bone. Next to last
came her skull, which burst into pieces with a sharp
crack when the hammer
came down.
Garloji said one sect of fellow worshipers at his
monastery liked to preserve the top parts of the
skulls and use them as enlarged cups for tea.
When the Chinese try to justify their occupation of
Tibet by depicting the slavery and harsh theocracy
that existed before 1950, skull teacups are often one
piece of evidence they offer of the nature of
pre-Communist Tibet.
When Lobsang finished, he looked up at the vultures on
the hillside. He
signaled them, with a flick of the wrist, that it was
feeding time. The
birds descended in a mass of flapping wings and
pecking beaks, devouring
the remains in minutes.
Lobsang took off his apron and walked away. Wearing a
scowl, he seemed
surprised that anyone would ask him to pause a moment
and talk about his
work. "I
come every day, and it's about the same," he
said. "Some bodies smell
worse. Some are bigger, heavier. No big deal."
