Tibetan Sky Burials: Stumbling upon the secret ritual of feeding the dead to vulture 'angels'
By Matthew Carney
Tibetan Sky Burials is a traditional custom in Tibetan Buddhism to farewell their dead, and these days outsiders are mostly forbidden from witnessing them.
I had heard of Tibetan Sky Burials with a mixture of horror and fascination. To put it bluntly, a dead body is chopped up into pieces and fed to waiting vultures.
Tibetans see it as a last gift to the universe — a way to show the insignificance and the impermanence of our earthly lives.
But it sounded way too brutal to show to my three kids.
So, when we arrived at a very isolated and traditional Tibetan Buddhist monastery near Tagong in North Eastern Sichuan I thought, "let's just look at the site where it happens".
We'd been told foreigners were not allowed to experience the secret ritual anyway.
Our driver directed us up to the top of the mountain where the burials take place. It was surrounded by a sea of Tibetan prayer flags and you could just make out a kind of stone slab.
So we hiked up there. Upon arriving we could hear Tibetan nuns chanting. "How lovely?" I thought. Stumbling upon a secret ritual
Then I turned and saw about 100 vultures sitting on the hill, waiting. Then, what looked like a body bag on the stone slab.
I actually couldn't believe it. Have we stumbled into the start of a sky burial? Through a translation app I asked one of the Tibetans next to me what was happening.
"Flesh eating birds" he replied.
"Oh, can we stay?" I asked.
"Yes, but on the side and no photos," he replied.
"This is amazing", I thought, but then I saw my kids. My wife and I had to make quick decisions.
We gave our six-year-old son the iPad to play computer games. He was thrilled, and we had never before been so happy to give it to him. He was too young to see this.
As for my 11-year-old son and my 13-year-old daughter, my wife Catherine quickly sat them down and told them what was about to happen and said it was their choice to stay or go.
We gave it to them straight, but told them the cultural and religious context.
To their credit they stayed. I was nervous — the first time I'd seen a dead body I was 12 and it had a profound effect on me.
Before we knew it the bag was taken off and the corpse was revealed. It looked like a middle-aged woman.
It all resembled an ancient biblical scene
Then in very dramatic fashion the rogyapas, or body breaker, stormed up the side of mountain looking every part 'the agent of death', dressed in a thick, dark scarlet coloured coat with a black hood.
With a butchers knife in hand he wasted no time in carving up the body. My stomach sunk. It was gruesome, and I just stopped myself from throwing up.
My kids though seemed to take it in their stride.
The vultures were growing impatient and started to jump at site of the flesh. The body breaker gave the signal and the Tibetans holding the birds back let them through.
They swarmed, in a frenzy jumping on top of each other tearing at the flesh. It was unbelievable, like some ancient biblical scene.
It was just too much when the detached head rolled out from the swarm and towards us. I covered my kids' eyes and my own but at last minute took a peek and saw a dozen vultures picking at the brain.
He mixed that with yak butter and barley flour and, in one last gesture, rolled it into a ball walked into the middle of the vultures and threw it high in the air.
And with that he was gone. Angels taking people's souls to heaven
What we had just seen was considered a success because there was absolutely nothing left of the body.
It's considered a bad omen if vultures don't eat the body or even if small bits are left.
Tibetans see the vultures as Dakinis, like angels who take soul into the heavens to await reincarnation and the next life — the body a mere vessel for the soul.
And at the end of it all, a peace and calmness seemed to descend over the scene.
Everyone seemed happy that the ritual had been fulfilled and the soul of the deceased may get a chance of enlightenment to escape the cycle of human life
It only took at most 15 minutes and the entire corpse was gone — every last piece of flesh had been seared off and eaten, leaving only the bones behind.
Then the body breaker gathered up the human bones and began to pulverise them with a mallet.
My kids too, surprisingly, were fine. They seemed to be able to rationalise the confronting scene they'd just witnessed was part a bigger grander picture — an ancient culture giving a meaning to lives.
I was a proud dad on that day, proud of their maturity and intelligence.
But as for my six-year-old son, he was none the wiser. He'd been deeply engrossed by his iPad, playing Minecraft the whole time.
