Tibetan Sky Burial

Our first stop in Sichuan Province was the sleepy little stopover town of Daocheng where we spent one night in a shabby makeshift Tibetan hotel.  The next morning we were planning to set out for the picturesque city of Kanding, a 12 or so hour ride on the breathtaking Tibetan Sichuan Highway, but we heard from fellow travelers of an unusual burial ceremony performed in nearby Litang and we decided to check it out.

The sacred hillside

We got a minibus with two Brits we met on our last 12 hour bus ride and headed to 2.5 mile-high Litang.   It’s a small dusty town inhabited by friendly rugged people.  I got the sense that tourists only come to Litang for two reasons, the August horse racing festival and sky burials.

The sky burial is a Tibetan funerary ceremony in which the body of the deceased is placed on a mountain, dissected, and then left for vultures to consume.  This method of burial was banned in China in the 60s and 70s but made a comeback during the 80s.  It is believed that through eating the body, the birds carry the soul to heaven.  The burial also serves a very practical purpose in providing an efficient and safe way of disposing of the dead in an area where the land is frozen much of the year and wood is scarce.

Remnants of past burials

We found a guest house that provided transportation and guides to the burials and went to the sacred hillside at 8 AM unsure of what to expect.  I was nervous and unsure I could handle it.  The walk along the hillside was littered with bone fragments and knives from past burials.  When we arrived the first burial of the day was well under way.  We sat close to the dozen or so neighbors and distant relatives of the deceased (the immediate family typically does not attend) and watched the cutter.  The folks we sat with were not at all bothered by our presence as I feared they would be.  In fact, I was surprised at how casual it was.  Many of them got up to take phone calls, smoke, and chat with us.

The cutter.

The cutter is a monk from the local monastery and the uncle of the owner of our guest house, hence the access to the burials.  He is 62 years old and has been a cutter for 30 years.  His story is unbelievable.  He entered the monastery at a young age, became a monk, and was minding his own business when one day at age 32 the big Lama tapped him to succeed the current cutter who was getting old.  He was mortified.  He cut two bodies and then ran away to Lhasa, some 1,500 km to the west in Tibet.  The big Lama sent three men to bring him back, they did, and he has been cutting ever since.

Delivering the body

While he was finishing up the first body the site for the second burial was selected by a Lama.  A tractor chugged up to the hill to the designated spot and from it the body, wrapped in rope and nylon sacks, was dumped on the ground.  The cutter unwrapped the body, flipped it so it was face down, and tied the neck to stake in the ground.   Wrapped in a clear plastic sheet up to his chest, the cutter knelt next to the body and began dissecting it.   He first  scalped the head and then cut deep crosshatching in the flesh all over the body: chest, arms, neck, legs, feet, everything.  All major tendons are severed but the body remained intact.

When he finished he stepped away and the hungry hoard of vultures, over 80 strong, that has been waiting impatiently surged upon the body.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  The birds were so densely packed together fighting for meat that some were stuck on top of others.  Flesh was ripped between beaks and it was madness.  After five minutes the cutter scared the birds away and all that was left of the body was a red picked clean skeleton.  The leash around the neck did not do its job as the body was a good 15 feet down the hill when the birds had finished.

Vultures devouring the body

The cutter dragged the body back to the stake and began the second phase of cutting the body.  Using a small axe, a big axe, and a stone “cutting board,” he chopped the skeleton into tiny fragments bone by bone.  The final bone to be cracked was the skull.  He lodged his smaller axe into the skull and used the back of the large axe to drive the smaller one through cracking it in half.  He then did a final mince to make sure the bits were small enough for the birds.  Once satisfied, he stepped away and the vultures returned to finish what was left.  While the birds were still eating the cutter and the neighbors of the dead left.  There burial was over.

It was unbelievable to have experienced this.  Prior to being on the hill that day I thought the whole thing was gross and brutal, but while watching it I didn’t feel that way at all and I don’t now.  The sky burial changed the way I think about the human body and death.  In Tibet, a dead body is an empty vessel and commands no special treatment.

Old grave markers. Since the same sites are used over and over the markers are collected after a certain period and put in a pile on top of the hill.