Warning: This blog post contains super minor spoilers from the movie Kekexili: Mountain Patrol. I don't talk about anything that happened outside the first few minutes but if you want to watch Kekexili: Mountain Patrol totally spoiler free be warned. I guess I should also put a trigger warning that I get into traditional Tibetan forms of corpus removal so if you aren't into that you might want to skip this post.
Today in my Chinese Film class we watched a movie called Kekexili: Mountain Patrol about the volunteer Tibetian Mountain Patrol who, in the 1990s, patrolled the Kekexili region of Tibet to protect the endangered Tibetan antelope from poachers. The move quite successfully captures the harshness of Tibet, giving it a feel somewhere between Afghanistan, Waziristan, and Alaska during the Gold Rush. To help illustrate this point, within the first 10 minutes of the movie we witness one of the Mountain Patrol member's, who was executed by the poachers, sky burial. Tibet has historically been a hard place to dispose of corpses; most of the land is too hard and too rocky to bury a body deep enough to get rid of it. Tibet, unlike many Buddhist regions, also lacks the large amount of trees necessary to cremate bodies before the invention of (and in Tibet's case access to) modern crematory machines. While the lamas (old Tibet's priest class) and other noted figures could be cremated, it was simply not possible to cremate all the dead people. Luckily for the Tibetans, Tibet is home to a large population of griffon vultures who are more than happy to eat anything dead. While Kekexili: Mountain Patrol doesn't show the full process, it shows enough for you to get the idea of what is going on. The naked dead body is brought out to a field by a Buddhist priest, sometimes the body is broken down into smaller pieces but often the body is just left whole. Attracted to the body, vultures swoop down and eat everything except the bones. The bones are then ground down, mixed with millet and yak milk, and fed to the birds who remain after the vultures are done eating. Interestingly enough, this process is not totally unique to Tibet. Zoroastrians (a small but ancient monotheistic religious group) in modern Iran and India previously Towers of Silence to dispose of their dead. Bodies would be left in the Tower for vultures to eat. Like many Tibetans, the Zoroastrians have been having issues disposing their dead using vultures. While in Tibet modern crematories have made cremation cheaper than sky burials, Zoroastrians of Iran face various government regulations and community pressures that drove the practice into disuse. The Zoroastrians of India still sometimes use Towers of Silence to dispose of their dead but, like the Tibetans, are having issues attracting enough vultures to fully dispose of corpses since the vulture population in both places has been declining. Who knows how much longer the rite of sky burial will last for?
3 Comments
Dad
3/31/2017 08:42:17 pm
I guess being eaten by vultures no worse than western practice of being buried in a cold, moist hole in the ground surrounded by hundreds of other corpses. Good thing they are all dead
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sharon
4/1/2017 09:22:02 am
waaaat? do not worry about spoilers - i, nor anyone else i know will be watching this movie! even on netflix! as soon as you come home, i am going to make you binge Arnold shcwartnezzer
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gramma m.
4/4/2017 11:30:11 pm
Saves having to sweep their tomb and having a vacation to do it. I saw the "towers" to dispose of bodies when we were in India. They also have huge funeral pyres and throw the ashes into holy rivers. Saves a lot of cash and doesn't eat up land for burial..
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AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
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