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Buddhist mummies
One of the worst ways to go would be buried live. Some Buddhist monks welcomed it as a final means of gaining total victory over the flesh.
Who are the Sokushinbutsu, you ask? The Japanese Buddhist monks who mummified themselves while still alive. The bodies that have been found by archeologists date to between the 12th and 20th centuries AD. But apparently, the process is much older. Keep reading to find out everything you need to know about mummifying yourself while still alive, as the Japanese Buddhist monks did.
self-mummification was originally a Taoist practice, and notes that, while the Japanese monks are the most famous self-mummifiers, cases of deliberate self-mummifcation have been recorded in China and India as well."
There’s a lot of talk about the “spiritual goal” as far as the Sokushinbutsu are concerned. "Where sokushinbutsu was concerned, a successful act of self-mummification meant the successful execution of a final spiritual practice,” according to Davis. "If, after an attempt at self-mummification, the attempted practitioner was found decayed, it was taken as a sign that the spiritual goal had not been achieved."
The process of self-mummifcation wasn’t seen as suicide by the Taoists who practiced it, but more a path toward immortality. The Sokushinbutsu, in a similar way, thought of the process as a way to transcend death
They would remain in their mummified state, which was viewed as a death-trance, for 5.67 billion years until they would be called upon to assist Maitreya for the benefit of all humankind,” Davis reports.
So, apparently, you don’t just wake up one day and decide you want to mummify yourself. Sorry for those of you at home with hopes of trying. There’s actually a 3,000-day training process of sorts.
The key element of the process is dietary,” Davis reports. "Japanese ascetics would commonly abstain from cereals, removing wheat, rice, foxtail millet, pros so millet, and soybeans. Instead, they would eat things like nuts, berries, pine needles, tree bark, and resin (which is why the diet of the sokushinbutsu was called mokujikyo, or 'tree-eating.'"
Then, you’re essentially buried alive up to your neck with a little space left for you to breathe, and you kind of just.. wait to die. "Once the ascetic was prepared to attempt to become a sokushinbutsu, it's said he would step into a tiny burial chamber and has himself buried alive, with a small opening to allow air inside the chamber,” Davis writes. "There he would sit, chanting sutra and ringing a bell to signal that he was still alive."
How Japanese Buddhist Monks Mummified Themselves While Alive
Does anyone feel inspired by this epic display of self-discipline? I confess that I found inspiration from it.
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