In its teachings, practices, and institutions, Buddhism in its varied Asian forms has been--and continues to be--centrally concerned with death and the dead. Yet surprisingly "death in Buddhism" has received little sustained scholarly attention. The Buddhist Dead offers the first comparative investigation of this topic across the major Buddhist cultures of India, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Tibet, and Burma. Its individual essays, representing a range of methods, shed light on a rich array of traditional Buddhist practices for the dead and dying; the sophisticated but often paradoxical discourses about death and the dead in Buddhist texts; and the varied representations of the dead and the afterlife found in Buddhist funerary art and popular literature. This important collection moves beyond the largely text- and doctrine-centered approaches characterizing an earlier generation of Buddhist scholarship and expands its treatment of death to include ritual, devotional, and material culture.

List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Bryan J. Cuevas and Jacqueline I. Stone
1 The Buddha’s Funeral 32
John S. Strong
2 Cross-Dressing with the Dead: Asceticism, Ambivalence, and Institutional Values in an Indian Monastic Code 60
Gregory Schopen
3 The Moment of Death in Daoxuan’s Vinaya Commentary 105
Koichi Shinohara
4 The Secret Art of Dying: Esoteric Deathbed Practices in Heian Japan 134
Jacqueline I. Stone
5 The Deathbed Image of Master Hongyi 175
Raoul Birnbaum
6 Dying Like Milare´pa: Death Accounts in a Tibetan Hagiographic Tradition 208
Kurtis R. Schaeffer
7 Fire and the Sword: Some Connections between Self-Immolation and Religious Persecution in the History of Chinese Buddhism 234
James A. Benn
8 Passage to Fudaraku: Suicide and Salvation in Premodern Japanese Buddhism 266
D. Max Moerman
v
9 The Death and Return of Lady Wangzin: Visions of the Afterlife in Tibetan Buddhist Popular Literature 297
Bryan J. Cuevas
10 Gone but Not Departed: The Dead among the Living in Contemporary Buddhist Sri Lanka 326
John Clifford Holt
11 Mulian in the Land of Snows and King Gesar in Hell: A Chinese Tale of Parental Death in Its Tibetan Transformations 345
Matthew T. Kapstein
12 Chinese Buddhist Death Ritual and the Transformation of Japanese Kinship 378
Hank Glassman
13 Grave Changes: Scattering Ashes in Contemporary Japan 405
Mark Rowe
14 Care for Buddhism: Text, Ceremony, and Religious Emotion in a Monk’s Final Journey 438
Jason A. Carbine
Chinese and Korean Character Glossary 457
Japanese Character Glossary 461
Contributors 467
Index 471
vi Contents