“What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.” 

                                                                                                                       Jean Piaget

In the last few years I've attended three different Buddhist funerals.  I thought a glimpse inside one might be interesting to you.  

Let me say up front that I'm no student of religion .... raised as a Catholic until age 14, then given a heavy, intense dose of fundamentalist Christian teaching after my parents converted.  But neither of these two sets of experiences spiritually rooted themselves.  I'm interested in religion but not a practitioner and, I do not endorse or subscribe to any particular faith or religion.

Like a modern western wedding, each of the Buddhist funerals I've attended was professionally photographed and videoed.  At one of them, I was asked by the family to photograph it.  These images came from that effort.  

Incense plays a major role in Buddhism.  This first image was taken previously at a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles of an incense burner located on the steps of the temple.  I'm fascinated with the symbolism.  I like the vagaries of the smoke and its color so I decided to use it as the intro photo for this blog entry.

There is an altar containing a picture of the deceased, an offering of various foods and fruits, and symbols of various other worldly items that might need in the next world by the deceased.  Out of respect, I've blurred the photo of the deceased.

A few tools of the trade used by the monks:

More Incense ... I need to investigae a bit about its role:

Prayer and chanting is, of course, led by Buddhist monks wearing robes not dissimilar in purpose to those worn by priests at a Catholic mass. The chanting, in this case, was done in Cantonese (a major Chinese dialect) so I'm not able to tell you about the content of the words.  As an aside, when I was an altar boy in the Catholic church, the ceremonies were all spoken in Latin...  "mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maximum culpa" ... a Latin pharase I remember chanting.  Of course, that's now changed but the comparison still holds.

And there are helpers performing assisting functions ... in this case, another monk, and two Buddhist nuns:

If you are a member of the family of the deceased, you wear certain clothing elements.  A child of the deceased wears a white rob and hood ... at first glance, my mind immediately thought of the Klu Klux Klan!  A Son-in-Law wears a plain white cloth headband" across the forehead. Grandchildren wear one with a Red dot (like the Japanese Rising Sun); and great grandchildren wear one with a blue dot.

Here are the daughters making an offering to the departed in their vestments:

And, here's a Grandson with his cloth headband:

At the end of the praying, the coffin is escorted to a waiting hearse. 

The contents of the altar and some symbolic paper money are burned in an open fire allowing these "gifts" to escape to the heavens where they will await the arrival of the deceased.  Like Western funerals, there is a funeral procession to the cemetery. This procession wound its way through the community and stopped at the deceased's home for a last view.

Buddhist's tradition is that the body is cremated, and such was the case for these three funerals.  But unlike Western traditions, the cremation is started immediately at the crematorium, and is watched by the family.  The finality of the event is not left to the imagination.

I hope you found this interesting and worth the view.  Thanks, as always, for looking and interacting!

Bye for now,

Adam