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Beschreibung

What is death?
How can we respond to death?
Why must we die?
Where do we go from here?
Do we go anywhere?

Understanding Death offers a thorough introduction to the views and practices of various religions regarding death and life after death. Drawing on examples from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Shamanic traditions, this student-oriented textbook explores how different conceptions of the “self” or soul inform the way humans interpret life and assign meaning to the phenomenon of death.

Incorporating contributions from members of each faith, Understanding Death provides readers with a comparative overview of how death is expressed and constructed in religious texts and canonical interpretations. Accessible chapters discuss how major religions address the nature of death itself while illustrating how history, philosophy, and ritual reflect what is important in understanding the meaning of death in that religion.

Now in its second edition, Understanding Death is revised and updated throughout, featuring three entirely new chapters on Sikhism, Jainism, as well as changing attitudes and new technologies related to death and dying in the twenty-first century.

Understanding Death: Ideas of Self and the Afterlife in Religions of the World, Second Edition, is an ideal textbook for undergraduate students and lecturers in Religious Studies programs, and an excellent resource for non-specialist readers interested in the subject.

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Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication Page

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgments

1 Understanding Death

Debates and Definitions

Death and the Self

Religion, Ritual, and Transformation

References and Further Reading

Notes

2 Death in the Ancient World

Egypt

Mesopotamia

Iran

References and Further Reading

Notes

3 Jewish Perspectives

Creation, Disobedience, and Death

The Soul and Sheol

Resurrection and the World to Come

The Journey of the Soul

Rituals of Departure

A Conversation on Understanding Death with Estel Lita and Marsel Russo

References and Further Reading

Notes

4 Christian Perspectives

The Death of Jesus

Developments in Christian Thought on the Soul

Resurrection and Eternal Life

Heaven and Hell

Rituals of Departure

A Conversation on Understanding Death with Trevor and Marjorie Myers

References and Further Reading

Notes

5 Muslim Perspectives

The Names of God

Ruh

and

Nafs

The Trial of the Grave

The Garden (

Janna

) and the Fire (

Jahannam

)

Modern Islamic Views on Heaven and Hell

Rituals of Departure

A Conversation on Understanding Death with Mine Khan

References and Further Reading

Notes

6 Perspectives of Indigenous Peoples

Soul Theories

The Destiny of Souls

Afterlife Among the Warao

Rituals of Departure

A Conversation on Understanding Death with Albert Dumont

References and Further Reading

Notes

7 Hindu Perspectives

Feeding the Ancestors

The First Sacrifice

Death, the Immortal

The Inner Controller

In the House of Death

Paths to Liberation

Rituals of Departure

A Conversation on Understanding Death with Sudha and Harsha Dehejia

References and Further Reading

Notes

8 Sikh Perspectives

Guru Nanak

Sri Guru Granth Sahib: The Book that Embodies the “Imperishable Light”

“There Is No Hindu and No Muslim”

Liberation of the Soul and the Guru’s Grace

Hukam

and Death

Re‐defining Ritual

Rituals of Departure

A Conversation on Understanding Death with Gurcharan Singh

References and Further Reading

Notes

9 The

Shramana

Movement: Jain Perspectives

Abandoning the Householder Life

Jain Perspectives: The Concept of Soul (

Jiva

)

Non‐violence (Ahimsa) and Asceticism: The Path to Liberation

Sallekhana

: The Heroic Death

Rituals of Departure

A Conversation on Understanding Death with Yash and Jagmohan Humar

References and Further Reading

Notes

10 The

Shramana

Movement: Buddhist Perspectives

The Life and Death of the Buddha

Foundations of the Buddha’s Dharma

The Process of Becoming a Self

Nirvana

: The Deathless

Mahayana and the Bodhisattva Ideal

Rituals of Departure

A Conversation on Understanding Death with Tôn Nũ’ Nguyễn Phũ’o’c Thùy Lan

References and Further Reading

Notes

11 Religion in Chinese Culture and Daoist Perspectives

Ancestors and Other Spirits of the Dead

Soul Theories

Daoist Perspectives: The Nameless Way

Transformations of the Self

The Search for Immortality

Rituals of Departure

A Conversation on Understanding Death with Wei‐ting Liu

References and Further Reading

Notes

12 New Ways of Accommodating Death

Keeping the Faith: Religious Accommodation

Conquering Fear: Death Positive and Beyond

Life Beyond Death: The Near‐Death Experience

References and Further Reading

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover Page

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication Page

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgments

Begin Reading

Index

WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

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Understanding Death

Ideas of Self and the Afterlife in Religions of the World

Second Edition

Angela Sumegi

This edition first published 2025© 2025 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Edition HistoryJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd (1e, 2014)

All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial technologies or similar technologies. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

The right of Angela Sumegi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

Registered Office(s)John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USAJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.

Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of WarrantyWhile the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: Sumegi, Angela, 1948– author.Title: Understanding death : ideas of self and the afterlife in religions of the world / Angela Sumegi, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada.Description: Second edition. | Hoboken, NJ, USA : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2025. | Includes index.Identifiers: LCCN 2024009164 (print) | LCCN 2024009165 (ebook) | ISBN 9781394185139 (paperback) | ISBN 9781394185153 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781394185146 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Death–Religious aspects–Comparative studies. | Future life–Comparative studies.Classification: LCC BL504 .S86 2025 (print) | LCC BL504 (ebook) | DDC 202/.3–dc23/eng/20240315LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024009164LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024009165

Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © Johan W/Getty Images

This book is dedicated to Ildiko, Matthew, and Livia; Chelsea, Matyas, Mya, Talia, William, and Connor—my children and grandchildren in whose lives I see my own and all those who came before me flowing to a distant sea.

Preface to the Second Edition

The second edition of this book aims to fill certain gaps in the original and respond to feedback from students and those who have used the first edition over the past decade. Three new chapters have been added to address the religions of Sikhism and Jainism as well as a closing chapter on changing attitudes and new technologies related to death and dying in the twenty‐first century. References, readings, and substantial portions of all chapters have been updated, revised, and rewritten. It is my hope that students and readers will use the information in the book as a starting point for their own investigation into the mysteries of death and that teachers will take the opportunity to expand on this work by bringing their own interests and expertise to bear on the subject.

As an introduction to the views and practices of various religions regarding death and life after death, this book offers the opportunity for a comparative reading in the hope that the reader will gain insight from what Arvind Sharma calls “reciprocal illumination,” the idea that we may find greater understanding of one tradition in light of others (Sharma, 2005). The text highlights notions regarding the self or soul and its trajectory through life and death as well as the goal or culmination of this journey. The ways in which each religion conceives of the “person” who lives and the “person” who dies form the central theme and primary organizing principle for the book. Such self‐conceptions are a crucial element in understanding the rituals of closure and farewell intrinsic to the ways in which individuals and human societies deal with the end of life.

We begin with an exploration of the questions that death evokes and that religions aim to answer. Subsequent chapters take the reader through the main responses of several religious traditions. There are 12 chapters including the introduction, a chapter on death in religions of antiquity, nine on living religions, and a final chapter that invites students to consider new ways of approaching death. This is not a book on world religions; discussions related to the general belief systems of each religion are oriented toward those aspects that inform perspectives on death. The emphasis in each chapter, therefore, toward history, philosophy, or ritual varies to reflect what is important in understanding the meaning of death in that religion. Beyond that, it will be apparent that my interest in the subject is focused on the ways in which we identify our innermost selves in life, in death, and beyond death as well as on the contradictions inherent in such identifications.

Throughout the book, it will become apparent that religion, as it is expressed in texts and canonical interpretations, is diverse and contradictory—how much more so when it is combined with the diverse and contradictory nature of individuals who engage with the textual tradition. Given the various religious sects and schools within any one religious tradition, the conversations that end each chapter are meant to expand on the perspectives provided in the chapter, offer a personal counterpoint to the abstract concepts and principles discussed in the chapters, and underscore for the reader that just as human beings live life in a multitude of ways, death is not merely a common event that happens to all; death is interpreted, constructed, and one might even say lived, in equally various forms.

My hope is that this book will draw the reader’s attention to differences and similarities among religions as well as to the varieties of expression that can be found within a single tradition. I aim to highlight the manifold conceptions of self and world that inform the way humans interpret life and personal continuation beyond death as well as our shared human struggle to discover the meaning of, or assign meaning to, the phenomenon of death—a struggle that is renewed with each personal encounter.

Author’s Note

As this book is intended for a general audience, diacritical marks have not been used and non‐English terminology has been kept to the minimum necessary. Unless otherwise stated, scriptural quotations are drawn from the following translations:

Coogan, M., et al. ed. 2018. New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha New Revised Standard Version 5th ed. Oxford: OUP.

Note the new updated edition online NRSVUE at https://www.biblegateway.com/.

Doniger, W., 1984.

The Rig Veda

. New York: Penguin Books.

Haleem, A., 2004.

The Qur’an: A New Translation

. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Olivelle, P., 1996.

Upanisads

. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stoler‐Miller, B., 1988.

The Bhagavad‐Gita

. New York: Bantam Books.

Reference

Sharma, A., 2005.

Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology

. New York: SUNY Press.

Acknowledgments

At the outset of my retirement, writing the second edition of this textbook has been a welcome challenge. I have enjoyed it immensely in terms of both my continued interest in the subject and as fruitful activity during COVID pandemic days. The editorial and graphics team at Wiley have been consistently encouraging, and I thank them all for their support and advice. In my desire to fill the gaps in the first edition, I have reached out to several people who responded with great generosity. Among them, I especially thank Dr. Gurcharan Singh and Dr. Anne Vallely who guided me through the intricacies of Sikhism and Jainism, respectively. My gratitude also to Dr. Christopher Jensen whose thoughtful comments improved not only the chapter on Chinese religion but many other areas of the book as well. I also acknowledge and thank my anonymous reviewers whose critique and suggestions were invaluable in making this book better than it would have been without them. My thanks to all those who generously shared their time and thoughts with me for the conversations that end each chapter. Finally, my thanks and deep appreciation to my partner Anthony Gaston for balancing my solitary computer time with exciting table tennis games and mind‐clearing walks.

1Understanding Death

Life surrounds us. Wherever we find ourselves, we are conscious that countless other living things exist alongside us—animals, plants, insects, microbes, as well as strange combinations of not‐quite‐animal, not‐quite‐plant life, like sea anemones. Similarly, death surrounds us—from the mosquito unconsciously slapped on an arm to the daily news stories that may be of passing notice, to a loved one whose loss brings prolonged grief and mourning. In general, however, we tend to think deeply of death only when it becomes part of our emotional experience, and even then, the business and busyness of life is like a river that carries us along past the numerous moments of other deaths until our own moment arrives. One feels helpless in the face of inevitable death—what can one do about it, really? It is easy, therefore, even in the midst of death to avoid contemplating it, to turn to life where we can have some kind of control, where we can do something about it. I invite you to consider this book as a space in which you can take the time to consider questions like: What is death? Why death? Where do we go from here? Do we go anywhere? And, as you will discover, these questions are much the same as asking: What is life? Are we going anywhere now? In the complex symbol system that is language, words like “life” or “love” or “death” are bound up with feelings, emotions, and ideas that are very complicated; those that surround death have a long and complex history—you might think of it as the history of becoming who and what we are.

There are many stories (and many versions of those stories) of how death came into the world, some, like the Indonesian story of the stone and the banana hint that mortality is a result of our own foolishness and greediness.

In the central Celebes of Indonesia the people of Poso tell how the Creator used to send things down to the first people by a rope from his nearby sky home. Once he sent down a stone, and the people rejected it as useless. The creator pulled up the stone and lowered a banana instead, and the people rushed to take it. Then the voice of the creator called down and scolded the people for their foolishness. Had they accepted the stone, he said, they would have achieved its solidity and immortality, but having chosen the banana, they had chosen its mortality and had introduced death into the world

(Leeming, 2001, p. 165).

Some insert an element of sheer chance, like the Zulu story from southern Africa in which the high God sends two messengers to the ancestors: the chameleon carries the message that humans will be immortal, and the lizard carries the message that they will be mortal. The chameleon, however, stopped for a snack of berries on the way and the quick lizard arrived first with her message of death (Cotterell, 1997).

Other myths associate the presence of death with sin and disobedience. One of the more famous examples of this type is the biblical story of Adam and Eve, the first man and woman. Their life in an earthly paradise is one of innocence and ease. They enjoy the fruit of all the trees, but encouraged by the serpent, they eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So … she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves

(Gen. 3:1–7).

Due to this transgression, God banishes them from paradise. They must make their way in the wilderness beyond, working hard for their food, the woman experiencing pain in childbirth, and eventually they must die and return to the earth from which God made them. Ultimately, the story points to an understanding of humankind as partaking of divinity in that knowledge.

Then the Lord God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life

(Gen. 3:22–24).

The immortality that was denied to humans in the Garden of Eden, eternal life in the presence of God, becomes a primary goal of biblical traditions.

Stories such as these from various cultures and religions relate the mythic events of our past, they show us what it means to be human and tell us why we must die; they also look to the future and tell us where we go when this life is finished. And as to that, there are many who claim to have seen what awaits us after death. We will look more closely at the subject of near‐death experiences (NDEs) as well as various interpretations of them in the last chapter of this book. However, whether we read contemporary reports of NDEs or medieval Christian accounts of visitations to hell or the reports of those the Tibetans call delok (“returned from the dead”), a crucial aspect of the narrative is that the person who returns serves as a living witness to the experience of dying and the encounter with what lies beyond death. However, from another perspective, if death is defined as a state of no return, then perhaps such people have not died at all.

Debates and Definitions

Death from which there is no return would appear to be a different matter altogether. How do we know when that death takes place? The neurologist James Bernat outlines four questions that constitute the preconditions for defining death: (1) Is death a fundamentally biological phenomenon or a fundamentally social phenomenon? (2) Regarding higher organisms, is there any state other than dead or alive? Can there be fuzzy intervening states that have features of both? (3) Is death a process or an event? And (4) Is death reversible or irreversible? (Bernat, 2018, pp. 401–402). Bear these questions in mind as we go through this chapter.

In the past, the clues that indicated a state of death were related to the condition of the physical body. Does it move, breathe, or have a heartbeat? Does it emit heat? Is it in a state of decay? At a certain level of physical destruction, the condition of death is not ambiguous—whether it is a goldfish floating belly up in a fish tank or a body laid out in a morgue, there is no confusion as to who is living and who is dead. However, before decay or destruction is apparent, there are living states that can be mistaken for death. In Victorian times, the fear of being buried alive was so widespread that safety coffins were developed in which a bell was attached by a cord to the hand of the person who could ring it as an alarm upon awakening.

Although the final condition of death is not ambiguous, the moment when that which is alive becomes that which is dead is a lot vaguer, a lot more confusing and subject to error because death can be understood as both process and event. As an event, it marks the beginning of preparations to dispose of the body, the final physical separation from the living. The weightiness and mystery of death lies in that physical absence. Prior to the development of technology that allows us to keep the body “alive,” dying was understood, as it still is by many today, to be a passage, a process, the ending of life, which both culminates in the event of death and transforms into the processes of burial, grieving, and remembrance. Mistakes were certainly made in the past based on the traditional determination of death as the cessation of breath and heartbeat, but when developments in technology and expertise opened up a new frontier of possibilities, such as transplanting the organs of the dead to give life to others,1 then the magnitude of the error of mistaking that which is alive for that which is dead became even greater, the interconnection between life and death more difficult to disentangle, more crucial to separate. The organ to be transplanted must be living but the person from whom it is taken must be dead. You can see, then, how urgent the need would be for the medical establishment to accurately identify when death had taken place, both for the one who waits for a life‐giving transplant and for the one whose death allows for it.

Other technologies developed in the mid‐twentieth century required not only a definition of death but a definition of life. Mechanical respirators and electronic pacemakers meant that the physical body could be kept functioning like a machine without any brain activity or apparent conscious activity—a boon for those who pray that a loved one will eventually awaken from a death‐like coma, or for those who seek for an organ transplant to provide a chance at continued life, but an ethical dilemma of profound proportions for those who must consider the question of whether or not the costly machinery is merely animating a corpse. The decision to remove someone from life support depends on whether we consider “life” or “death” to be present, and if life is present, then is it the kind of life that is worthy of being maintained? Is death always an evil to be suppressed at all cost? Is life always a value to be promoted at all cost?

An early response to these dilemmas came in 1968 from the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School. It should be noted that they did not set out to define death; as the chairman of the committee stated: “Only a very bold man, I think, would attempt to define death” (Bleich, 1996, p. 29). They proposed to define irreversible coma by establishing the characteristics of a permanently non‐functioning brain. This would replace the traditional criteria of death as cessation of breath and heartbeat. A person could be declared dead if brain function was irreversibly lost even though heart and lung activity was present due to mechanical support. The confirmation that all brain activity had permanently ceased was assisted, though not determined, by an electro‐encephalograph (EEG). This became known as “brain death” and passed into popular culture in any number of hospital and medical television shows that dramatize the moment of death as a flat line on the EEG monitor. But is brain activity more definitive of life than respiration and blood circulation? Must all brain activity be permanently lost to declare death or only the higher‐brain functions that support consciousness, sensation, and mental factors like thought? Does a non‐functioning brain mean that the person is biologically dead? And finally, is it life that we seek to define or human life?

Among the ongoing attempts by medical ethicists to determine the moment of death was a book by Robert Veatch, Death, Dying, and the Biological Revolution. In his book, he provided the following general definition: “Death means a complete change in the status of a living entity characterized by the irreversible loss of those characteristics that are essentially significant to it” (Veatch, 1976, p. 25). The question then is: What is essentially significant to a human person, so much so that when it is lost—that is called “death”? Veatch presented four possible answers.

Irreversible loss of the flow of vital fluids and functions

such as blood circulation, heartbeat, and breathing—this refers to the traditional heart–lung definition of death. Since machines can maintain these functions for the body, then according to this definition, for however long heart–lung capacity is maintained, the person is alive.

Irreversible loss of soul

—for many cultures, life‐force is encompassed in the notion of soul; death results from the permanent departure of the soul. This definition would depend on being able to scientifically determine exactly what the soul consists of, where it leaves the body, and how one would know when it has left.

Loss of the capacity of the body to regulate its own vital activities

due to the irreversible loss of whole‐brain functions, called “brain death.” This definition is challenged by those who regard human life as more than simply body functions.

Loss of capacity for social function

due to the irreversible loss of higher‐brain functions (1976, p. 30 ff.).

The last answer suggests that what makes us human is our capacity for social interaction with our world, but this definition depends on our understanding of “capacity for social interaction.” Simply because a person in a deep coma has no capacity for interaction that we can perceive, are we convinced that such a person is unaware of his or her environment at every level of consciousness? Is consciousness to be exactly equated with the physical activity of the brain? What should be considered essentially significant to human life? Breath? Soul? Brain? Or the conscious ability to communicate and interact with one’s environment? When does the loss that constitutes death take place and the process of dying become the event of death? That may appear to be a biological question, since we are accustomed to thinking of ourselves, at least in part, as biological organisms, but does it have a biological answer? Such questions remain unresolved, and over 50 years later, they continue to fuel religious, philosophical, medical, and legal debates.2 In a 2018 interview, Harvard ethicist Robert Truog commented, “That link, between being irreversibly unconscious and being dead, has never really been made in a convincing way … the central justification equating brain death with biological death is now known to be false” (Truog, 2018).

So, in the last analysis, is the moment of death a social construction, a condition that is so when we agree that it is so? What exactly is the relationship between mind and body?

In her research on this subject, Ornella Corazza refutes the dualism inherent in concepts of mind and body. She draws on the work of Japanese philosophers and theorists who propose a vision of the human body as extended in space. According to this holistic view, “Our use of tools creates a semi‐definite body‐space around us, while our visual and tactile perception extends this dimension still further until it reaches the immensity of space” (Corazza, 2008, p. 1). In other words, I not only have a body, I am my body and “from within,” my body‐space is indefinite and as vast as the universe. Still, the question remains: Who or what is this “I,” this “person” that has a body or is a body; that has a mind or is a mind? Who dies? This question was raised by another bioethicist Richard Zaner (1988) in his critique of the whole‐brain criteria for death. According to Zaner, if we are to determine when the death of a person has taken place, surely there is a prior need to establish the meaning of “person” relative to the death that takes place. The debate turns on where we place the emphasis; emphasis on the loss of physical body functions underlies strictly defined biological definitions of death, whereas emphasis on the loss of personhood underlies a “societal” approach that seeks to define death as the loss of what makes a person a person.

In her review of the issues, the medical anthropologist Margaret Lock (2004) points out that the biological approach is criticized because it presumes that a person is identified solely with the body; and the societal approach is criticized because personhood is culturally constructed, therefore subject to varying interpretations, and could be easily manipulated according to the interests of the society without attention to the interests of the individual. However, Lock also highlights the fact that the body is equally a cultural construction when it is regarded as “precultural, an aggregation of natural facts amenable to rational experiment and manipulation” (Lock, 2004, p. 95). In other words, even the physical body is not simply a “given” fact understood in the same way by all peoples; different cultures conceive of the body and its meaning in different ways. For example, among the Wari’ of the Western Brazilian rainforest, the word for flesh or body is the same as the word for custom or habit. They explain personality and behavior not with reference to mind but as located in the body. “Peoples’ habits, eccentricities, and personality quirks are explained in phrases such as ‘His flesh is like that’ … or ‘That’s the way her body is’” (Conklin, 2004, p. 248).

For the Wari’, the body does not become a mere corpse or shell upon death. The dead body still retains the personal identity of the deceased, which is transformed through their funeral rites into the “body” of an ancestor. The Wari’ believe that their dead ancestors live in an underworld beneath the rivers and lakes where there is no hunting or fishing because all animals have human forms there. However, to feed their children, the ancestors emerge from the water and return to life in the human world as peccaries (a type of wild pig) that are hunted as food for the community. The peccaries, then, are kin who are roasted and eaten by humans. This was symbolically reflected in the mortuary cannibalism practiced by pre‐contact tribes. In a very formal, solemn, and sad ceremony, the corpse was dismembered, roasted, and eaten by the relatives of the deceased. In the eating of their dead, the Wari’ affirmed the relationship between those who eat and those who are eaten. Through the ritual, the body of a human who was an eater of animals is transformed into the eternal spirit of an ancestor who appears in the form of a peccary to be slain and eaten. The funeral ritual then constituted “the dead person’s first offering of self as food” (Conklin, 2004, p. 256). Although many may regard such practices as barbaric or repulsive, it is a powerful reminder that human beings construct their worlds, their identities, and their bodies in different ways.

Death and the Self

In many societies, when asked, “Who are you?”, people will often respond first by giving a name. At the same time, we know that a mere name does not define who we are. That story involves many more people, places, events, thoughts, emotions, accomplishments, and so on, all of which underscore a sense of personal existence, a feeling of “me‐ness” that, despite all description, remains undefined by the details of our lives. The story of “me” is also shaped by the way we understand words such as self or identity, what is essential or particular to each person. During the conversations that took place at the Fourth Mind and Life Conference between the fourteenth Dalai Lama and western scientists and humanists, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor explained that the modern western way of describing the essence of oneself as a self is related to the history of how we regard ourselves within the larger context of our existence. He points out that Plato, the fourth century BCE Greek philosopher, understood reason, our capacity for self‐control, as related to the order of the cosmos. This view was changed by the fourth century CE Christian theologian, Augustine, for whom our innermost self was related to God. And in another change, the seventeenth century French philosopher Descartes described the self or reason as instrumental—it is the instrument with which I order my life and control my thinking and feeling (Varela, 1997, p. 13).

Self‐control, however, has an inhibiting effect on the freedom implied in self‐exploration and self‐expression. Taylor finds the common source of the modern view of both self‐control and self‐exploration in a conception of the human being that focuses on the human being in a self‐enclosed way.

… now we have a picture of the human being in which you may also believe in God, you may also want to relate to the cosmos, but you can grasp the human being in a self‐enclosed fashion with these two capacities of self‐control and self‐exploration. It also has meant that perhaps the most central value in the moral and political life of the west is freedom, the freedom to be in control or the freedom to understand who one is and to be one’s real self

(Varela, 1997, p. 15–16).

In our exploration of religious responses to death, we will find differing approaches to the discovery of the true self—some seek to find and know the self, some seek to lose the self. From infancy, consciousness of our needs and desires influences our actions and responses to our environment. As one grows and becomes conscious of “myself” as the one who desires, then “I” become unquestionably present in all my conscious hours, whether waking or dreaming. Under some conditions, such as deep sleep or deep states of meditation, this sense of personal existence may disappear, only to return upon waking or coming out of meditation. The persistence of “self”‐consciousness is a strong theme in Herman Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha, the story of a young Brahmin man who seeks to escape both life and death by escaping the self through meditation and ascetic practices.

He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non‐being. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself, in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha …

(Hesse, 1957, pp. 16, 17).

The “me” that I am continues from birth to death and is a little‐understood combination of material and immaterial factors, whose nature and relationship have been argued by philosophers, ancient and modern. The fact of death is a severe challenge to the common human awareness of personal existence. In life, the body constitutes an inescapable, recognizable form that situates a person in space and time. Even if I wander far from my body in dreams or altered states of consciousness, paradoxically, the body that I perceive separate from me is still me—but who am I, where am I, when my body no longer exists? Materialists will answer, you are not; you are nowhere. Death is the end of personal existence and identity. In the scientific world, the Nobel Prize‐winning scientist Francis Crick does not mince words in his book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, when he says:

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules

(Crick, 1994).

For those who equate consciousness with brain activity, the other side of death is simply oblivion like a deep sleep from which one never wakes, but the idea that consciousness is not entirely physically determined has never lost its hold on human thought.

Descartes, following the ancient Greeks, concluded that the essential “me” is not the physical body but the immaterial soul or “thinking being,” which, although intimately connected to the body, is an entirely different order of being whose continuity does not depend on the body. The question is—how can that which is immaterial be connected to that which is material? This is the so‐called mind–body problem, the “hard problem of consciousness” and ever since Descartes, it has elicited various responses from philosophers, theologians, scientists, and psychologists.

Regarding the continuity of the individual beyond death, such responses generally fall into three categories. There are those that support a wholly physical explanation for the sense of a persisting self. Their focus, like Francis Crick’s, is on the function of the brain as the seat and source of consciousness. Then there are those who support a type of dualism, according to which some immaterial aspect of a person, whether called “consciousness” or “soul” or “mind,” persists after departing the body upon death. This would include all religious traditions that propose the existence of an innermost self or soul that supports personal identity and experience during life and after death. Finally, there are those who seek the roots of the mind–body connection in a holistic approach to both the body and the mind. Scientists like Francisco Varela (1997) have drawn on eastern meditative systems and their philosophies to generate a new science of consciousness, to reconceive what it means to be a body, and to seek new answers to the problem of how subjective experience arises from physical processes. We may know, for example, that the physical occurrence of rapid eye movement indicates that a person is dreaming, but in the twenty‐first century, it is still the case that we don’t know how the subjective experience of the dream arises. The search for the physical basis of consciousness continues and the gap between immaterial consciousness and physical brain remains.3

In the field of consciousness studies, Corazza’s work aims to redefine or, more accurately, undefine the body to reveal it as “an indefinite entity, which is always changing and has no physical boundaries or delimitation such as the skin” (Corazza, 2008, p. 126). Nevertheless, despite such research, despite the teaching of philosophers, the experiences of meditators, and our own moments of unitary feelings, our ordinary experience is that I cannot be in two places at once, that in life, I am bound to my body, which is very much defined and will one day be destroyed. Although there are many living states that mimic the immobility and inactivity of death—sleep, hibernation, dormancy, coma, states of catatonia, deep states of meditation—the physical condition of death is unmistakable. Dead bodies rot, and it is this irreversible transformation that underlies our sense of the finitude of death. That which was, no longer is. For the most part, we accept this as a fact of life. Dead leaves are burned or become mulch; dead animals are cleared off the road by the sanitation department; the goldfish floating belly up in the bowl is flushed or buried. However, for many human beings, evidence of the finitude of death in the decomposition of the physical is challenged by the feeling that “persons” are not constituted merely of material bodies and physical processes.

The idea of a fundamental duality underlying the complexities of human nature is common to societies, past and present. In her linguistic analysis of soul discourse, Anna Wierzbicka (1989) suggests that soul concepts present in cultures around the world reflect a universal belief that the visible material body is only one aspect of a person, and that to be a person involves an immaterial counterpart, interpretations of which vary widely. She notes that regardless of the way in which the immaterial aspect is understood or analyzed—whether as soul, mind, heart, life‐force, or consciousness—cross‐culturally, the linguistic terms for “person,” “self,” or “I” assume a relationship between the physical body and something other than the body. This “something other,” when understood in terms of the spiritual or transcendent aspect of a person, becomes the basis of beliefs in a future beyond death. Just as we have rituals that mark birth, the beginning of our life’s journey, or farewell parties that express sadness at separation, or good wishes at the start of a new adventure or phase in one’s life, so humans have developed rituals that mark the transformation that death entails, both for the living and the dead. Just as, in this life, we imagine our future and then prepare for it even though our future is not at all guaranteed, similarly, humans have considered it prudent to prepare for a future after death despite the undetermined nature of such a future. Death rituals signify that most undying of human characteristics—hope. Of course, hope in the future depends on the strength of one’s belief that one’s actions now can bring about a desirable state in the future. This is the primary basis for self‐cultivation, social activism, and religious teaching on death and afterlife.

Religion, Ritual, and Transformation

Most people have some intuitive understanding of what is meant by the word “religion.” In western cultures, that understanding has its historical origins in the medieval Christian idea of “piety” and is based on the experiences and writings of Christian missionaries active during the period of European colonialism. Their work resulted in what is called the “World Religions Paradigm” (WRP) and it assumes an overarching category called “religion” of which there are several subspecies. In this view, world religions have in common such things as a set of beliefs, rituals, scriptures, institutions, and priesthoods. Religion is also understood to belong to the private sphere unassociated with politics, economics, law, or other public sphere matters. However, among scholars, the word itself defies definition and is the subject of intense debate. Historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith famously declared “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization” (Smith, 1982). Nevertheless, in academic literature, religion as a category continues to be used strategically. Although the following chapters deal with religious responses to death and dying, this book does not subscribe to the WRP. All religions do not have a corpus of scripture, belief in a creator God, a specialized priesthood, or relate only to the private sphere. This book follows Paul Hedges’ six reasons for the way he uses the concept of religion:

There is no assumption of commonality of function, organization, or modes of behavior. Religion is simply a useful classifier and a contested concept.

We can usefully speak of certain aspects of culture as religious, i.e. those areas of thought, life, and interaction that deal with what can be broadly termed “transcendence.”

Religion is not entirely distinct from politics, philosophy, economics, art, or even the secular. These are all overlapping and intersecting realms of human activity.

We must be conscious that the term “religion” will conjure certain things to our minds and hide others.

“Religion” is not a neutral descriptor. Even the fact that this discussion is in English shapes the arguments and how we frame them.

Many contemporary traditions claim and relate to the term “religion,” while it is also a political and legal reality. Traditions are, or have become, “religions” in multiple ways (Hedges,

2021

, p. 34).

In the chapters to follow, there are sections on “rituals of departure” in which we explore how different religions treat the end of a person and disposal of the body, but first we need to ask, what is ritual? In socio‐religious studies, this question has inspired many theories. The word covers numerous social activities from the secular rituals of sporting events or the ways we begin our day, to the placing of a flower at a roadside shrine, the grand ceremonies of Easter in a Catholic cathedral, or the Hindu festival of lights called “Diwali.” Contemporary theory has shifted from an emphasis on the specific actions that constitute ritual to an emphasis on “ritualization” and the performative power of ritual. That is to say, the capacity of the ritual performance to generate emotion and to produce life‐changing social effects such as changing the status of a person from childhood to adulthood, from single to married, lay to monastic, or from corpse to ancestor. In the field of religious studies, Catherine Bell further defines the term “ritual” as

… a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities. As such, ritualization is a matter of various culturally specific strategies for setting some activities off from others, for creating and privileging a qualitative distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane,’ and for ascribing such distinctions to realities thought to transcend the powers of human actors

(Bell, 1992, p. 74).

In relation to death, the performative power and strategies of ritual are intended to bring about crucial transformations that align with the beliefs of the participants.

High on the Tibetan plateau, it is still possible to observe the ritual dismemberment of a corpse, which is then fed to the waiting vultures. The Tibetan Buddhist sky burial emphasizes the impermanent nature of the body and underscores concepts of universal compassion and responsibility for the well‐being of all living things. On the other side of the world, until 1969, the Wari’, as mentioned above, consumed and cremated their dead to respect the corpse, which should not be allowed to touch the cold, damp ground. Their practice reinforced their belief that the ancestors care for them by becoming the animal flesh that they hunt and eat; it was their way to enact the ritual transformation of the deceased. In Varanasi, in India, at the edge of the Ganges River, corpses are burned on great pyres of wood and their remains thrown into the river. Those Hindu cremation rites represent the understanding that upon death, the person’s higher self, the unborn, undying soul, has left the body to be reincarnated in another form, entering into another birth, life after life, until the final goal of liberation from any embodiment is achieved. Such rituals may be very different from the ones with which you are familiar, but they all represent ways in which humans have disposed of their dead, ways in which they have interpreted the action of removing the body from among the living. As we examine the mortuary rituals of different religious traditions in the subsequent chapters of this book, it will become clear that death rituals reveal, perhaps more than any other type of ritual or custom, the ways in which a particular group of people understand what it means to be a person both in life and in death.

Funeral practices and death rituals can be related to geographical, economic, social, and political concerns, or to conditions such as the presence or absence of wood for burning, the cost of burial or cremation, and the need for memorials that celebrate national heroes or commemorate private loss. In this book, we will focus on death rituals as signifying, acknowledging, and enacting the transformation that takes place when a person shifts from a living to a dead status. Death rituals are cultural constructions that tell us when this shift takes place, where the person is located after death, and the status of their continuation. They reflect the values and beliefs of a community regarding the essence of personal existence and the meaning of life and death. Beyond that, they highlight the intimately interconnected nature of the person as a biological organism and as a socially constructed self. Death rituals indicate not only what a community believes regarding self or soul and a person’s future after death, but also how a community regards the physical body and what kind of transformation is enacted by death upon the body.

Despite the great variety of religious beliefs and teachings about the meaning of death, all of which emphasize the continuity of the person in some form or other, not everyone regards death as a gateway to a future or alternate existence. For many people, death is simply oblivion, like a deep sleep, from which one does not awake—a comforting thought because at least there is nothing to fear in oblivion. However, if death is a state of no return, then doubts and questions linger. This is Shakespeare’s point in the following passage from Hamlet:

      To die, to sleep.

To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

Must give us pause

(3.1.72–76).

What dreams may come? The religious response to this question is the subject of this book. It may be good to bear in mind that all the stories we hold dear, whether they are Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or Jewish narratives—of heaven and hell, of the first humans, of a great flood, of judgment and the afterlife, of spirit or soul—they all have antecedents. These stories were old when they were new; they create the tapestry of religion, and in them we can find the threads that connect us individually with our common ancestral heritage as human beings. They are not the property of one culture or tradition; they may have been preserved by a particular culture, but they are our common human heritage. For some people, the religious narratives that they have been taught about death and life after death are true. Others admit that they simply don’t know what happens. And there are those who would say—all your speculations and ideas about life after death are merely wishful thinking, just coping strategies for dealing with the reality of the loss that is death; there is no reason to believe the stories of religion—death is simply the end of life. This may be so; I do not have the personal experience to contradict it. However, let me suggest that there is more to learn from all the various propositions of myth and religion than the truths they claim. Because it is in contemplating these different ideas, teachings, and stories of death and future life, no matter how strange or alien some of them might seem, that one may come upon what is actually important for one’s own life and death, if only to arrive at a deeper understanding of what it is that I don’t know when I say, “I don’t know.”

References and Further Reading

Bell, C., 1992.

Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice

. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bernat, J. L., 2018. Defining Death. In:

The Routledge Companion to Death and Dying

(ed. C. Moreman), 399–410. London & New York: Routledge.

Bleich, J. D., 1996. Establishing Criteria of Death. In:

Ethical Issues in Death and Dying

, 2nd ed., (ed. T. L. Beauchamp and R. M. Veatch), 28–32. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Cann, C., 2023.

Death and Religion: The Basics

. New York: Routledge.

Conklin, B. A., 2004. ‘Thus Are Our Bodies, Thus Was Our Custom’: Mortuary Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society. In:

Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross‐Cultural Reader

(ed. A. C. G. M. Robben), 238–262. Oxford: Blackwell.

Corazza O., 2008.

Near‐Death Experiences: Exploring the Mind–Body Connection

. London: Routledge.

Cotterell, A., 1997.

A Dictionary of World Mythology

. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crick, F., 1994.

The Astonishing Hypothesis

. New York: Scribner.

Hedges, P., 2021.

Understanding Religion: Theories and Methods for Studying Religiously Diverse Societies

. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Hesse, H., 1957.

Siddhartha

(trans. H. Rosner). New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Leeming, D., 2001.

A Dictionary of Asian Mythology

. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lock, M., 2004. Displacing Suffering: The Reconstruction of Death in North America and Japan. In:

Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross‐Cultural Reader

(ed. A. C. G. M. Robben), 91–111. Oxford: Blackwell.

Smith, J. Z., 1982.

Imagining Religion

. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T. A., 2016.

The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

. London: Penguin Books.

Truog, R., 2018.

Death is Universal, But Sometimes Murky

. Harvard Gazette.

Varela, F. J. ed., 1997.

Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama

. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

Veatch, R., 1976.

Death, Dying, and the Biological Revolution: Our Last Quest for Responsibility

. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Veatch, R., and Friedman Ross, L. 2016.

Defining Death: The Case for Choice

. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Wierzbicka, A., 1989. Soul and Mind: Linguistic Evidence for Ethnopsychology and Cultural History.

American Anthropologist

, 91: 41–58.

Zaner, R. M., 1988. Introduction. In:

Death: Beyond the Whole‐Brain Criteria

, (ed. R. Zaner). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Notes

1

The first successful kidney transplant took place in 1954 and the first successful heart transplant was done by the South African surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard in 1967.

2

In June 2023, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, a 25‐year‐old bet was resolved. The wager was between Drs. Koch and Chalmers that in 25 years, the nerve cells in which consciousness is generated would be found (Koch) or not (Chalmers). Chalmers won the bet.

3

Such debates continue to be exemplified in articles like “The Whole‐Brain Concept of Death Remains Optimum Public Policy” by James L. Bernat in

The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics

,Vol. 34, Issue 1, 2006 and the opposing view in the same journal, “Death, Brain Death, and the Limits of Science: Why the Whole‐Brain Concept of Death Is a Flawed Public Policy” by Mike Nair‐Collins, Vol. 38, Issue 3, 2010.

2Death in the Ancient World



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