When they have finished, Phuntsog rolls some of the flesh into a ball, and walks towards the open space. I can hear him calling ‘Come, come!’ His deep voice echoes in the air, as he looks up at the clouds. Then he drops the ball on the ground. Everyone looks skyward, hoping for a sign of the vultures. Twenty minutes pass. Phuntsog has warned me that it can take hours for the vultures to come, depending on the weather. Just as he is calling again, a single vulture appears. It circles the site several times, and then straightens its legs and lands. I watch as, with a last flap of its wings, it pounces on the ball — it has the whole of it to itself.
In what seems like no time at all, twenty or thirty more vultures appear in the sky. Their wingspan looks to be more than a metre across. I wonder if my body would be enough to feed even one of them. The men continue to rub their hands with tsampa and mix it with the flesh, handing it to Phuntsog, who lays it out for the vultures. In a flash the birds gobble everything down. There is relief on the men's faces. They believe that when the vultures eat the body quickly, without leaving anything behind, reincarnation will be swift too. The intestines are the last to go — perhaps because they are the richest part. Phuntsog has told me that once the vultures have eaten these, they will not take anything else. If the vultures do not finish the corpse — sometimes there are several bodies on a particular day — he will discuss this with the families, and then he will either burn what is left, or take it to the water. Everything must go, he says.
Phuntsog has also told me something else. Vultures have a secret, he claims: whatever they swallow, they leave nothing on the ground, not even their own waste. They defecate in the sky, thousands of metres up, and the waste is immediately dispersed by strong winds and currents. Even when they are dying, they will fly higher and higher, towards the sun, until the sun and wind take them to pieces, leaving no trace. Phuntsog says this is why no one has ever seen a vulture's corpse.
After everything has been consumed, Phuntsog cleans his equipment, wraps up his poles and ropes, and leaves with the others. The vultures are still on the slope, lingering. (‘Were they still hungry?’ I ask Phuntsog later. ‘Oh, sometimes they are just digesting. They are too heavy to fly.’) I sit down and wait.
The Chinese have always been appalled by the practice of sky burial. One of the last Ambans declared it to be ‘without morals and without reason, and cruel beyond words’. He tried to forbid it and demanded the Tibetans bury their dead as we do.11 It did not occur to him that the ritual might have practical origins. In the whole Tibetan area, less than 1 per cent of the land is arable, so burial in the ground is hardly practical. The cold winter lasts more than five months of the year, and during that time the earth is frozen. Digging is difficult, if not impossible, in many parts of Tibet. Also most Tibetans live on grassland, and they roam wherever there is water and grass. If they bury their dead, they will be leaving them behind.
But the rituals of death are deeply ingrained in a culture. For us Chinese, who have been so tied to the land for generations, a burial is seen as a way of returning to Mother Earth. Only then can the dead have their final rest. And for my grandmother, such a burial was an event to be prepared for well in advance. When she turned seventy, she announced to us all that she was ready to go and presented my parents with a list of items that she would require: a coffin, four sets of clothes for the four seasons, a house, a boat, a table and two chairs, a wardrobe, a number of animals and plenty of money. I was flabbergasted. How could we possibly afford these things? I remember asking my mother, who laughed and said, ‘Don't be silly. Grandmother's treasures will all be made of paper, except for the clothes.’
My father's response to all this surprised me even more. A staunch Communist, he was usually impatient with Grandmother's superstitious beliefs. Once he had caught her praying in the dark and shouted, ‘Your Buddha is not worth a dog's fart. Why don't you pray to Chairman Mao for a change?’ But this time, he simply said, ‘This is your grandmother's last wish. We should satisfy her.’
My grandmother lived to be ninety-four. For more than a decade, one fixture of my summer vacation was to help her air her burial clothes. We did this covertly, one outfit at a time, so that none of the neighbours would suspect us of being superstitious. My grandmother would remind me again and again to make sure that, when the time came, my mother dressed her in all four of the outfits while she was still breathing — otherwise, she would be going to the next world naked. Unfortunately, by the time my grandmother died, burial had been forbidden in China because of the population explosion and pressure on the land. Cremation was the order of the day. Although peasants could still get away with burying their beloved in the family plots, Party officials like my father would be severely punished for breaking the new decree. My father had always followed the Party's every command, but this time, he was in agony. He went missing for days and my mother later told me that he was out trying to find a way to transport my grandmother's body secretly to our home village. He did not succeed. The roads were bad, and the trip would have taken too long — the corpse might rot. So Grandmother's meticulous preparations went up in flames.
As I watch the last vulture flapping its wings and flying off, I stand up to leave. It is lifting itself further and further away, into the void. Is it taking the soul of the dead body with it? I wonder. As I walk back to the house, the scene of the sky burial plays over and over in my mind. I had expected something far more brutal, far bloodier. After having seen it for myself, I now understand why there is generally no family present. But for a dispassionate observer like myself, the matter-of-factness of the sky burial is hard to deny. There is something peaceful and dignified about it, and it produces no waste or pollution of any kind. By giving their bodies to the vultures, Tibetans are performing their last offering in this life. I remember what Phuntsog told me: ‘Giving is in Tibetans' nature, in life or in death. The vulture only eats dead things. We cannot let it go hungry while we bury or cremate our dead. That would be cruel.’ Whether or not the soul is going to a better place, sky burial does seem to me like a natural, and ecological, way to go.
THREE Journey to the Next Life
TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS after the death of his mother, Tseten calls again. The family is preparing for a special fire ritual, the most elaborate they have performed so far. Do we want to film it?
‘Are you sure?’ I ask, cautiously. I am keen to film it, but I do not want to intrude. In the time since she passed away, I have often found myself thinking of Tseten's mother. Despite my own beliefs, I seem in some curious way to be growing concerned about the passage of her soul.
But Tseten assures me it will be all right.‘Mila has invited you,’ he says.
We set off immediately. As we approach the house, we see villagers arriving, carrying baskets of food or large jars of chang. One man struggles under the weight of a huge sack full of cowpats. Coming up the stairs by the stable, we find the Rikzins' upper courtyard packed; half the village seems to have turned up. Three shaven-headed nuns in maroon robes are arranging food on a long table: barley and barley flour, butter, sugar, tea, mustard seeds, rice, Chinese dates, spices, and quite a few other things that I don't recognise. Two more nuns are cleaning two five-foot long ceremonial horns. In a far corner of the yard, a couple of men are mixing a vast heap of tsampa with brown sugar to make tso, small cones of offerings. The heap gets bigger all the time, as new visitors add tsampa, sugar, and raisins they have brought with them. I watch a little girl who quietly waits her turn behind the adults. She holds a small bowl of tsampa in both hands, with a piece of yellow paper — a prayer for the dead, perhaps — tucked into the middle of it; when her turn comes, she tips it onto the heap.
Mila is standing in the centre of the courtyard. He looks calm and serene, like the rest of the family. Had I not known, I would not have suspected that he had just lost his wife. The only difference I notice is that he seems rather shabby, even dirty, his chin unshaven, the collar and the sleeves of his shirt shiny with grease. I have been told it is the custom for the family not to wash for forty-nine