Sky burial is a funeral practice in which a human corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements or to be eaten by scavenging animals.
It is a specific type of the general practice of excarnation. It is practiced in the region of Tibet and the Chinese provinces and autonomous regions of Qinghai, Sichuan, and Inner Mongolia, as well as in Mongolia, Bhutan, and parts of India such as Sikkim and Zanskar
Few such places remain operational today due to religious marginalisation, urbanisation, and the decimation of vulture populations.
The majority of Tibetan people and many Mongols adhere to Vajrayana Buddhism, which teaches the transmigration of spirits. There is no need to preserve the body, as it is now an empty vessel. Birds may eat it or nature may cause it to decompose.
The function of the sky burial is simply to dispose of the remains in as generous a way as possible (the origin of the practice’s Tibetan name).
In much of Tibet and Qinghai, the ground is too hard and rocky to dig a grave, and due to the scarcity of fuel and timber, sky burials were typically more practical than the traditional Buddhist practice of cremation.
Why sky burial?
For Tibetan Buddhists, sky burial and cremation are templates of instructional teaching on the impermanence of life.
Jhator is considered an act of generosity on the part of the deceased since the deceased and his/her surviving relatives are providing food to sustain living beings.
Such generosity and compassion for all beings are important virtues in Buddhism.
Although some observers have suggested that jhator is also meant to unite the deceased person with the sky or sacred realm, this does not seem consistent with most of the knowledgeable commentary and eyewitness reports, which indicate that Tibetans believe that at this point life has completely left the body and the body contains nothing more than simple flesh.
Only people who directly know the deceased usually observe it, when the excarnation happens at night.
In the past, cremation was limited to high lamas and some other dignitaries, but modern technology and difficulties with sky burial have led to an increased use of cremation by commoners.
Other nations that performed air burial were the Caucasus nations of Georgians, Abkhazians, and Adyghe people, in which they put the corpse in a hollow tree trunk.
