The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations

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: Practices, Discourses, Representations, edited by Bryan J. Cuevas and Jacqueline I. Stone 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.

Studies in East Asian Buddhism, No. 20
Published in association with the Kuroda Institute
April 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3031-1 / $65.00 (CLOTH)