Sky Burial

Sky burial is a funerary practice associated chiefly with Tibetan Buddhist communities of the Tibetan Plateau and neighboring Himalayan regions, in which a deceased person's body is ritually dismembered by specialist practitioners at a designated site and left exposed on a mountainside or platform to be consumed by vultures and other scavenging birds. The practice reflects Tibetan Buddhist teachings on the impermanence of the physical body and the transfer of consciousness to a new existence after death, and it is also understood pragmatically as suited to a terrain where wood for cremation is scarce and the ground is often too rocky or frozen for burial; offering the body to sustain other living beings is further read as a final act of generosity consistent with Buddhist ethical values. Conducted according to prescribed ritual procedure, often timed and overseen by monks or specially trained practitioners, sky burial remains an actively practiced funerary rite in parts of Tibet and among Tibetan communities today, though it is also a regulated and, in some contexts, contested practice under Chinese state administration of the region.