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Despite strong preferences for traditional funerals, more and more Tibetans are choosing modern cremation as a new route to reincarnation.
Cremation in a diesel-burning furnace has become especially popular in Gonghe County in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Hainan, northwest China's Qinghai Province.
Several days ago, an aunt of Yang Xiujia, a Tibetan herdsman of Cihansu Village, died and her family members cremated her remains at the Gonghe County funeral home, using a diesel-burning furnace.
Yang said that in the past, Tibetans would burn cypress trees to cremate the bodies of the deceased.
"Today more and more of my fellow countrymen tend to use a cremation furnace as a route for reincarnation," Yang added. "It's cheap and environment-friendly."
Jayang, head of the funeral home, said the cremation furnace was designed in accordance with the practice of Tibetans in cremating the deceased. The cremation room is decorated with scripture canisters and long narrow religious flags.
The furnace has cremated the bodies of more than 300 deceased Tibetans since it was put into use last year, according to Jayang.
He said cremation was carried out in strict accordance with the procedures of the Buddhist religion.
Lamas are invited to calculate and give a specific date for cremation before the funeral ceremony is held, during which people pray for the dead and put 24 kinds of Tibetan medicines on the body, and then the cremation is carried out.
The whole process needs one hour to complete, compared with the traditional tree-burning way which might last for at least eight hours, according to Jayang.
By time-honored tradition, when a Tibetan dies, his or her remains are disposed of by "heaven", by burning trees or by water burial.
Tibetans in Gonghe County used to dispose of the remains of the dead by "heaven", a form of burial in which the body of the deceased is chopped into pieces and placed on a holy altar on a mountain top to serve as food for condors. Tibetans hold the belief that the condor takes the soul to heaven.
Along with the change of local ecological environment, the number of condors has become smaller, making it more difficult for Tibetans to carry out "heaven burial". Thus, more and more people have begun cremation by burning firewood, which has accelerated deterioration in environment.
Yang Jiaxiu said that in the past, the grass of the Talatan grassland in Gonghe County was taller than the sheep, but now the area has become barren with little grass.
"To improve the environment, the state has launched a program to return low-yield farmland to forest. A program to control and prevent desertification has also been launched in my county," Yang said.
"Each year, many trees are planted, but many of them are used to cremate the bodies of the dead," Yang said. "We have been living on grazing livestock for generations. Without grassland and trees, we would lose our homesteads."
According to tradition, Tibetans hold that it is necessary to use cypress and birch trees to cremate the bodies of the deceased. It is calculated that three cubic meters of timber are needed to cremate the remains of one dead person. In Gonghe County, at least300 cubic meters of timber are needed annually.
Due to many years of excessive deforestation, cypress or birch trees have been severely depleted.
The reason that Tibetans used cypress and birch trees for cremations was that such trees produced less ash, but it was not written in the sutra that the bodies of the deceased must be cremated for reincarnation by burning trees, said Gazam Doje, a living Buddha at the outstanding Taxiu Lamasery in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Hainan.
"There was no diesel here in the past, so people used trees to cremate the bodies of the deceased," said Gazam Doje.
"In fact, both the trees and diesel are treasures of nature. Burning diesel does not breach the practice of the Tibetan religion and more important, it protects the local environment," Gazam Doje noted.
He expressed his wish that his body be cremated using the diesel-burning furnace after he passes away.
(Xinhua News Agency March 29, 2003)
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