It's been almost a week since a 6.9 earthquake turned life upside-down in Yushu, Qinghai, China, leaving in its wake, 2,039 dead and 12,135 injured and reducing 85% of structures in the quake zone to ruins. Still, 195 people are missing and probably many more. Official statistics are never complete; they never report what we will never know, the lost that will be missed but never be found.
Yet life goes on under the intense blue skies of the Tibetan Plateau and we have to move on, but let's remember the missing after the fold.
In a traditional Tibetan Sky Burial, the deceased lies in rest in a Buddhist temple for 3 days while Monks chant in prayer to free the spirit from the body. After this, the bereaved assemble and follow as the body is carried to a celestial altar, a simple platform on open ground and ritually dismembered, saving the organs, as vultures or Dakini (sky dancers) circling above are kept at bay, and then finally allowed to carry the remains up to the sky. In this way, the empty vessel of the body is returned to nature, celebrating the transitory, impermanent nature of existence that Buddhists believe is the nature of life.
It’s one of several funeral methods but the most common and believed to be the most virtuous since this offering of flesh saves the lives of the vulture’s normal prey, as Sakyamuni fed his own flesh to hawks to save a pigeon.
But it’s a complicated and lengthy ceremony and this earthquake left many temples in ruins and "too many for the vultures". Near the ruins of the main monastery of Jiegu township, as monks chanted mantras in front of piles of dead, Monk Lopu said "I'd say we've collected a thousand or more bodies here. Many of the bodies you see here don't have families or their families haven't come looking for them, so it's our job to take good care of them." And so yesterday, they built a funeral pyre and cremated the remains of so many lost souls in a ritual normally reserved for the most holy of Monks, sending them skyward in a plume of smoke.
Unless you’ve visited the high plateau 4,000m high, it’s difficult to understand the power of that bright and intensely blue sky. But it’s the same sky we all sit under and tomorrow, Wednesday, one week to the moment at 07:49 will commence a day of mourning and if you chose you can observe a few moments of silence for the lost, including those nameless we will never know.
The white of this page, the Buddhist color of mourning, is a fitting image so I’d prefer to leave it at that.
Thank You