November 19, 2015 • 41 mins
We tend to think of mummification as either an environmental event or a mortuary act perpetrated by others, but mummification can also occur as an act of ritualized self destruction. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian consider the Sokushinbutsu of Japan, who once engaged in a process of ascetic self mummification that spanned years of extreme body modification. Their purpose? To travel through time...
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I am
Christian Stager. If you've been listening to our podcast, you
may have tuned into our episode on Egyptian mummification and
the long history and evolution of mummification there from a
(00:26):
purely environmental mummification into this ultra refined mortuary art. Yeah.
We went over the history of thousands of years of
how mummification evolved, and during that episode we we said
to you the audience, Hey, you know, there are lots
of other forms of mummification out there. We're not going
(00:46):
to be able to do them justice in this one episode,
So do you want to hear more? And the answer
seemed to be yes. Yeah, enough people said yes that
we went ahead and did what we were going to
do anyway. Yeah, well, this one's too fascinating to pass
up to. Yeah, because in this we're getting into um.
I mean, there's still elements of environmental mummification and funerary mummification,
(01:07):
but there's this added element of self mummification. So and
of course when I started researching this, it immediately made
me think of seppuku, which is another form of suicide
in this same region in Japan. Uh And this is
essentially suicide, in fact, so much so that it was
banned by the Japanese government in the nineteenth century. Yeah,
(01:31):
I think we can't help withdraw a line between these
two forms of ultimately highly ritual life self destruction. Yeah.
In fact, I would go so far as to say
that this has some elements in common with uh DR Kevorking,
for instance. I mean, it's on a much longer term scale.
You're not This takes like ten years, I think right
(01:51):
to self mummify. Yeah, It's definitely a deliberate act in
which the individual is accepting death and really speeding along
to a certain degree, in taking a certain amount of
command over the process. Yeah. Absolutely. So, Okay, enough enough
teasing on our part here. What are we talking about here?
This is the suku shin Botsu of Japan. Yeah. This
(02:14):
practice lasted from about seven hundred and seventy four Common
Era until the twentieth century, and aside from nineteen mummified
members of the twelfth century Fujiwara clan, it constitutes the
only mummification right in Japanese culture. One of our resources
for this episode is an excellent piece by Kim Jeremiah
(02:34):
titled Buried a Lie, The Forgotten practice of self Mummification,
and he does a great job outlining this practice that
was carried out by certain Shinn Buddhists who sought to
serve Miroku Bosatsu, the Bodhisattva of the future who will
arrive on Earth some five billion, six hundred and seventy
(02:55):
million years from now. So this is essentially a Buddha
that will arrive on Earth tremendous amount of time in
the future. And and so from what I was reading, UH,
he is said to currently reside in what is called
Tussida Heaven, which is this place is depicted as flooded
with rotating light, and this rotating light apparently reveals a
(03:17):
forty nine story palace uh. And it is a you know,
as most heavens are a paradise with no sorrow or sin.
The thing that's really interesting here about this particular group
is uh the Sokushan Budsu practicing. It was in Yamagata,
and there were members of a specific sect that brought
together parts of esoteric Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and some kind
(03:40):
of local spiritual practices. So this is I guess like
like the version of mysticism, right, like Buddhist mysticism sort of. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
well we'll discuss you see this um. You know, like
with any religion, religions don't travel on James. Any culture
they enter, they end up with absorbing pieces of pre
(04:01):
existing religions. They emerge with a with cultural values. And
so as Buddhism UH emerges from India, travels through China
UH into Japan, it ends up picking up all these
different elements sort of like how when we talked about
the serpent and the rainbow in one episode, like the
Vuodha and culture incorporates aspects of local culture and Haiti
(04:22):
as well as Catholicism into the mysticism and myth of zombies. Yeah, yeah,
And I think it's one of the things that makes
any discussion of a religious worldview fascinating, that ever changing
nature of it. So these guys in particular thought that
they could achieve special powers, obviously one of which was
to live for five billion years and meet this Buddha
(04:45):
in the future, but other things where they practiced meditating
in caves or under these really cold waterfalls, and then
some of them even stabbed out their own eyes and
performed other forms of mutilation on themselves, uh, in order
to gain these powers that were part of their beliefs. Yeah,
there's a there's a huge trend here with a just
(05:07):
a complete I mean, they were they were aesthetics. They
were rejecting the physical world, um, showing them in almost
a contempt for the physical world in their devotion to
to the spiritual realm. And and you know, there are
definitely some kind of cool quasi sci fi elements here too,
because essentially they're they're wanting to put their body into
(05:27):
a spiritual suspended animation so that they can reach this
far distant time and place. Yeah. Absolutely, I think you
should explain that process because it's it's pretty wild. It
reminds me of that Darren Aronofsky movie The Fountain. Have
you seen that? Yeah, it reminds me of that this
idea that like you're not even reincarnated, but like there, uh,
(05:50):
you will exist in this other state for this long
long period of time so that you can ultimately achieve transcendence. Yeah. Yeah,
and I would not be surprised of if he was
inspired by these Eastern models. Yeah. So, in order to
reach that five point six billion year point in the
future and meet the Bodhistotta of the future and and
(06:13):
serve him um, you have to self mummify as a
living Buddha, which Jeremiah explains as a as a means
again to reach this towout sue heaven, which is the
current residence of the Bodhisatta of the future. So you
have a What you do is you engage in a
slow and meditative approach to the death point, and it's
only then that the monk can self guide their soul
(06:35):
through the void to a realm of his choosing. And
this reminds me of of elements of Tibetan Buddhism as well,
where there's this huge emphasis on what happens immediately following death,
and you've got to be prepared for that journey between
this incarnation and the next. And as we learned, there
is a connection between Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism and this practice.
(06:59):
Their culture really connected in a way, and we'll get
to that later, but we wanted to start with these
guys the and I say guys. They were all men
the soku shin butsu practice. Now another source, we're looking
at his mummification in the ancient and new world. This
is a wonderful resource for anything related to mummies. Will
include a link up. This is our goat here every
time we do something about yeah yeah, from Anna Maria
(07:22):
Rosso and she classifies shing gone self immuni mummification as
a case of entering a kind of undead suspension in
which the monk's body is preserved for resurrection upon Mikoru
Bosatsu's arrival. So they're kind of two different takes. They
are probably amounting to the same thing. Either you're sticking
(07:43):
around and tell he comes, or you're preserving your body
is kind of an anchor for your wandering spirit to
go and serve him. Now. Yeah, And so the first
I guess founder of this that practiced this was Kobu Daishi,
and he was alive from seven seventy four war to
eight thirty five. And the idea here is that he
(08:04):
remained in this particular state within the Gogyo mausoleum, and
monks to this day right still bring food to him
as he awaits the arrival of their you know this
this Buddha in heaven essentially. Yeah, there's some wonderful images
of monks bring into the highly ritualized affair. It's not
just someone pushing ateria tray under a crypt door or anything.
(08:27):
It's a it's a it's very ritualized. And they bring
this fine chest up with with food for him. One
of the things I read was that supposedly his nails
and hair continued to grow for years after his death. Uh,
And monks would go in there when they would feed him,
they would also give him a trim and redress his body. Uh.
(08:47):
And then you know, they'd go back another thirty years
later or whatever, and they'll just be dust. And the
dust was the rags of the robes essentially, and they
clear it out and do the whole process all over again.
But the myth is that his hair and nails kept
growing and so they had to cut it. Huh. So
in all of this, um, obviously we need to we
need to state that we're dealing with the religious interpretations
(09:11):
and often in supernatural layers, all on top of a
body's decomposition or lack of decomposition. So as we go
through all of this, you keep an open mind about it,
but also you know, don't feel I mean, feel free
to pick at a little bit with your mind. Yeah,
and I think, like the Egyptian mummies, there is of
(09:32):
course the cultural and religious aspect that comes into play
that you know, promotes this activity. But then there's a
science behind it to actually achieve mummification in such a
way that the body doesn't decay. Right, Yeah, because okay,
so so what's the goal here? The goal is to
gradually reduce one's physical body to a withered state, just
(09:53):
like how much of a mummy can I become while
still alive, while just meditating and trying to re to
that death point and then to remain dry and for
the most part incorruptible. So in order to achieve this
state would be Soko shum bits who first practices a
starvation diet. Okay, and this consists of just nuts and
(10:14):
berries and tree bark and roots and uh this phase
apparently last would last between three and ten years, however
long it took to whittle that body down to the
skin and bone state atlasientially starving themselves. Yeah. In fact,
that diet, did you know, like it was designed specifically
(10:35):
to strip them of body fat. That's what specifically ate
those things. And in fact, some of the herbs and
nuts that were involved in that diet were designed to
I mean, they didn't have the science of this, but
they inhibited bacterial growth. So that was part of the
process here of helping you mummify yourself. Yeah, and I
guess that could conceivably cut down on decomposition too, because
so much of the decomposition, as we've discussed in the
(10:56):
previous momification episode, is coming from within. So keep that
in mind as well. You're dealing with early people that
are looking at a corpses decomposition, they're often thinking of
it as an externalized decomposition, the elements making the body decompose,
when really it's most of the decomposition is occurring within,
as the body begins to fall apart of the bacteria
(11:18):
feeds on everything. Yeah. And as part of that too,
they weren't even allowed to eat specific things as part
of their diet too, so like cereal, wheat, rice, foxtail, millet,
proso millet, and soybeans were all things they had to
stay away from because of you know, it would promote
bacterial growth. Now, Atlas Obscura also has a has a
page about self mumification, and they mentioned that the poisonous
(11:40):
sap from the rushi tree uh was also used to
the monks consumed this to purge their bodily fluids and
and supposedly repel scavenging parasites. Yeah, and this is brutal,
Like the several accounts that I read of this, I mean,
purge bodily fluids is accurate, but I mean it was
violent vomiting uh. And but they did it, you know,
(12:03):
for this reason. It was part of the sacrifice of
being able to make this journey through time. And in fact,
here's another interesting tidbit that I read. They did X
rays of some of these monks uh and they found
that there were river stones in their guts. So apparently
they ate those two. I don't know what the promotion
(12:23):
would be like what you know, how that would affect
the mommification process. But they were filling their stomachs with stones.
And it goes without saying, if anyone out there is
looking to lose weight, um, please don't try this diet.
Please don't try the self modification diet. Although I could
see that being the next big thing. Yes, Okay, so
(12:44):
you're finally reduced to the state of walking or maybe
just sitting here. I wonder if they could even walk.
I would imagine the other monks maybe had to help
them get from place to pull, because they have to
be pretty frail at this point. UM. So at this
point they be You're buried alive with a little help
from your friends, obviously, um for three years, with only
bamboo breathing tubes to sustain you down there in the darkness,
(13:08):
and here you meditate, you recite sutras, and you periodically
ring a bell um to let everyone know that you're
still down there, still meditating, until eventually you're gonna die
from dehydration. Yeah. So the idea here is that they're
when they're buried alive, they're buried alive in the lotus position.
So I think that the box or whatever they're in
is designed to fit their bodies in the lotus position.
(13:31):
And then when you stop ringing that bell, I think
that you ring the bell once a day basically to
say like, hey, I'm still moving down here. And when
it stops, that's when they take the tube out. Uh.
And they sealed the tomb uh, and there's a thing
here too, that the number three is very important to
this ritual. They did things in threes, uh, and it
(13:51):
was particular to the Buddhist priesthood. The reason why is
that apparently there's three jewels in Buddhism, the Buddha, the Sanga,
and the Dharma. And then there's the three great secrets
of secret of the body, which are moodras, which we
know over here as you know yoga practice basically. And
then there's a secret of speech mantras, and the secret
of the mind which is meditation. So that's why they
(14:14):
wait for three years before they pull them back up.
And so when they do pull them up, the first
thing you check is that could be corruption level of
the body. If it's uncorrupted, then the then hey, success
self mummification has taken place. You dress uh the monkey
in robes and put them on display for veneration. If
the body's rotted, however, you're going to perform an exorcism
(14:36):
and bury the corpse. Yeah. That two extremes. One is
you're venerated forever. The other is this is a hideous,
disgusting thing. We have to exercise it like you don't
exercise just a regular dead body. Right, but this this
process went wrong, and it's you know, within that practice,
I can sort of understand how they would they would
(14:56):
see it as being the opposite of holy. Yeah, is
well discuss later. You see this this interesting um dichotomy here,
where on one hand, there's still very much this idea
that a corpse is a thing that is not it's
not pleasant, it's not to really be dealt with, you Bury,
I can get rid of it, except if it's the
body of a very special individual. Is that if the
(15:19):
body itself is in this strange, undeath uncorrupted state, and
then it is an object of veneration. Yeah, And I
want to add here they had a couple of little
cheats that they were here too. After they pulled the
bodies out. It's true that, you know, if the body
itself hadn't decayed, that that was when they venerated them.
But after they pulled it out, if it hadn't decayed,
(15:41):
they would preserve it by adding incense to the body,
and then they would um dry it out over a
charcoal fire. Yeah. And this is this kind of gets
back to the original idea from our Egyptian Amumies episode,
where you have mummification begin as environmental process, and when
the environmental process fails due to different environmental circumstances such
(16:02):
as more elaborate tombs so that are being used, then
you have to begin employing mummification techniques, uh to to
fake what you're not achieving naturally. And so we see
a bit of that here. It's like, Okay, if it
has corrupted or it looks like it's corrupting a little bit,
what are some cheats we can apply to get it
back into that that desired zone. Yeah, in the same
(16:24):
way that the Egyptians started off by burying their bodies
in the dry sands, and that would help to prevent
them from decaying. They're in Japan just using charcoal, fire
and smoke basically to achieve the same thing. Less than
thirty Japanese monks are known to have completed this grueling
journey to the death point. And of course we have
(16:44):
no idea if they found the Boodhystot buddhistop of the future,
or if they're going to at some point the distant future. Yeah,
I mean that's still to come. Yeah, five billion years,
that's the way is off. But the Japanese government, like
I said at the top. They did not like this,
and as of the nineteenth century it is illegal to
do that, though some of these monks did continue this
(17:05):
practice and into the twentieth century. I think, like the
early nineteen hundreds, they were a monks doing this um
the majority of which happened at a temple on Mount
you don't know called da Nichi bu uh and they're
basically there's an idea that there's a local spring there
that high has high levels of arsenic in it, so
(17:26):
they think that has something to do as well with
the mummification process, that somehow arsenic is contributing to those
uh in The area around there is where they conducted
their exercises UH. And in Japanese the area is called
sennen Zawa and that translates into the mountain stream of
otherworldly men or swamp of wizards or swamp of immortals,
(17:49):
which I like. I liked both of those quite a bit.
The swamps swamp of wizards. Yeah, uh, you can still
visit sixteen of these uh soku shinbutsus of the twenty
eight that remain, there were thirty that no were known
to have completed it. But I think that some of
them are off limits, you know, for obvious reasons. They're
probably pretty fragile, but in various locations around Japan you
(18:12):
can visit these. Uh. The hundreds of people are thought
to have attempted this, so that, you know, getting back
to that those exorcisms there, that means there were hundreds
of these exorcisms of these bodies that did decay. Yeah.
And also it's such a grueling endeavor to undertake. I
can't I can't imagine everyone who started out on this path,
(18:33):
had the had the afforded to do actually make it
to that death point in the original prescribed way. Yeah,
I agree, And I want to add two stories about
two of these monks that I think put it into
a little bit of perspective here. And this isn't to
say that all of the hundreds of monks that attempted
this had these kinds of background. But the most famous
(18:54):
of which, uh, that you can I think still visit
is Daijuku Bosatsu Shinyo Kai Shonen uh. And he mummified
himself at the age of nineties six in seventeen three,
and he's at that mount uh you don't know temple.
He was a farmer. And the story goes that he
was a farmer. He was walking along the road one
day and a samurai bumped into him, and the samurai
(19:18):
took offense to this and started to fight, essentially drew
sword and started to fight, and this farmer only had
a walking stick and somehow defeats the samurai and kills
him in battle. Uh. But killing a samurai was illegal then, uh,
And the punishment was death. So he didn't want to
die for defending himself on the road, so he fled
(19:39):
to this temple and took up the religious you know
practice in the name Shinyo Kai. So that's what led
to his eventual you know, immersion into this culture and
then leading on to the self mummification practice. But I
gotta say, like, if I got to ninety six, you know,
I'd give it a shot. Why not? I mean, you
(20:02):
can you can only be in control of so many
different things at that point. Why not be in control
of your your journey to the death point. Yeah. And
there's another monk known as Tetsu Monkei who's another part
of this order, and he supposedly killed two samurai with
a fire hook. Wait, what's a fire I don't know.
It's I was just imagining it was a hook that's
(20:23):
on fire, but I bet it's like a hook that
you used to move charcoals around something like that. It's
that because we also see this this traditional element of
the common man does not have access to weapons and
then must create a martial art around common farming or
you know, crafting tools. Well, this story was like a
(20:43):
little too large for some people to believe, so they
looked into it some more and they think what actually
happened as he killed a prostitute, okay, and then like
like the other guy fled to the monastery. Same thing.
But this guy, Remember I was talking about how they
would cut their own eyes out as part of aractice.
He's one of them. He cut out his own eye
and threw it into a river because he wanted to
(21:05):
pray for a cure for a local eye disease. It
was infecting the local villages. So that gives you kind
of an idea of the you know, these practices. We
don't have a lot of information on this, but it's
it's pretty extreme. Yeah, and I believe you were looking
into this and you found that there there is a
group that is that is advocating for more more access
(21:28):
to the existing mummified monks. Yeah. My understanding is that
it's called the Japanese Mummy Research Group and that apparently
they're responsible for studying, you know, the mummified monks, and
they petitioned the government for permission to exhume the graves
of the ones that they find. But I believe that
this was started around the same time that the practice
was ending, probably the beginning of the twentieth century. So
(21:52):
now we're going to venture away from Japan and into China,
and particularly we're going to look at Chan Buddhism. This
is a cool of my Yana Buddhism that developed in
China from the sixth century uh CE onward. So here
we see a definite merging of Buddhist and dallast ideas.
And interesting here is the notion that Buddhism and dallas
(22:15):
to sorcery seem to combine into a notion of Buddha
is a sort of foreign immortal who achieved some form
of death. Yeah, there's a fantastic piece that we used
for this, uh well as one of our sources for
this episode. That's up on Ion I and from a
couple of years ago, I think, and it's you know what,
I didn't realize it until I've finished the piece and
(22:37):
I rolled back up and I realized it's written by
one of my favorite writers over there, woman named Lauren Davis.
She's good. Yeah, it's some of my favorite stuff on
their site is by her. But this is specifically about
in the Science and Civilization in China, a book, which
is the fifth volume of that series. Uh. And they
speculate that the self mummification originally was a dallast practice.
(22:59):
They note that while Japanese monks are the most famous
self mummifiers, there are deliberate self mummifications that have also
been recorded in China and India as well. So this
is where like, clearly there's a connection somehow between these
two things. They couldn't have just especially because they're from
the same belief systems. They couldn't have just independently sprung
up on their own. Yeah, And so that's why we're
(23:20):
looking at a Chan Buddhism and some particular examples here
among the some of the Chan masters, because you seem
of a form of mummification that maybe isn't quite as
deliberate and self destructive as the Japanese models we were
looking at, but but definitely similar blue print. And the
idea here is that they're this particular sect of Buddhism,
(23:41):
which I was unfamiliar with until we researched. This is
known for rejecting empty rituals and unworthy authority figures. Yeah,
there's a quote that I was reading and one of
the great sources for this section of the podcast, Robert H.
Sharks the idolization of Enlightenment on the mummification of Chan
masters in medieval China. Uh. People is how there's there's
a quote that the Chan would use where it says,
(24:04):
if you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. Yeah, in
other words, saying that if you meet somebody claiming to
be this great individual, reject them. Yeah. I've heard that
term before and I've always liked it, but I didn't
realize that it originated here, and in fact that this
particular school, you know, the idea was they didn't wanna
be based around superstition essentially. Uh. And so it's strange
(24:25):
then that they were involved in the mummification thing. Yeah,
this is this is definitely a fascinating area where you
see these merging and in times contradictory ideas coming from
the Dallist roots and the Buddhist roots, where on one
level Buddhism, you think of Buddhism and you think of, oh,
it's all about not caring. It's about about setting aside
(24:49):
any high levels of anxiety about death or even life
itself that you're you're disconnecting. And then with with Dallas Sorcery,
you have a farm more supernatural understanding of man's place
in the universe and what's possible with the physical body,
and these two things kind of merged together into one form. Yeah,
(25:09):
and I'm sure too that like the political and economic
and cultural pressures that were going on in the area
at the time contributed to this melding. You know, the
the the economic aspect of were interesting when we get
into it. Yeah, especially, So one thing about this, you know,
it's important to say you hinted at it here, is
that most Buddhism regards corpses as just lifeless lumps of flesh,
(25:33):
right rotting flesh in particular, and you just dispose of them.
It's no longer a person. So again it's it's a
little strange, this veneration thing, but we'll get into you know,
there there is a worship that was applied to their
abbots in particular. Uh. And this explains their fascination with
the possibility of bodies not decomposing. So they thought that
(25:54):
if their bodies didn't decompose, that they were incorruptible. And uh.
This involved you know, artificial mummification the same way that
we've talked about previously, but it was thought as a
mean to achieve spiritual purity and preserve it within their remains. Yeah.
So you see this, this idea that an individual is
is going to be wholly enough, pure enough that there
(26:16):
there's gonna be residual purity, residual karma even in the body. Uh.
And and the dallast roots here, apparently are that a
Daoist master sheds his body like the shell of a cicada,
and then his spirit alone ascends into the spirit realm,
leaving behind and this incorruptible body and the body serves
as a kind of anchor for an immortal soul wandering beyond,
(26:41):
which which is a fabulous idea that is is almost
science fiction in its elements, like the idea of say
a a body and some suspended state, but the mind
is wandering around in some some sort of virtual reality. Yeah,
And I think it's important to note too that these abbots,
my impression from the reading was these abbots, uh, we're
(27:02):
venerated because they're very charismatic and and the followers within
their temples and their communities loved them dearly. And so
part of this also was that the preservation allowed for
the new abbot that would come in, who was maybe
a little green and maybe not known so well, to
have a little bit of leeway uh and at time
(27:25):
to to get to know them better and build his
reputation and charisma, while the mummified version of the previous
abbot was still there for them to connect with. Yeah. Because, yeah,
the the center that the abbot and his charismatic power,
it had a lot to do with the support from
the community, the support from the government. It's like having
the lead singer of a band change, how right, But
(27:45):
imagine if the new lead singer could say, actually, the
old lead singers right here. He's in this he's not dead.
He's in this undeathed state, so he's technically still here.
You can come and venerate him. He's still the the
ritual spiritual center of of the monastery. And and that's
important to it's it's not only the outside forces, but
(28:06):
the inside forces. The the Abbot in this undeathed state,
in this mummified state, remains the rallying point for everyone.
That's what Black Sabbath should have done is mummified Ozzy
Osbourne and then had Ronnie James Dio you know, performed
with Azzi's uh mummified body on stage. Or Van Halen
could have done it as well. Sammy Haggard performs with
(28:28):
the body of David. They had the idea of an
aged rocker as a mummy. It is just perfect, I
mean because they kind of reached that state on their own.
Look at any and you can easily see a month. Yeah,
Mick Jagger is definitely approaching mummification. So okay. So the
first chin Master mummy that we know of was a
(28:49):
guy named Tao Sin And who was alive from five
eighty to six fifty one. When he passed away at
the age of seventy two, his students wrapped him in
lacquered cloth so they could preserve the miracle of his
natural incorruptibility. Uh and so like like what you're saying,
this wasn't a you know, a normal practice for Buddhism.
Is sometime in Eastern Han or early six Dynasties period,
(29:12):
the rationale around this changed. They wanted to maintain the
integrity of the body and the soul together after death
through this kind of preservation. Now, another example that Robert H.
Sharf brings out in his piece is that of Sean
wou Wei, who died in seven thirty five at age
ninety nine, but he wasn't buried until seven forty, and
according to his biography, he was he was so quote
(29:34):
imbued with meditation and wisdom that no decay occurred in
the five years between death and the tomb, and in
seven fifty eight, eighteen years later, his dissiples dug him
back up and then discovered very little decay. Or so
it's said, again, you kind of have to throwing a
little grain of salt here and there when it comes
to the the official religious account. So what's the common
(29:57):
practices here, so that it's different from what you're talking
about with the Japanese model earlier there it's not self
mumification in the sense that they starve themselves and eat
nuts and berries and then bury themselves life. Right, it's
not that gory. Uh. It's almost like the kind of
mummification in a lot of ways, similar to Egyptian mummification. Yeah,
(30:19):
because you do see these varying levels of embalming techniques
coming online to to make up for missing environmental factors.
Mummification itself in China goes back as far as two
hundred and six BC. Uh. And then the notion of
a lingering soul presence in the body like may underlie
(30:39):
all of it it, just as it seems to underlie
any mommification practice. Yeah. And the spirits of your ancestors
still to this day, seems to be fairly potent cultural
idea China. So they had various preservation practices. Uh. One
is just temporary burial, which again has a lot in
common with the Egyptian model bearing in the ground. If
(31:00):
the ground is dry, then it's going to dry the
body out, drying over a fire, which you mentioned already. Yeah,
this is my favorite though. Salt brine in a used
inside of an urn to pickle the body, essentially tick
all the body. I read about that one. That is,
so you put the body in there and let it
soak for like years, right, and then you take it
(31:20):
out and momify it. And in any of these cases,
when you get the body back out, it's it's dried out.
You wrap it in various layers, including lacquered cloth, then
you dress it in robes, and you place it in
a in a position and befitting a chan master. So
from what I was reading, the lacquering process is actually
very similar to the same process that they used to
(31:41):
produce specific kinds of Buddhist sculptures, and it resulted in
a durable finished product. So I think that that's where
they got the idea from. They said, well, let's apply
this statue process to you know, venerating our elders. Uh.
And so do you want to get into the thing
about that there's a technique of placing aid and bone
in the nine orifices of the body. Yeah, this is
(32:03):
interesting and I don't have a lot of details on this.
I probably don't have to to employ them. But the
the the use of jade is interesting, um because it
was a common Han dynasty method for the wealthy to
be buried in a suit of jade. Uh. People may
have seen images of this. It tends to it's not
a solid suit of jade, but it has like jade que,
(32:25):
jade squares, jade tiles um. And this is because the
stone was thought to prevent decay. So if it works
on the outside, which there's no evidence that it did,
but if it worked on the outside, then the magical
thinking is that it would work inside as well. Because
it's as with the Egyptian model of momification, you see
this continuing struggle to try and figure out where decay
(32:46):
is coming from from the outside or from the inside. Therefore,
put the jade on the outside and put it on
the inside. Um. If you ever have the opportunity to
see a Chinese mummy, definitely take advantage of it. I
got to see one at the Museum of the Western
Han Dynasty Mausoleum in Guangzhoe when I was there a
couple of years ago to get my son. He was
(33:07):
not impressed. He was a year and a half and
did not see the beauty of everything there and cried
his head off. But I did get to see a
fabulous restored mummy there with the the jade suit, and
that would have been zal May, the second ruler of
the Kingdom of southern you. Yeah, I think I've brought
up on the show before that I spent some time
(33:29):
in my childhood in Southeast Asia and I lived in
China for six or seven weeks on my own. Actually
it was a teenager, which is kind of a wild story.
But I never got to see anything like that that
sounds really cool. Well, apparently there are only a handful
of these. I think they're more than more than ten,
so that's about how many have been recovered. Only five
have been restored. So I just kind of looked into
(33:51):
gain to see one while in Guangjoe. So another thing
about these specific Chun Buddhist monks the way that they
were preserved. After they were covered in the lacquered cloth,
they were gilded as well, so they're they're they're there's
elements of gold here, right or some kind of metal,
(34:12):
and uh, they're dressed in fine robes afterwards as well.
So when you saw that one, did it have that
kind of shiny exterior? Um, I don't remember there being
as much of a shiny exterior so much, but the
jade suit was the thing that made the big impact.
And given how old they are too, I would imagine
over time that you know, that would kind of fade. Um.
(34:35):
So one of the things about this is that there
was a traditional funeral practice even before this mummification came
into effect, which the abbots were always buried with a
portrait of themselves nearby. Uh. And at some point mummifying
the abbot replaced the portrait the idea of being able
to interact with the you know, the the abbot and
(34:56):
his spirit. So it created a flesh icon and yeah,
I love that that's the term that the traffic uses
in his piece, flesh icon. So they could use these
as both an effigy and a holy relic. But there's
also as we talked about a little bit earlier, is that, Um,
there's the aspect of interacting with the government here too
in the economy. So a lot of these temples and
(35:20):
institutions were supported by government funds, and so if the
abbot was very popular with the community and very charismatic
and then passed away, there's always the possibility that the
government might withdraw funding and think, oh, well, this is
no longer an active institution, right. Yeah, it comes back
to the lead singer scenario exactly. The lead singer drops
out and how are you going to keep the support
(35:43):
for your product going, so they mummified them in order
to keep it active. And again, like we're talking about, yeah,
the the new singer, the new abbot comes in and
kind of gets used to the community then and hopefully
builds up enough of a following that he too gets mummified.
You know, I do want to throw in real quick
that another fascinating aspect of this, uh that came out
in my my research is that according to Holmes aged Welch,
(36:06):
that's he's an early twentieth century expert on East Asian culture,
particularly Taoism and Buddhism, and he's talking about the mummification
of the bodies and he points out, of course how
they were gilded, but quote sometimes the lobes of the
ears were lengthened and a dot was placed between the eyebrows.
Golden skin, long lobes and the uma dot were among
(36:27):
the thirty two sacred marks of a Buddha. The implication
was therefore that in his lifetime, the monk whose corpse
the visitors saw before him, had attained buddhahood. So in
this we see postmortem body modification, which granted any form
of mummification or funerary, right, you know, anytime anything a
mortician does is body modification. But generally we were all about,
(36:50):
let's just make it look as much like it did
when it was alive. But here we see a modification
to make the body look more like the spiritual idea
idea as as as opposed to just what they were. Definitely,
from what I've seen the photographs during the research, I mean,
these do not retain human form in the way that say,
(37:10):
like our typical idea of an Egyptian mummy does, right,
because it's not stuff full of blackered linen and all
all kinds of materials, but it is you know, designed
to be an icon in the same way like a
statue would be, and really to be kind of a
trans human body for a different type of being, which
is such a fascinating idea. And I think there are
(37:33):
elements of that in Egyptian um momification as well, but
they I think it's often lost on us, And I
feel like this example brings out that motif in a
in a new way. Yeah it. You know, every time
we get into this kind of stuff, I have to
think to myself, like, what kind of uh post death
rituals are we going to come up with in the future,
(37:53):
you know, like where we go on with that when
we start taking our bodies and you know, with trans
humanism coming along, know, when we start trying to make
them look more alien or something like that. Yeah, we
ended up being Joe did a podcast episode on the
near future of various funeral rights. Yeah, we didn't get
into this as much, but I can't help but think
of RoboCop, remember, because there's a whole scene where it's
(38:16):
like RoboCop meeting his former wife and someone's pointing out, well,
this isn't him, that we did this to honor him,
which if you take the place is just like glued
on over. So in a sense, he's buried within RoboCop.
He kind of like a like a Warhammer four eight
thousand dreadnought where the tomb is the robot. Which so
(38:38):
in a way, RoboCop is a funeral rite and one
that I think we should all be open to. Yeah,
why not. Let right, it's in the movies. It went
really well, it did, Yeah, it went great. Alright, So
we've discussed the Soko Shimbidsu, We've talked about the John
Masters and those are just two specific examples from East
(38:58):
Asian mom of the Asian history, and we we can't
get into all of the examples in this podcast. Maybe
we'll come back for more later. You do see related examples,
particularly in Thailand. Um, very much of the same model
I think is Sean Buddhism, but certainly an area that
deserves its own spotlight, perhaps at a later date. Yeah,
(39:20):
and in fact, you know, there's of course other mummies too,
especially in the American continent. So uh, there's possibility that
we could talk about Mayan or Tintrue mummies in the
future too. So if you're interested, let us know. Yeah,
sounds good to me. I am certainly down to do
more episodes on global mummification rituals me too, So let
us know. There's tons of avenues to get in touch
(39:41):
with us. In fact, we are on Facebook, Twitter and
Tumbler on all of those social media platforms. We are
under the handle below the mind that's where you can
find us and interact with us. But not only that,
we're on periscope every Friday at noon now and you
can directly interact with us there. We Uh. If you
haven't used periscope before, you get to see us hanging
(40:02):
out in front of an iPad and chatting with you, uh,
conversations that we had last week. We're about the possibility
of you, Joe and I writing our own horror anthology books.
One of our fans suggested that, all right, keep suggesting that. Yeah. Uh,
And and of course you can always visit the site
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, where we've got
(40:22):
blog posts and videos and all kinds of other content
that's not just the podcast. We work hard on Stuff
to Blow your Mind, and we've got all kinds of
crazy things out there, especially about mummies, right exactly. Yeah,
we have a lot of content about mommies, and don't
make sure include some links to it in the landing
page for this episode, as well as links out to
some of these key resources if you want to deeper
dive into the topics. And hey, if you want to
(40:44):
reach out to us directly, you don't have to self
mummify yourself. You don't have to slowly poison yourself and
been a Buddhist cript. Yeah we're here. Instead, just send
us an email. You can reach us at blow the
Mind at how Stuff Works dot back for more on
(41:06):
this and thousands of other topics is that how stuff
works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I am
Christian Stager. If you've been listening to our podcast, you
may have tuned into our episode on Egyptian mummification and
the long history and evolution of mummification there from a
(00:26):
purely environmental mummification into this ultra refined mortuary art. Yeah.
We went over the history of thousands of years of
how mummification evolved, and during that episode we we said
to you the audience, Hey, you know, there are lots
of other forms of mummification out there. We're not going
(00:46):
to be able to do them justice in this one episode,
So do you want to hear more? And the answer
seemed to be yes. Yeah, enough people said yes that
we went ahead and did what we were going to
do anyway. Yeah, well, this one's too fascinating to pass
up to. Yeah, because in this we're getting into um.
I mean, there's still elements of environmental mummification and funerary mummification,
(01:07):
but there's this added element of self mummification. So and
of course when I started researching this, it immediately made
me think of seppuku, which is another form of suicide
in this same region in Japan. Uh And this is
essentially suicide, in fact, so much so that it was
banned by the Japanese government in the nineteenth century. Yeah,
(01:31):
I think we can't help withdraw a line between these
two forms of ultimately highly ritual life self destruction. Yeah.
In fact, I would go so far as to say
that this has some elements in common with uh DR Kevorking,
for instance. I mean, it's on a much longer term scale.
You're not This takes like ten years, I think right
(01:51):
to self mummify. Yeah, It's definitely a deliberate act in
which the individual is accepting death and really speeding along
to a certain degree, in taking a certain amount of
command over the process. Yeah. Absolutely. So, Okay, enough enough
teasing on our part here. What are we talking about here?
This is the suku shin Botsu of Japan. Yeah. This
(02:14):
practice lasted from about seven hundred and seventy four Common
Era until the twentieth century, and aside from nineteen mummified
members of the twelfth century Fujiwara clan, it constitutes the
only mummification right in Japanese culture. One of our resources
for this episode is an excellent piece by Kim Jeremiah
(02:34):
titled Buried a Lie, The Forgotten practice of self Mummification,
and he does a great job outlining this practice that
was carried out by certain Shinn Buddhists who sought to
serve Miroku Bosatsu, the Bodhisattva of the future who will
arrive on Earth some five billion, six hundred and seventy
(02:55):
million years from now. So this is essentially a Buddha
that will arrive on Earth tremendous amount of time in
the future. And and so from what I was reading, UH,
he is said to currently reside in what is called
Tussida Heaven, which is this place is depicted as flooded
with rotating light, and this rotating light apparently reveals a
(03:17):
forty nine story palace uh. And it is a you know,
as most heavens are a paradise with no sorrow or sin.
The thing that's really interesting here about this particular group
is uh the Sokushan Budsu practicing. It was in Yamagata,
and there were members of a specific sect that brought
together parts of esoteric Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and some kind
(03:40):
of local spiritual practices. So this is I guess like
like the version of mysticism, right, like Buddhist mysticism sort of. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
well we'll discuss you see this um. You know, like
with any religion, religions don't travel on James. Any culture
they enter, they end up with absorbing pieces of pre
(04:01):
existing religions. They emerge with a with cultural values. And
so as Buddhism UH emerges from India, travels through China
UH into Japan, it ends up picking up all these
different elements sort of like how when we talked about
the serpent and the rainbow in one episode, like the
Vuodha and culture incorporates aspects of local culture and Haiti
(04:22):
as well as Catholicism into the mysticism and myth of zombies. Yeah, yeah,
And I think it's one of the things that makes
any discussion of a religious worldview fascinating, that ever changing
nature of it. So these guys in particular thought that
they could achieve special powers, obviously one of which was
to live for five billion years and meet this Buddha
(04:45):
in the future, but other things where they practiced meditating
in caves or under these really cold waterfalls, and then
some of them even stabbed out their own eyes and
performed other forms of mutilation on themselves, uh, in order
to gain these powers that were part of their beliefs. Yeah,
there's a there's a huge trend here with a just
(05:07):
a complete I mean, they were they were aesthetics. They
were rejecting the physical world, um, showing them in almost
a contempt for the physical world in their devotion to
to the spiritual realm. And and you know, there are
definitely some kind of cool quasi sci fi elements here too,
because essentially they're they're wanting to put their body into
(05:27):
a spiritual suspended animation so that they can reach this
far distant time and place. Yeah. Absolutely, I think you
should explain that process because it's it's pretty wild. It
reminds me of that Darren Aronofsky movie The Fountain. Have
you seen that? Yeah, it reminds me of that this
idea that like you're not even reincarnated, but like there, uh,
(05:50):
you will exist in this other state for this long
long period of time so that you can ultimately achieve transcendence. Yeah. Yeah,
and I would not be surprised of if he was
inspired by these Eastern models. Yeah. So, in order to
reach that five point six billion year point in the
future and meet the Bodhistotta of the future and and
(06:13):
serve him um, you have to self mummify as a
living Buddha, which Jeremiah explains as a as a means
again to reach this towout sue heaven, which is the
current residence of the Bodhisatta of the future. So you
have a What you do is you engage in a
slow and meditative approach to the death point, and it's
only then that the monk can self guide their soul
(06:35):
through the void to a realm of his choosing. And
this reminds me of of elements of Tibetan Buddhism as well,
where there's this huge emphasis on what happens immediately following death,
and you've got to be prepared for that journey between
this incarnation and the next. And as we learned, there
is a connection between Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism and this practice.
(06:59):
Their culture really connected in a way, and we'll get
to that later, but we wanted to start with these
guys the and I say guys. They were all men
the soku shin butsu practice. Now another source, we're looking
at his mummification in the ancient and new world. This
is a wonderful resource for anything related to mummies. Will
include a link up. This is our goat here every
time we do something about yeah yeah, from Anna Maria
(07:22):
Rosso and she classifies shing gone self immuni mummification as
a case of entering a kind of undead suspension in
which the monk's body is preserved for resurrection upon Mikoru
Bosatsu's arrival. So they're kind of two different takes. They
are probably amounting to the same thing. Either you're sticking
(07:43):
around and tell he comes, or you're preserving your body
is kind of an anchor for your wandering spirit to
go and serve him. Now. Yeah, And so the first
I guess founder of this that practiced this was Kobu Daishi,
and he was alive from seven seventy four war to
eight thirty five. And the idea here is that he
(08:04):
remained in this particular state within the Gogyo mausoleum, and
monks to this day right still bring food to him
as he awaits the arrival of their you know this
this Buddha in heaven essentially. Yeah, there's some wonderful images
of monks bring into the highly ritualized affair. It's not
just someone pushing ateria tray under a crypt door or anything.
(08:27):
It's a it's a it's very ritualized. And they bring
this fine chest up with with food for him. One
of the things I read was that supposedly his nails
and hair continued to grow for years after his death. Uh,
And monks would go in there when they would feed him,
they would also give him a trim and redress his body. Uh.
(08:47):
And then you know, they'd go back another thirty years
later or whatever, and they'll just be dust. And the
dust was the rags of the robes essentially, and they
clear it out and do the whole process all over again.
But the myth is that his hair and nails kept
growing and so they had to cut it. Huh. So
in all of this, um, obviously we need to we
need to state that we're dealing with the religious interpretations
(09:11):
and often in supernatural layers, all on top of a
body's decomposition or lack of decomposition. So as we go
through all of this, you keep an open mind about it,
but also you know, don't feel I mean, feel free
to pick at a little bit with your mind. Yeah,
and I think, like the Egyptian mummies, there is of
(09:32):
course the cultural and religious aspect that comes into play
that you know, promotes this activity. But then there's a
science behind it to actually achieve mummification in such a
way that the body doesn't decay. Right, Yeah, because okay,
so so what's the goal here? The goal is to
gradually reduce one's physical body to a withered state, just
(09:53):
like how much of a mummy can I become while
still alive, while just meditating and trying to re to
that death point and then to remain dry and for
the most part incorruptible. So in order to achieve this
state would be Soko shum bits who first practices a
starvation diet. Okay, and this consists of just nuts and
(10:14):
berries and tree bark and roots and uh this phase
apparently last would last between three and ten years, however
long it took to whittle that body down to the
skin and bone state atlasientially starving themselves. Yeah. In fact,
that diet, did you know, like it was designed specifically
(10:35):
to strip them of body fat. That's what specifically ate
those things. And in fact, some of the herbs and
nuts that were involved in that diet were designed to
I mean, they didn't have the science of this, but
they inhibited bacterial growth. So that was part of the
process here of helping you mummify yourself. Yeah, and I
guess that could conceivably cut down on decomposition too, because
so much of the decomposition, as we've discussed in the
(10:56):
previous momification episode, is coming from within. So keep that
in mind as well. You're dealing with early people that
are looking at a corpses decomposition, they're often thinking of
it as an externalized decomposition, the elements making the body decompose,
when really it's most of the decomposition is occurring within,
as the body begins to fall apart of the bacteria
(11:18):
feeds on everything. Yeah. And as part of that too,
they weren't even allowed to eat specific things as part
of their diet too, so like cereal, wheat, rice, foxtail, millet,
proso millet, and soybeans were all things they had to
stay away from because of you know, it would promote
bacterial growth. Now, Atlas Obscura also has a has a
page about self mumification, and they mentioned that the poisonous
(11:40):
sap from the rushi tree uh was also used to
the monks consumed this to purge their bodily fluids and
and supposedly repel scavenging parasites. Yeah, and this is brutal,
Like the several accounts that I read of this, I mean,
purge bodily fluids is accurate, but I mean it was
violent vomiting uh. And but they did it, you know,
(12:03):
for this reason. It was part of the sacrifice of
being able to make this journey through time. And in fact,
here's another interesting tidbit that I read. They did X
rays of some of these monks uh and they found
that there were river stones in their guts. So apparently
they ate those two. I don't know what the promotion
(12:23):
would be like what you know, how that would affect
the mommification process. But they were filling their stomachs with stones.
And it goes without saying, if anyone out there is
looking to lose weight, um, please don't try this diet.
Please don't try the self modification diet. Although I could
see that being the next big thing. Yes, Okay, so
(12:44):
you're finally reduced to the state of walking or maybe
just sitting here. I wonder if they could even walk.
I would imagine the other monks maybe had to help
them get from place to pull, because they have to
be pretty frail at this point. UM. So at this
point they be You're buried alive with a little help
from your friends, obviously, um for three years, with only
bamboo breathing tubes to sustain you down there in the darkness,
(13:08):
and here you meditate, you recite sutras, and you periodically
ring a bell um to let everyone know that you're
still down there, still meditating, until eventually you're gonna die
from dehydration. Yeah. So the idea here is that they're
when they're buried alive, they're buried alive in the lotus position.
So I think that the box or whatever they're in
is designed to fit their bodies in the lotus position.
(13:31):
And then when you stop ringing that bell, I think
that you ring the bell once a day basically to
say like, hey, I'm still moving down here. And when
it stops, that's when they take the tube out. Uh.
And they sealed the tomb uh, and there's a thing
here too, that the number three is very important to
this ritual. They did things in threes, uh, and it
(13:51):
was particular to the Buddhist priesthood. The reason why is
that apparently there's three jewels in Buddhism, the Buddha, the Sanga,
and the Dharma. And then there's the three great secrets
of secret of the body, which are moodras, which we
know over here as you know yoga practice basically. And
then there's a secret of speech mantras, and the secret
of the mind which is meditation. So that's why they
(14:14):
wait for three years before they pull them back up.
And so when they do pull them up, the first
thing you check is that could be corruption level of
the body. If it's uncorrupted, then the then hey, success
self mummification has taken place. You dress uh the monkey
in robes and put them on display for veneration. If
the body's rotted, however, you're going to perform an exorcism
(14:36):
and bury the corpse. Yeah. That two extremes. One is
you're venerated forever. The other is this is a hideous,
disgusting thing. We have to exercise it like you don't
exercise just a regular dead body. Right, but this this
process went wrong, and it's you know, within that practice,
I can sort of understand how they would they would
(14:56):
see it as being the opposite of holy. Yeah, is
well discuss later. You see this this interesting um dichotomy here,
where on one hand, there's still very much this idea
that a corpse is a thing that is not it's
not pleasant, it's not to really be dealt with, you Bury,
I can get rid of it, except if it's the
body of a very special individual. Is that if the
(15:19):
body itself is in this strange, undeath uncorrupted state, and
then it is an object of veneration. Yeah, And I
want to add here they had a couple of little
cheats that they were here too. After they pulled the
bodies out. It's true that, you know, if the body
itself hadn't decayed, that that was when they venerated them.
But after they pulled it out, if it hadn't decayed,
(15:41):
they would preserve it by adding incense to the body,
and then they would um dry it out over a
charcoal fire. Yeah. And this is this kind of gets
back to the original idea from our Egyptian Amumies episode,
where you have mummification begin as environmental process, and when
the environmental process fails due to different environmental circumstances such
(16:02):
as more elaborate tombs so that are being used, then
you have to begin employing mummification techniques, uh to to
fake what you're not achieving naturally. And so we see
a bit of that here. It's like, Okay, if it
has corrupted or it looks like it's corrupting a little bit,
what are some cheats we can apply to get it
back into that that desired zone. Yeah, in the same
(16:24):
way that the Egyptians started off by burying their bodies
in the dry sands, and that would help to prevent
them from decaying. They're in Japan just using charcoal, fire
and smoke basically to achieve the same thing. Less than
thirty Japanese monks are known to have completed this grueling
journey to the death point. And of course we have
(16:44):
no idea if they found the Boodhystot buddhistop of the future,
or if they're going to at some point the distant future. Yeah,
I mean that's still to come. Yeah, five billion years,
that's the way is off. But the Japanese government, like
I said at the top. They did not like this,
and as of the nineteenth century it is illegal to
do that, though some of these monks did continue this
(17:05):
practice and into the twentieth century. I think, like the
early nineteen hundreds, they were a monks doing this um
the majority of which happened at a temple on Mount
you don't know called da Nichi bu uh and they're
basically there's an idea that there's a local spring there
that high has high levels of arsenic in it, so
(17:26):
they think that has something to do as well with
the mummification process, that somehow arsenic is contributing to those
uh in The area around there is where they conducted
their exercises UH. And in Japanese the area is called
sennen Zawa and that translates into the mountain stream of
otherworldly men or swamp of wizards or swamp of immortals,
(17:49):
which I like. I liked both of those quite a bit.
The swamps swamp of wizards. Yeah, uh, you can still
visit sixteen of these uh soku shinbutsus of the twenty
eight that remain, there were thirty that no were known
to have completed it. But I think that some of
them are off limits, you know, for obvious reasons. They're
probably pretty fragile, but in various locations around Japan you
(18:12):
can visit these. Uh. The hundreds of people are thought
to have attempted this, so that, you know, getting back
to that those exorcisms there, that means there were hundreds
of these exorcisms of these bodies that did decay. Yeah.
And also it's such a grueling endeavor to undertake. I
can't I can't imagine everyone who started out on this path,
(18:33):
had the had the afforded to do actually make it
to that death point in the original prescribed way. Yeah,
I agree, And I want to add two stories about
two of these monks that I think put it into
a little bit of perspective here. And this isn't to
say that all of the hundreds of monks that attempted
this had these kinds of background. But the most famous
(18:54):
of which, uh, that you can I think still visit
is Daijuku Bosatsu Shinyo Kai Shonen uh. And he mummified
himself at the age of nineties six in seventeen three,
and he's at that mount uh you don't know temple.
He was a farmer. And the story goes that he
was a farmer. He was walking along the road one
day and a samurai bumped into him, and the samurai
(19:18):
took offense to this and started to fight, essentially drew
sword and started to fight, and this farmer only had
a walking stick and somehow defeats the samurai and kills
him in battle. Uh. But killing a samurai was illegal then, uh,
And the punishment was death. So he didn't want to
die for defending himself on the road, so he fled
(19:39):
to this temple and took up the religious you know
practice in the name Shinyo Kai. So that's what led
to his eventual you know, immersion into this culture and
then leading on to the self mummification practice. But I
gotta say, like, if I got to ninety six, you know,
I'd give it a shot. Why not? I mean, you
(20:02):
can you can only be in control of so many
different things at that point. Why not be in control
of your your journey to the death point. Yeah. And
there's another monk known as Tetsu Monkei who's another part
of this order, and he supposedly killed two samurai with
a fire hook. Wait, what's a fire I don't know.
It's I was just imagining it was a hook that's
(20:23):
on fire, but I bet it's like a hook that
you used to move charcoals around something like that. It's
that because we also see this this traditional element of
the common man does not have access to weapons and
then must create a martial art around common farming or
you know, crafting tools. Well, this story was like a
(20:43):
little too large for some people to believe, so they
looked into it some more and they think what actually
happened as he killed a prostitute, okay, and then like
like the other guy fled to the monastery. Same thing.
But this guy, Remember I was talking about how they
would cut their own eyes out as part of aractice.
He's one of them. He cut out his own eye
and threw it into a river because he wanted to
(21:05):
pray for a cure for a local eye disease. It
was infecting the local villages. So that gives you kind
of an idea of the you know, these practices. We
don't have a lot of information on this, but it's
it's pretty extreme. Yeah, and I believe you were looking
into this and you found that there there is a
group that is that is advocating for more more access
(21:28):
to the existing mummified monks. Yeah. My understanding is that
it's called the Japanese Mummy Research Group and that apparently
they're responsible for studying, you know, the mummified monks, and
they petitioned the government for permission to exhume the graves
of the ones that they find. But I believe that
this was started around the same time that the practice
was ending, probably the beginning of the twentieth century. So
(21:52):
now we're going to venture away from Japan and into China,
and particularly we're going to look at Chan Buddhism. This
is a cool of my Yana Buddhism that developed in
China from the sixth century uh CE onward. So here
we see a definite merging of Buddhist and dallast ideas.
And interesting here is the notion that Buddhism and dallas
(22:15):
to sorcery seem to combine into a notion of Buddha
is a sort of foreign immortal who achieved some form
of death. Yeah, there's a fantastic piece that we used
for this, uh well as one of our sources for
this episode. That's up on Ion I and from a
couple of years ago, I think, and it's you know what,
I didn't realize it until I've finished the piece and
(22:37):
I rolled back up and I realized it's written by
one of my favorite writers over there, woman named Lauren Davis.
She's good. Yeah, it's some of my favorite stuff on
their site is by her. But this is specifically about
in the Science and Civilization in China, a book, which
is the fifth volume of that series. Uh. And they
speculate that the self mummification originally was a dallast practice.
(22:59):
They note that while Japanese monks are the most famous
self mummifiers, there are deliberate self mummifications that have also
been recorded in China and India as well. So this
is where like, clearly there's a connection somehow between these
two things. They couldn't have just especially because they're from
the same belief systems. They couldn't have just independently sprung
up on their own. Yeah, And so that's why we're
(23:20):
looking at a Chan Buddhism and some particular examples here
among the some of the Chan masters, because you seem
of a form of mummification that maybe isn't quite as
deliberate and self destructive as the Japanese models we were
looking at, but but definitely similar blue print. And the
idea here is that they're this particular sect of Buddhism,
(23:41):
which I was unfamiliar with until we researched. This is
known for rejecting empty rituals and unworthy authority figures. Yeah,
there's a quote that I was reading and one of
the great sources for this section of the podcast, Robert H.
Sharks the idolization of Enlightenment on the mummification of Chan
masters in medieval China. Uh. People is how there's there's
a quote that the Chan would use where it says,
(24:04):
if you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. Yeah, in
other words, saying that if you meet somebody claiming to
be this great individual, reject them. Yeah. I've heard that
term before and I've always liked it, but I didn't
realize that it originated here, and in fact that this
particular school, you know, the idea was they didn't wanna
be based around superstition essentially. Uh. And so it's strange
(24:25):
then that they were involved in the mummification thing. Yeah,
this is this is definitely a fascinating area where you
see these merging and in times contradictory ideas coming from
the Dallist roots and the Buddhist roots, where on one
level Buddhism, you think of Buddhism and you think of, oh,
it's all about not caring. It's about about setting aside
(24:49):
any high levels of anxiety about death or even life
itself that you're you're disconnecting. And then with with Dallas Sorcery,
you have a farm more supernatural understanding of man's place
in the universe and what's possible with the physical body,
and these two things kind of merged together into one form. Yeah,
(25:09):
and I'm sure too that like the political and economic
and cultural pressures that were going on in the area
at the time contributed to this melding. You know, the
the the economic aspect of were interesting when we get
into it. Yeah, especially, So one thing about this, you know,
it's important to say you hinted at it here, is
that most Buddhism regards corpses as just lifeless lumps of flesh,
(25:33):
right rotting flesh in particular, and you just dispose of them.
It's no longer a person. So again it's it's a
little strange, this veneration thing, but we'll get into you know,
there there is a worship that was applied to their
abbots in particular. Uh. And this explains their fascination with
the possibility of bodies not decomposing. So they thought that
(25:54):
if their bodies didn't decompose, that they were incorruptible. And uh.
This involved you know, artificial mummification the same way that
we've talked about previously, but it was thought as a
mean to achieve spiritual purity and preserve it within their remains. Yeah.
So you see this, this idea that an individual is
is going to be wholly enough, pure enough that there
(26:16):
there's gonna be residual purity, residual karma even in the body. Uh.
And and the dallast roots here, apparently are that a
Daoist master sheds his body like the shell of a cicada,
and then his spirit alone ascends into the spirit realm,
leaving behind and this incorruptible body and the body serves
as a kind of anchor for an immortal soul wandering beyond,
(26:41):
which which is a fabulous idea that is is almost
science fiction in its elements, like the idea of say
a a body and some suspended state, but the mind
is wandering around in some some sort of virtual reality. Yeah,
And I think it's important to note too that these abbots,
my impression from the reading was these abbots, uh, we're
(27:02):
venerated because they're very charismatic and and the followers within
their temples and their communities loved them dearly. And so
part of this also was that the preservation allowed for
the new abbot that would come in, who was maybe
a little green and maybe not known so well, to
have a little bit of leeway uh and at time
(27:25):
to to get to know them better and build his
reputation and charisma, while the mummified version of the previous
abbot was still there for them to connect with. Yeah. Because, yeah,
the the center that the abbot and his charismatic power,
it had a lot to do with the support from
the community, the support from the government. It's like having
the lead singer of a band change, how right, But
(27:45):
imagine if the new lead singer could say, actually, the
old lead singers right here. He's in this he's not dead.
He's in this undeathed state, so he's technically still here.
You can come and venerate him. He's still the the
ritual spiritual center of of the monastery. And and that's
important to it's it's not only the outside forces, but
(28:06):
the inside forces. The the Abbot in this undeathed state,
in this mummified state, remains the rallying point for everyone.
That's what Black Sabbath should have done is mummified Ozzy
Osbourne and then had Ronnie James Dio you know, performed
with Azzi's uh mummified body on stage. Or Van Halen
could have done it as well. Sammy Haggard performs with
(28:28):
the body of David. They had the idea of an
aged rocker as a mummy. It is just perfect, I
mean because they kind of reached that state on their own.
Look at any and you can easily see a month. Yeah,
Mick Jagger is definitely approaching mummification. So okay. So the
first chin Master mummy that we know of was a
(28:49):
guy named Tao Sin And who was alive from five
eighty to six fifty one. When he passed away at
the age of seventy two, his students wrapped him in
lacquered cloth so they could preserve the miracle of his
natural incorruptibility. Uh and so like like what you're saying,
this wasn't a you know, a normal practice for Buddhism.
Is sometime in Eastern Han or early six Dynasties period,
(29:12):
the rationale around this changed. They wanted to maintain the
integrity of the body and the soul together after death
through this kind of preservation. Now, another example that Robert H.
Sharf brings out in his piece is that of Sean
wou Wei, who died in seven thirty five at age
ninety nine, but he wasn't buried until seven forty, and
according to his biography, he was he was so quote
(29:34):
imbued with meditation and wisdom that no decay occurred in
the five years between death and the tomb, and in
seven fifty eight, eighteen years later, his dissiples dug him
back up and then discovered very little decay. Or so
it's said, again, you kind of have to throwing a
little grain of salt here and there when it comes
to the the official religious account. So what's the common
(29:57):
practices here, so that it's different from what you're talking
about with the Japanese model earlier there it's not self
mumification in the sense that they starve themselves and eat
nuts and berries and then bury themselves life. Right, it's
not that gory. Uh. It's almost like the kind of
mummification in a lot of ways, similar to Egyptian mummification. Yeah,
(30:19):
because you do see these varying levels of embalming techniques
coming online to to make up for missing environmental factors.
Mummification itself in China goes back as far as two
hundred and six BC. Uh. And then the notion of
a lingering soul presence in the body like may underlie
(30:39):
all of it it, just as it seems to underlie
any mommification practice. Yeah. And the spirits of your ancestors
still to this day, seems to be fairly potent cultural
idea China. So they had various preservation practices. Uh. One
is just temporary burial, which again has a lot in
common with the Egyptian model bearing in the ground. If
(31:00):
the ground is dry, then it's going to dry the
body out, drying over a fire, which you mentioned already. Yeah,
this is my favorite though. Salt brine in a used
inside of an urn to pickle the body, essentially tick
all the body. I read about that one. That is,
so you put the body in there and let it
soak for like years, right, and then you take it
(31:20):
out and momify it. And in any of these cases,
when you get the body back out, it's it's dried out.
You wrap it in various layers, including lacquered cloth, then
you dress it in robes, and you place it in
a in a position and befitting a chan master. So
from what I was reading, the lacquering process is actually
very similar to the same process that they used to
(31:41):
produce specific kinds of Buddhist sculptures, and it resulted in
a durable finished product. So I think that that's where
they got the idea from. They said, well, let's apply
this statue process to you know, venerating our elders. Uh.
And so do you want to get into the thing
about that there's a technique of placing aid and bone
in the nine orifices of the body. Yeah, this is
(32:03):
interesting and I don't have a lot of details on this.
I probably don't have to to employ them. But the
the the use of jade is interesting, um because it
was a common Han dynasty method for the wealthy to
be buried in a suit of jade. Uh. People may
have seen images of this. It tends to it's not
a solid suit of jade, but it has like jade que,
(32:25):
jade squares, jade tiles um. And this is because the
stone was thought to prevent decay. So if it works
on the outside, which there's no evidence that it did,
but if it worked on the outside, then the magical
thinking is that it would work inside as well. Because
it's as with the Egyptian model of momification, you see
this continuing struggle to try and figure out where decay
(32:46):
is coming from from the outside or from the inside. Therefore,
put the jade on the outside and put it on
the inside. Um. If you ever have the opportunity to
see a Chinese mummy, definitely take advantage of it. I
got to see one at the Museum of the Western
Han Dynasty Mausoleum in Guangzhoe when I was there a
couple of years ago to get my son. He was
(33:07):
not impressed. He was a year and a half and
did not see the beauty of everything there and cried
his head off. But I did get to see a
fabulous restored mummy there with the the jade suit, and
that would have been zal May, the second ruler of
the Kingdom of southern you. Yeah, I think I've brought
up on the show before that I spent some time
(33:29):
in my childhood in Southeast Asia and I lived in
China for six or seven weeks on my own. Actually
it was a teenager, which is kind of a wild story.
But I never got to see anything like that that
sounds really cool. Well, apparently there are only a handful
of these. I think they're more than more than ten,
so that's about how many have been recovered. Only five
have been restored. So I just kind of looked into
(33:51):
gain to see one while in Guangjoe. So another thing
about these specific Chun Buddhist monks the way that they
were preserved. After they were covered in the lacquered cloth,
they were gilded as well, so they're they're they're there's
elements of gold here, right or some kind of metal,
(34:12):
and uh, they're dressed in fine robes afterwards as well.
So when you saw that one, did it have that
kind of shiny exterior? Um, I don't remember there being
as much of a shiny exterior so much, but the
jade suit was the thing that made the big impact.
And given how old they are too, I would imagine
over time that you know, that would kind of fade. Um.
(34:35):
So one of the things about this is that there
was a traditional funeral practice even before this mummification came
into effect, which the abbots were always buried with a
portrait of themselves nearby. Uh. And at some point mummifying
the abbot replaced the portrait the idea of being able
to interact with the you know, the the abbot and
(34:56):
his spirit. So it created a flesh icon and yeah,
I love that that's the term that the traffic uses
in his piece, flesh icon. So they could use these
as both an effigy and a holy relic. But there's
also as we talked about a little bit earlier, is that, Um,
there's the aspect of interacting with the government here too
in the economy. So a lot of these temples and
(35:20):
institutions were supported by government funds, and so if the
abbot was very popular with the community and very charismatic
and then passed away, there's always the possibility that the
government might withdraw funding and think, oh, well, this is
no longer an active institution, right. Yeah, it comes back
to the lead singer scenario exactly. The lead singer drops
out and how are you going to keep the support
(35:43):
for your product going, so they mummified them in order
to keep it active. And again, like we're talking about, yeah,
the the new singer, the new abbot comes in and
kind of gets used to the community then and hopefully
builds up enough of a following that he too gets mummified.
You know, I do want to throw in real quick
that another fascinating aspect of this, uh that came out
in my my research is that according to Holmes aged Welch,
(36:06):
that's he's an early twentieth century expert on East Asian culture,
particularly Taoism and Buddhism, and he's talking about the mummification
of the bodies and he points out, of course how
they were gilded, but quote sometimes the lobes of the
ears were lengthened and a dot was placed between the eyebrows.
Golden skin, long lobes and the uma dot were among
(36:27):
the thirty two sacred marks of a Buddha. The implication
was therefore that in his lifetime, the monk whose corpse
the visitors saw before him, had attained buddhahood. So in
this we see postmortem body modification, which granted any form
of mummification or funerary, right, you know, anytime anything a
mortician does is body modification. But generally we were all about,
(36:50):
let's just make it look as much like it did
when it was alive. But here we see a modification
to make the body look more like the spiritual idea
idea as as as opposed to just what they were. Definitely,
from what I've seen the photographs during the research, I mean,
these do not retain human form in the way that say,
(37:10):
like our typical idea of an Egyptian mummy does, right,
because it's not stuff full of blackered linen and all
all kinds of materials, but it is you know, designed
to be an icon in the same way like a
statue would be, and really to be kind of a
trans human body for a different type of being, which
is such a fascinating idea. And I think there are
(37:33):
elements of that in Egyptian um momification as well, but
they I think it's often lost on us, And I
feel like this example brings out that motif in a
in a new way. Yeah it. You know, every time
we get into this kind of stuff, I have to
think to myself, like, what kind of uh post death
rituals are we going to come up with in the future,
(37:53):
you know, like where we go on with that when
we start taking our bodies and you know, with trans
humanism coming along, know, when we start trying to make
them look more alien or something like that. Yeah, we
ended up being Joe did a podcast episode on the
near future of various funeral rights. Yeah, we didn't get
into this as much, but I can't help but think
of RoboCop, remember, because there's a whole scene where it's
(38:16):
like RoboCop meeting his former wife and someone's pointing out, well,
this isn't him, that we did this to honor him,
which if you take the place is just like glued
on over. So in a sense, he's buried within RoboCop.
He kind of like a like a Warhammer four eight
thousand dreadnought where the tomb is the robot. Which so
(38:38):
in a way, RoboCop is a funeral rite and one
that I think we should all be open to. Yeah,
why not. Let right, it's in the movies. It went
really well, it did, Yeah, it went great. Alright, So
we've discussed the Soko Shimbidsu, We've talked about the John
Masters and those are just two specific examples from East
(38:58):
Asian mom of the Asian history, and we we can't
get into all of the examples in this podcast. Maybe
we'll come back for more later. You do see related examples,
particularly in Thailand. Um, very much of the same model
I think is Sean Buddhism, but certainly an area that
deserves its own spotlight, perhaps at a later date. Yeah,
(39:20):
and in fact, you know, there's of course other mummies too,
especially in the American continent. So uh, there's possibility that
we could talk about Mayan or Tintrue mummies in the
future too. So if you're interested, let us know. Yeah,
sounds good to me. I am certainly down to do
more episodes on global mummification rituals me too, So let
us know. There's tons of avenues to get in touch
(39:41):
with us. In fact, we are on Facebook, Twitter and
Tumbler on all of those social media platforms. We are
under the handle below the mind that's where you can
find us and interact with us. But not only that,
we're on periscope every Friday at noon now and you
can directly interact with us there. We Uh. If you
haven't used periscope before, you get to see us hanging
(40:02):
out in front of an iPad and chatting with you, uh,
conversations that we had last week. We're about the possibility
of you, Joe and I writing our own horror anthology books.
One of our fans suggested that, all right, keep suggesting that. Yeah. Uh,
And and of course you can always visit the site
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, where we've got
(40:22):
blog posts and videos and all kinds of other content
that's not just the podcast. We work hard on Stuff
to Blow your Mind, and we've got all kinds of
crazy things out there, especially about mummies, right exactly. Yeah,
we have a lot of content about mommies, and don't
make sure include some links to it in the landing
page for this episode, as well as links out to
some of these key resources if you want to deeper
dive into the topics. And hey, if you want to
(40:44):
reach out to us directly, you don't have to self
mummify yourself. You don't have to slowly poison yourself and
been a Buddhist cript. Yeah we're here. Instead, just send
us an email. You can reach us at blow the
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(41:06):
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