The term sokushinbutsu or sokushin-jbutsu ( ? Lett. "Buddha in his own body") refers to a particular Buddhist religious ritual, practiced in the eleventh century by several Japanese monks who, through a long and painful mental preparation, physical and food, which culminated with the death, voluntarily predisposing your body to a "automummificazione" process. Unlike other preservation techniques of the body, such as those in use in Ancient Egypt, in this case the preparation for mummification occurred while one who underwent there was still alive.

The phases of the ritual

The process ( nyj?) Is divided into three phases, each of which has a duration of one thousand days each phase is characterized by progressively increasing deprivation, accompanied by exercise and meditation. Through the path of sokushinbutsu is put to the test the resistance, not only physical, of him who is subjected, resulting in profound changes also mental substantially that through a terrible agony which extends for almost six years.
First phase

During the first phase of the path, the monaco travels in a valley called Senninzawa (lett. "Swamp of the immortal"), where a practical life of meditation and hard exercise, but according to a feeding extremely limiting, exclusively water-based diet and the nuts and seeds you can find in the woods, so as to lose the body fat mass.
Second phase

The next phase of the ritual is expected that the Monaco, that during the previous a thousand days he has already eliminated almost completely body fat, undertake an even more depriving diet, feeding only of small quantities of bark, needles and conifer roots, always keeping the body and mind active through exercise and meditation. This type of diet, together with the constant exercise, from the physiological point of view leads to a drastic loss of body weight, in addition to determining a slow but progressive disproportion in the water balance in the body. As we approach the end of the thousand days of this second phase, the monaco also begins to take a poisonous tea made from urushi (Toxicodendron vernicifluum), a poisonous plant whose sap was usually used for cover ceramics. Ingestion of this toxic tea causes the body severe nausea, sweating and urination, leading to further loss of body fluids. In addition, both the internal tissues or the skin absorb the toxin, in turn become so toxic as to make the body, once dead, repellent larvae and other insects that otherwise they ciberebbero.
Third phase

After completing the thousand days of the second phase, the third and final step is the monaco walk into a stone crypt, barely big to hold his body in the lotus position. Then the crypt is sealed, and only a bamboo cannula ensures the exchange of air necessary for survival. Inside the room the Monaco, deprived of food and water, you can only spend the last days in meditation, echoing from time to time a bell that has brought with it inside the tomb, while outside more monks watch waiting for the day so this bell ceases to ring. When this happens, the bamboo cannula is removed from the outside, and the crypt is hermetically sealed, leaving the exhausted agonize monaco in an environment poor in oxygen content. The crypt is closed for another thousand days at the end of which is opened to see if the path is successfully accomplished. If the body is found mummified monaco, the ritual to attain Buddhahood will be considered successfully completed, and the mummified body will be done immediately object of the deepest veneration; but if, on the contrary, in the corpse have taken place putrefactive processes, then immediately perform an exorcism ritual, after which the crypt will again be sealed and the Monaco, even if it can not be considered a Buddha, it will still be respected and admired for the harsh privations path voluntarily undertaken.
Origins and diffusion

The bases of the practice of sokushinbutsu, whose origins can be traced back to the Tantric Buddhism of the Shingon school, reside in a maximalist conception of the path to reach the Nirvana, which is accessed through a very tough preparation, consisting of a long period of exercise and deprivation extremely painful. The ultimate goal of the religious path is the attainment of Bodhi, or the becoming Buddha. In Japan, the ritual of sokushinbutsu appears exclusively restricted to members of the Shingon sect Shugen-do school.

It has been suggested that the practice dell'automummificazione have originated in China during the Tang Dynasty, as part of a complex ritual tantric self-purification, then broadcast in Japan by Kukai, the founder of the Shingon school (the same Kukai, the approach death, would have ceased to drink and eat, devoting himself exclusively to meditation, then taking an embryonic form of sokushinbutsu.

In favor of Chinese origin of sokushinbutsu, it was shown that both the ritual of abstaining from the consumption of the six cereals ( kokudachi?), Both feed on wood ( mokujikigy?) Are the religious practices of Taoist matrix based in their turn on the "doctrine of the Three worms" ( S, sanchongP), which would live inside the body and would accelerate the aging, especially in the presence of their favorite food, cereals.

Moreover, even in the ancient Indian ascetic philosophy of Jainism it is referred to the practice of sallekhana, which provided voluntarily to face the approach of this death.

Although Buddhism, at least in its original conception, discarding asceticism, both the Mahayana school, and afterwards the great Vajrayana school conferred importance to the inner discipline and estrangement, even through hardship car tax courses, to the achievement of ' enlightenment (bodhi), brought concepts to the extreme even by practicing ritual suicide, likely harbingers of the rite of sokushinbutsu real.

Although the practice was undertaken, over the centuries, by several hundred monks, the bodies of only 24 of these have survived to the present day, while on the other, has to be considered that they could not bring to completion the culminating path with automummificazione. The maximum spread of the ritual is registered in the territory of the prefecture of Yamagata, with particular concentration in the sacred area of the Three Mountains of Dewa, home to several Buddhist temples that preserve some of the bodies of those who finished successfully the mummification process, revered as deity by worshipers of the Buddhist religion. The laws of Japan as early as 1877 (Meiji period) has prohibited the exercise of this practice, even if the last monaco who has undertaken died in 1903, completing the ritual. During a trial held in Japan for fraud against the state, the sokushinbutsu was given as a reason by a family that had continued to receive a pension of a spouse who died in the seventies for 30 years.

With reference to Buddhist doctrine, further examples of ritual automummificazione were recently discovered in Tibet and Mongolia. The mummified body of a monaco was also discovered inside a statue of Buddha from China, after it had been examined by X-ray.
The meaning of sokushinbutsu

It is noteworthy that while in Christianity the practices of deprivation (asceticism) and dell'autopunizione (flagellation) generally have a merely atoning significance, to be achieved through the mortification of the flesh, the Buddhist sokushinbutsu be considered starting from completely different assumptions. The difference is the objective that is pursued by the different practices: while in Christianity the objective to be achieved is man's purity, in Buddhism the goal is God, and not themselves. The fundamental meaning of the practice of sokushinbutsu would lie in the concept of Samsara, it understood in the Buddhist sense as a punishment to the eternal cycle of death and rebirth, to which one can only escape by finding a way to reach Nirvana.
The scientific reasons for mummification

With reference to the particular case of the sokushinbutsu, for a long time it was considered that the mummification of the bodies was a process to be put exclusively in connection with the long ritual ordeal to which underwent the monks voluntarily. The different phases that constitute the path of sokushinbutsu appear indeed targeted to the loss, in a slow and gradual, of each track of adipose tissue from the body, and to the drastic reduction of body fluids, in order to eliminate the main trigger factors of putrefactive phenomena . In addition, the final phase, in which the body is placed to blow in a cramped crypt at a reduced oxygen content, is functional to the creation of an anaerobic environment, in such a way as to avoid the development of bacterial organisms.

Given that, in all probability, at the base of the preparation and execution of the ritual were taken into account aspects borrowed from everyday life, such as preservation of dried or dehydrated foods, and the observation of the putrefaction process in cadavers, in recent times it has been It found that, in the prefecture of Yamagata, right in the area Three sacred mountains of Dewa (places where there is the highest concentration of mummies), there are several springs, whose waters, chemical analysis, have revealed high levels of arsenic so as to be almost lethal for humans. Based on this observation, it was suggested that their water intake from these sources may lie the key to the mummification process. Western techniques, such as the so-called tranchiniano method, provide for themselves the use of arsenic-based solutions to achieve the conservation of the body.
Examples of sokushinbutsu

Although the ritual has been practiced in all likelihood as early as the eleventh century, the oldest mummy is known to us is that of Honmykai Shonin monaco ( ?), Which undertook the nyj in the year 1683. He was the servant of a feudal lord, that at some point in life he left his family to devote himself to asceticism, through the practice of mokujiki (lett. "Feed on wood"), that the total rejection of the six cereals, feeding only of needles and cones of conifer, bark, nuts and occasionally also of stones and crystals (elements also present in immortality Taoist search of Lingbao school).

Inside the temple Rysuiji Dainichi-Bo ( ?), In the city of Tsuruoka, it is preserved the body Daijuku Bosatsu Shinnyokai Shonin (1687-1783), a monaco who realized the age of sokushinbutsu 96 years, after dedicating himself to asceticism for most of life.

From Wikipedia