FUNERALS, DEATH CUSTOMS AND CREMATIONS IN THAILAND FUNERALS, DEATH CUSTOMS AND CREMATIONS IN THAILAND Funerals in Thailand are regarded as important events because they represent rebirth and the passage from one existence to another. The older and more respected an individual is the more elaborate the funeral rites. Most Thais are cremated in accordance with a Buddhist ritual. The formal wake period is seven days. Watch Transmorphers Youtube here.

At that time the body is taken to a house of a morgue where it may be kept for days or even years until it is cremated. During a Buddhist funeral in Thailand the family of the deceased buys a temple- like bier made of wood and crepe paper. After the casket is placed on the bier a two- day outdoor wake with music, gambling and barbecues are held. Gifts are piled on top of the casket. Afterward the casket is carried by men with long bamboo poles to the cemetery. After the family the family says it final goodbyes and photographs are taken the bier and the remains of the deceased are burned by the cemetery keeper. Richard Barrow wrote on thaibuddhist.

Although this documentary is promoting intelligent design view I decided to post it. For centuries scientists and philosophers have marveled at an eerie. Acknowledgments. The work of digitizing A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms was made possible by a research grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Phx-ult the. theosophical glossary. by. h. p. blavatsky. author of "isis unveiled", “the secret doctrine", " the key to theosophy" london: the theosophical. Express Helpline- Get answer of your question fast from real experts. Issuu is a digital publishing platform that makes it simple to publish magazines, catalogs, newspapers, books, and more online. Easily share your publications and get. Touching the Toes then Bending Backward Eight Section Brocade Chi Kung. Opening and Movements: From the Wu Ji position step out with your left foot about 6" to. 9780761434337 076143433X Animales de Los Humelados, Dana Meachen Rau 9780711229143 0711229147 Granite and Grit - A Walker's Guide to the Geology of British Mountains.

1 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul. No more missed important software updates! UpdateStar 11 lets you stay up to date and secure with the software on your computer.

Funerals for Thai Buddhists can go on for much longer than what you may have seen before in the West. It could last from anything from one week to a year or two. Depending on how close you were to the deceased, you probably won’t be expected to attend every part of the funeral. For the parents of colleagues at work I probably would only attend the cremation on the last day.

For relations of friends you probably would attend at least one if not all of the chanting sessions. If you are close to the family then it might be appropriate for you to bring a wreath. Either that or give the family some money in an envelope. Source: Richard Barrow, thaibuddhist.

August 5, 2. 01. 1]. On the clothes worn to a Thai funeral Barrow wrote: “You should wear either black or white or a combination of the two. You should avoid any bright colours but you could get away with it if it is a muted colour. For example, I have seen some people wearing blue jeans but with a white or black polo shirt. For myself I usually wear a white shirt and black tie for the main events and a black polo shirt for other times. Ibid]. Callousness Towards Death in Thailand Thailand's newspapers are filled, on an almost daily basis, with graphic pictures of murder and accident victims.

It is not unusual for ambulance drivers to pose with dead bodies and accident victims and post the pictures on Facebook. One posting on Isaanstyle blog reads: “I still remember vividly a horrible crash I had attended a while ago where a drunk Thai guy (surprising) ran into some girls on a motorbike. One girl was killed instantly and she was not a pretty picture to see. Another girl was in a bad way. As the crowd of gawkers gathered to do nothing other than rubber neck, there were tiny kids standing in front of their parents looking at the scene while parents talked. It made me sick to see this and I couldn’t believe that people could be such terrible parents.

There are things that kids can see and other things that they just shouldn’t see. Source: Isaanstyle blog, February 2. Henri Paget, wrote on the ninemsn blog: “When Perth travel agent Michelle Smith was stabbed to death in Phuket, ambulance workers shocked her grieving friends by posing for a photo with her dead body. But scenes like these are commonplace in Thailand, a country with an extraordinarily desensitised attitude towards death and relaxed regulations when it comes to the treatment of dead bodies. Source: Henri Paget, ninemsn, November 1.

Alan Morison, an Australian journalist who lives in Phuket and runs the local news website Phuketwan, was the first Western reporter at the scene when Mrs Smith was killed in a bungled street robbery in June. He said her distraught friends looked on as the ambulance workers took a "trophy shot" with her body. I] tried to explain this process to some of her friends,” he said.

To me it simply represents the acceptance of death in Thai society .. I neither condone it or reject it, simply see it as a cultural difference." *. Marko Cunningham, a New Zealander who operates a free ambulance service in Bangkok and also assists in body care and collection for people who die in Thailand, especially foreigners, said Thai people were not offended by these displays. They see [death] every day in the streets and their lives. Everyone has a family member who has been killed in a road accident or other accident of some sort.”*. Why do ambulance workers pose with dead bodies? The majority of ambulance workers in Thailand are not paid – they are volunteers, required only to undertake a two- day first responder training course.

When they arrive at the scene of a death they are responsible for taking care of the body until a paid official arrives to move them to the morgue. While undertaking the task they will often take photos to post on Facebook or other social media.

The posing with a dead body is a pride thing, to show that one has helped take care of that body.. Mr “It’s a pride in doing a job that society generally shuns,” said Cunningham, the author of the book 'Sleeping with the Dead'.

In some of the photographs the ambulance workers can be seen pointing at the corpse. Pointing at a dead body is just something that has come from pointing to small things in pictures to highlight them,” Mr Cunningham said. It’s a little strange that the Thais still point at the obvious but [it’s] just something that they have actually picked up from Western media, although interpreted in a sometimes bizarre way.” *. Mr Cunningham said he believed the culture was slowly changing to align with Western values, and he had recently seen some volunteers begin to pixelate their gory images. But he said he respected the way the Thai people accept death and do not shy away from it.

I now realise how obsessed with the ‘horror’ of death that Westerners are,” Mr Cunningham said. For Thais it’s sad to say goodbye but they see it just as the end of one journey and the start of another.

We wish them well on their next journey and hope we meet them in the next life to be friends again.”*. Ideas About Death, Suffering and Funerals in Buddhism According to buddhanet. Funeral rites are the most elaborate of all the life- cycle ceremonies and the ones entered into most fully by the monks. House Season 3 Episode 19 Megavideo here. It is a basic teaching of Buddhism that existence is suffering, whether birth, daily living, old age or dying.

This teaching is never in a stronger position than when death enters a home. Indeed Buddhism may have won its way the more easily in Thailand because it had more to say about death and the hereafter than had animism. The people rely upon monks to chant the sutras that will benefit the deceased, and to conduct all funeral rites and memorial services. To conduct the rites for the dead may be considered the one indispensable service rendered the community by the monks.

For this reason the crematory in each large temple has no rival in secular society. Source: Buddha Dharma Education Association, buddhanet. The idea that death is suffering, relieved only by the knowledge that it is universal, gives an underlying mood of resignation to funerals: Among a choice few, there is the hope of Nirvana with the extinction of personal striving; among the vast majority there is the expectation of rebirth either in this world, in the heaven of Indra or some other, or in another plane of existence, possibly as a spirit. Over the basic mood of gloom there has grown up a feeling that meritorious acts can aid the condition of the departed.

Not all the teaching of Anatta (not self) can quite eradicate anxiety lest the deceased exist as pretas or as beings suffering torment. For this reason relatives do what they can to ameliorate their condition. Ibid]. Books: Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies? Kenneth Iverson M. D., descriptions of funeral customs in different cultures; A View of Death and Mourning (1. Matt Cartmill, a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Duke University.

The Privileged Planet - Top Documentary Films. Although this documentary is promoting intelligent design view I decided to post it. For centuries scientists and philosophers have marveled at an eerie coincidence. Mathematics, a creation of human reason, can predict the nature of the universe, a fact physicist Eugene Wigner referred to as the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. In the last three decades astronomers and cosmologists have noticed another, seemingly unrelated, mystery. Contrary to all expectations, the laws of physics seem precisely fine- tuned for the existence of complex life. Could these two wonders actually be isolated pieces of a wider pattern?

Both are prerequisites for science, yet what about the process of scientific discovery itself? What are its necessary conditions?

Why is it even possible? Read any book on the history of science, and you'll learn about magnificent tales of human ingenuity, persistence, and dumb luck. But that's only part of the story, and not even the most important part. Our location is much more critical to science than it is to real estate.

For some reason our Earthly location is extraordinarily well suited to allow us to peer into the heavens and discover its secrets. Elsewhere, you might learn that Earth and its local environment provide a delicate, and probably exceedingly rare, cradle for complex life. But there's another, even more startling, fact, described in The Privileged Planet: those same rare conditions that produce a habitable planet- that allow for the existence of complex observers like ourselves- also provide the best overall place for observing. What does this mean? At the least, it turns our view of the universe inside out. The universe is not "pointless" (Steven Weinberg), Earth merely "a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark," (Carl Sagan) and human existence "just a more- or- less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents" (Steven Weinberg). On the contrary, the evidence we can uncover from our Earthly home points to a universe that is designed for life, and designed for discovery.