When death occurs, all the karmic forces that the dead person accumulated during the course of their lifetime become activated and determine the next rebirth.
For the living, death is a powerful reminder of the Buddha's teaching on impermanence; it also provides an opportunity to assist the deceased person as they transition to a new existence.
For the living, ceremonies marking another's death are a reminder of life's impermanence, a fundamental aspect of the Buddha's teaching.
[1][4] Death rites are generally the only life cycle ritual that Theravāda Buddhist monks get involved in and are therefore of great importance.
[12] Many other scriptures or a combination of classic Buddhist scriptures, such as the Great Compassion Mantra, the Heart Sutra, the Amitabha Pure Land Rebirth Mantra and Sapta Atitabuddha Karasaniya Dharani (or Qi Fo Mie Zui Zhen Yan 七佛滅罪真言), are also commonly used.
"Exposure of the Corpse" (Lushizang, 露屍葬) is the practice of placing the body of the deceased in an open area instead of using coffins or sarcophagi.
In the Indian tradition, the practice of exposing the corpse included putting the body in the forest or sinking it underwater.
There were three ways to dispose of the remains: Starting from the third century AD, Chinese monks used caves as the resting place for the deceased.
Before medieval times, the word "stone cave" (Shishi, 石室) can either mean the government library or suggest the main room in an ancestral temple (Zongmiao宗廟).
Many Mahayana Buddhist monks noted in their last testaments a desire for their students to bury them sitting in a lotus posture, put into a vessel full of coal, wood, paper and/or lime and surrounded by bricks, and be exhumed after approximately three years.
Many were destroyed during the cultural revolution in China, some were preserved, such as Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch of Ch'an Buddhism and Kim Kiaokak, a Korean Buddhist monk revered as a manifestation of Ksitigarbha, and some have been discovered recently: one such was the Venerable Tzu Hang in Taiwan; another was the Venerable Yuet Kai in Hong Kong.
In Tibet, firewood was scarce, and the ground often not suitable for burial, so the unusual practice of feeding the body to vultures or other animals developed.