RELIGIOUS MATTERS
Rituals can hold the core beliefs of a culture
and provide a sense of control in an otherwise helpless situation.
Chandan Khanna/AFP
Ketika Garg, The
Conversation
Cultures
have built elaborate rituals to help humans process the
grief of losing someone.
Rituals
can hold the core beliefs of a culture
and provide a sense of control in an
otherwise helpless situation. I came to understand this when I lost my mother
last year and participated in the primary Hindu rituals of death and grief.
The cultural practices and experiences
helped me find meaning in my loss.
Body and
soul
Many
Eastern religions do not bury their dead, instead, they cremate them. Most
Hindus consider this to be the final sacrifice of a
person.
The
Sanskrit word for death, “dehanta,” means “the end of body” but not the end
of life. One of the central tenets of Hindu philosophy is the
distinction between a body and a soul. Hindus believe that the body is a
temporary vessel for an immortal soul in the mortal realm. When we die, our
physical body perishes but our soul lives on.
The soul
continues its journey of birth, death and rebirth, in perpetuity until final
liberation. This is at the heart of the philosophy of detachment
and learning to let go of desires.
Scholars of Indian
philosophy have argued about the importance of cultivating detachment in the
Hindu way of life. An ultimate test of detachment is the acceptance of death.
Hindus
believe that the soul of the deceased stays attached to its body even after its
demise, and by cremating the body, it can be set free. As a final act, a close
family member forcefully strikes the burning corpse’s skull with a stick as if
to crack it open and release the soul.
To fully
liberate the soul of its mortal attachments, the ashes and remaining bone
fragments of the deceased are then dispersed in a river or ocean, usually at a
historically holy place, like the banks of the River Ganges.
Knowledge
within rituals
Someone
from a different tradition might wonder why a ritual should ask mourners to
destroy the body of their loved ones and dispose of their remains when one
should be caring for all that remains of the dead?
As
shocking as it was, it forced me to understand that the burning corpse is only
a body, not my mother, and I have no connection left to the body. My PhD
studies in cognitive sciences, a field
that seeks to understand how our behaviour and thinking are influenced by
interactions between brain, body, environment and culture, made me look beyond
the rituals. It made me understand their deeper relevance and question my
experiences.
Rituals
can help us understand concepts that
are otherwise elusive to grasp.
For example, scholar Nicole Boivin describes the importance of physical doorways
in rituals of social transformation, like marriage, in some cultures. The
experience of moving through doorways evokes transition and creates an
understanding of change.
The
author with her mother at the beach in the city of Puri in 1998. Photo credit:
Arun Garg, CC BY
Through
the rituals, ideas that were abstract until then,
such as detachment, became accessible to me.
The
concept of detachment to the physical body is embodied in the Hindu death
rituals.
Cremation
creates an experience that represents the end of the deceased’s physical
body. Further, immersing ashes in a river symbolises the final detachment with the
physical body as flowing water takes the remains away from the mortal world.
Dealing
with the death of a loved one can be incredibly painful, and it also confronts
one with the specter of mortality. The ritual of liberating the soul of the
dead from its attachments is also a reminder to those left behind to let go of
the attachment to the dead.
For it is
the living who must learn to let go of the attachment to the dead, not the
long-gone soul. Cultural rituals can widen one’s views when it is difficult to
see past the grief.
Standing
at a place where millions before me had come and gone, where my ancestors
performed their rites, I let go of my mother’s final remains in the holy waters
of the river Ganges.
Watching
them float away with the waves of the ancient river helped me recognise that
this was not the end but a small fragment in the bigger circle of life.
As the
Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita – The
Song of God – says of the soul,
It is not
born, it does not die;
Having
been, it will never not be.
Unborn,
eternal, constant and primordial;
It is not
killed, when the body is killed.
Ketika Garg is a PhD Student of Cognitive
Science, University of California, Merced.
This
article first appeared on The Conversation.
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