[Buddha-l] Buddhist stupa to be moved from NM Petroglyph Park

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Tue, 2012-10-02 at 13:55 -0600, Jo wrote:

> Gravestones have names and other info on them so why not the religion
> membership of the dead? I see it as part of the buried remains' IDs,

When Buddhists die, they never have anything put on their graves,
because Buddhists know they don´t have no steenkin' identity. When you
go to a graveyard and see a stone with nothing on it, you can be sure a
Buddhist is buried there. 

My personal hero in these matters is the naturalist and novelist Edward
Abbey (a graduate of the philosophy department at University of New
Mexico), who left instructions to take his body out into the desert to
be buried in a shallow unmarked grave. He wanted to be eaten by maggots,
buzzards and coyotes. His request was for something completely illegal,
but it was honored. To this day, no one knows where he was buried.

That is what my mother wanted also. Unfortunately, her request was not
honored. That could be part of why I was in a bad mood about all the
crosses and stars of David and Unitarian chalices on grave stones I saw
near her tombstone. (There was nothing on her gravestone except her
name, but I know she would have regarded even that much information as a
major invasion of her privacy.) 

Once I get talking about death and funerals, I just can´t seem to stop.
It´s by far my favorite topic. A couple of days ago I heard a
fascinating radio news report about the critical shortage of buzzards in
India. This has caused a crisis in the Parsi community. For centuries
they have put their dead out in towers of silence to be eaten by
buzzards, but the heavy use of pesticides to keep the insect population
down has rendered buzzards infertile, and there is fear that buzzards
may go entirely extinct in India within a few more years. And that
raises the troubling social question, ¨What on earth does one do with a
dead Parsi?¨

-- 
Richard Hayes