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Sky Burial ▢｜Definition｜1st｜20260314131402-00-⌔
Sky burial
Sky burial (Tibetan: བྱ་གཏོར་, Wylie: bya gtor, lit. “bird-scattered”1) is a funeral practice in which a corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements, or to be eaten by scavenging animals, especially crows, vultures, bears and jackals. Comparable excarnation practices are part of Zoroastrian burial rites where deceased are exposed to the elements and scavenger birds on stone structures called Dakhma.2 Sky burials are endemic to Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Inner Mongolia, as well as in Mongolia, Nepal, Bhutan, and parts of India such as Sikkim and Zanskar.3 The locations of preparation and sky burial are understood in the Vajrayana Buddhist traditions as charnel grounds. Few such places remain operational today, as the practice was completely banned during the Cultural Revolution as a superstitious practice; in modern times, the practice is regulated by the Chinese Communist Party due to the ongoing decline of vulture populations.45
The majority of Tibetan people and many Mongols adhere to Vajrayana Buddhism, which teaches the transmigration of spirits. In this tradition there is no need to preserve the body, as it becomes an empty vessel upon death. Birds may eat it or nature may cause it to decompose. The function of the sky burial is simply to dispose of the remains in as generous a way as possible (the origin of the practice’s Tibetan name). In much of Tibet and Qinghai, the ground is too hard and rocky to dig a grave, and due to the scarcity of fuel and timber, sky burials were typically more practical than the traditional Buddhist practice of cremation, which has been limited to high lamas and some other dignitaries.6
Other nations which performed air burial were the Maasai people, Caucasus nations of Georgians, Abkhazians, and Adyghe people, in which they put the corpse in a hollow tree trunk.78
Printed 2026-06-28.
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Link to original Footnotes
Lamb, Robert (2011-07-25). “How Sky Burial Works”. HowStuffWorks. Archived from the original on 2024-05-20. Retrieved 2025-04-24. ↩
“Zoroastrian funerals”. BBC. 2009-10-02. Retrieved 2025-04-24. ↩
Sulkowsky, Zoltan (2013-12-01). Around the World on a Motorcycle. Center Conway, NH: Whitehorse Press. p. 114. ISBN 978-1-884313-55-4. ↩
Faison, Seth (1999-07-03). “Lirong Journal; Tibetans, and Vultures, Keep Ancient Burial Rite”. The New York Times. Paragraph 13. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 2009-08-10. Retrieved 2025-04-24. ↩
MaMing, Roller; Lee, Li; Yang, Xiaomin; Buzzard, Paul (2018-03-29). “Vultures and sky burials on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau”. Vulture News. 71 (1): 22. doi:10.4314/vulnew.v71i1.2. ISSN 1606-7479. ↩
“Sky Burial”. Travel China Guide. 2019-03-20. Retrieved 2025-04-24. ↩
“ОПИСАНИЕ КОЛХИДЫ ИЛИ МИНГРЕЛИИ” [Description of Colchis or Mingrelia]. voslit.info (in Russian). Archived from the original on 2012-12-25. Retrieved 2025-04-24. ↩
“История Грузии” [History of Georgia]. voslit.info (in Russian). Retrieved 2025-04-24. ↩
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