Friday 30 April 2010

General Overview

As I have just finished writing an essay on this topic, a lot of the information that will (hopefully) appear here will be similar to the essay. Why do to lots of research?!

In order to get a clear understanding of what a 'true Buddhist death ritual' is, you have to go through a lot of ethnographic accounts. After doing all this you will then realise that in actual fact there is no such thing as a 'true Buddhist death ritual'.

It works like this; most, if not all societies have their own traditions and practices. Within these are death rituals, and at the beginning they have nothing to do with Buddhism, it is only after Buddhism has been introduced and embraced by a culture does a Buddhist influenced death ritual appear.

When I did my research into the differences between the death rituals, I focused on three different places:

Mongolia

Ladakh

Nepal

Each group had their own rituals and ideas, they also shared some common themes with each other.

Thursday 29 April 2010

Welcome

Hi, welcome to my new blog. This is the first time that I have ever tried working with modern technology.

Part of the Encountering Buddhism course that I'm doing at the University of Aberdeen requires me to to do an online presentation as part of completing the course.

As I lack the skills and the patience to learn how to make my own web page, I have decided to try using a blog. This could work well or it could go horrible wrong!