Buddhist Rituals of Death and Rebirth: Contemporary Sri Lankan Practice and Its Origins

The book is organized around three ritual stages: death and dying, the funeral, and post-funerary rites. Each section follows three levels of analysis: description of contemporary Sri Lankan practice, commentary on ritual meaning, and investigation of historical roots. Topics include deathbed chanting, taking refuge and precepts, the importance of the final thought-moment, treatment of the corpse, burial and cremation, offering of matakavastra, feeding of hungry ghosts, seventh-day matakadānaya, and the transfer or giving of merit to the deceased. The later sections trace these practices through Vedic, Brahmanical, Pāli, commentarial, Abhidhamma, epigraphic, and archaeological sources. The study shows that Sri Lankan Buddhist death rituals are not merely local customs, but part of a long historical continuum in which Buddhist ideas of karma, rebirth, merit, monks, ancestors, and preta beings interact with older South Asian ritual patterns.