Rethinking Death through a Nepalese Cremation Ritual

Pages upon pages of notes don’t even begin to recount the endless people met, memories made, and rapids run in the past three weeks. This blog will be one of many, trying to recall and reflect upon 16 life changing days so stay tuned. I last left you somewhere in the sky between Doha and Kathmandu. Our story today starts in a four story air b and b with a courtyard filled with kayaks and gear. For four bedrooms and many couches, me and my group of five other kayakers payed $35 each for two nights in Kathmandu. The house rested in possibly the least tourist focused neighborhood in town. Every time yet another taxi with a kayak on top pulled up, we were given very confused glances from the neighbors. Across from our home the neighbor’s wife could be found analyzing our foreign lifestyle from her balcony and the family that lived next to her frequently stared at us outside of their tin roofed kitchen.

After arriving with my kayak loaded in a single cab cargo truck the team’s first excursion was a short walk to the most famous temple of Shiva in the Hindu religion, Pashupatinath. Just hours earlier at 3 am, the three kayakers that arrived before me could have been found carrying their boats up the steps of the temple from the airport because “the taxi drivers were trying to rip them off”. The late night discovery of my friends led us to learn that the Pashupatinath Temple is located on the banks of the sacred Bagmati river and consist of a maze of steep stairs and various small temple structures. We paid a tourist’s entrance fee and were given a pamphlet that outlined the rules of the temple, which included “don’t feed the monkeys”, “be respectful of customs and traditions” and the last bullet point which we found quite alarming read: “don’t get too close when taking photos of burning corpses”. This last bullet point confused us but we didn’t know how to get more information without seeming ignorant or disrespectful so we moved on without a second thought. After cluelessly wandering through the temple with no knowledge of what it symbolized, we reached the river which was lined with brick platforms that stretch into the water, one of which had a large pile of straw and wood burning on top of it. We quickly stopped and wondered if this was what the pamphlet had foreshadowed but then left the temple to continue our errands. Shortly after stepping out of the temple gates and onto the busy street, we were approached by a Nepali man with excellent English who offered to tour us around the temple and inform us of all that we missed. A combination of having nothing better to do and still being curious about the mysterious burning platforms led us to agree. As we walked back into the temple we passed a van with a small crowd gathered around it. Two men lifted a plank loaded with what could be none other than a human body covered in a sheet, out of the back of the van. I cast an alarmed look at my friend Jimmy who responded with “well that’s a moment you’ll never forget”. He was right. I’ll never forget seeing a body unloaded into a loud and chaotic crowd of people who seemed so unfazed by the presence of death.

After 45 minutes of information from our impromptu tour guide, we were enlightened. We learned that in the Hindu religion, Shiva is the God of Destruction. A western mind hears this and immediately associates destruction with evil. The Hindu religion however, sees death and destruction as a natural and beautiful process that must happen in order for a soul to continue on and be reincarnated into another life form. Because death is not viewed as a fearful process, the cremations happen publicly on the platforms previously mentioned. Bodies are unloaded at the temple and blessed with a red powdered pigment. Red is a sacred color used at funerals, holidays, weddings, and births. The deceased are then brought to the rivers edge where the family cleans them with sacred water from the river. They are then placed on one of the platforms with wood and straw and cremated. In rural areas far away from the sacred Bagmati, cremations take place on the banks of local streams and rivers. I paddled past at least three different cremations during my time on Nepalese rivers. The river’s edge is crowded with people watching the ritual take place and milling about on other business. After the cremation, the ashes are swept into the river and the largest remaining part of the corpse is gifted back the family and buried in the earth. With this ritual the body returns to what are considered the five elements of the earth. The smoke from the body returns to wind and sky, the ashes return to the fire first then are washed into water, and the last piece of the body is buried in the earth. We stood amongst the crowd and watched as three cremation rituals took place simultaneously and what started as an alarming experience ended as one of the most enlightening and beautiful learning moments of my life.