Introduction: Passing On: The Social Life of Death in South Asian Religions

In his classic study of the collective representation of death, Robert Hertz suggested that death is best understood as a rite of passage in which the deceased makes a transition from the visible “here and now” to an invisible hereafter.1 Death is thus the ultimate experience of passage; it is a threshold through which one passes beyond the house of life to some unknown place. As the termination of life, death is both a terminus ad quem and a terminus a quo, both an “end to which,” or conclusion, and an “end from which,” or commencement. In many South Asian religious traditions, death constitutes a particularly important moment of passage since it offers the deceased the opportunity to pass beyond the dissatisfactory and often painful cycle of repeated birth and death (sam$såra) and to experience liberation (mokßa or nirvån$a). It is through the terminal of death that those who are ready for it pass into the deathless interminability of the unconditioned. For those who are not yet ready for this ultimate passage out of the realm of conditioned existence, death entails a transition to another life. As this transition is represented in many South Asian traditions, the assistance of the living is vital. To ensure safe passage of the deceased to his or her postmortem destination, a great deal of sustained ritual activity is required. Without the ritual intervention of the living—the provision of sustenance and the ritual manipulation of various surrogates for the dead, for example—the deceased may fail to achieve a satisfactory postmortem condition and end up instead suspended in limbo between life and death. Hindus perform ancestral rites (∞råddha) in order to provide sustenance for the deceased on the year-long journey to the abode of the ancestors (pi†®-loka). Tibetan Buddhist mourners sponsor recitations of texts such as the Bar do thos grol