Being a Corpse the Buddhist Way: Scenes from a Singaporean Chinese Mortuary

The Singaporean world of death is in the midst of a revolution. In the span of a generation, funerals have been simplified, “traditional” mourning garb has vanished, cremation has replaced burial, and ancestral altars have been removed from family homes. Drawing on fieldwork in Hokkien, Hakka, and Teochew funeral parlors, where I worked as an embalmer, I argue that these changes are part of a larger, politically orchestrated shift to mutate the form taken by religious belief itself, transforming a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors, into a sterile, more easily controlled, “Protestant” Buddhism. In this lecture I consider what prompts this emergent Buddhization of Chinese religion. Do shifts in orthodoxy signify shifts in orthopraxy? And what does it mean to be a corpse in a Buddhist way? 

 

Ruth E. Toulson is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research examines the relationship between religion and politics in Southeast Asia, particularly in Singapore, and in Mainland China. Her current book project, Transforming Grief: Life and Death in a Chinese Funeral Parlor, uses death ritual as a lens through which to explore the “Buddhization” of Chinese religion in Singapore. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming. During 2015 she holds an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.