Tibet protects celestial burials
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2006-01-12 09:36

The Tibet government has tightened regulations to protect traditional celestial burials.

Photographing or making videos of celestial burial scenes and publishing archive images or descriptive text is now banned, according to the Department of Civil Affairs of Tibet.

Celestial burial is a funeral that has been practiced for more than 1,000 years. Celestial practitioners feed a dead body to vultures, which they call "holy eagles." The move is designed to show respect to Tibetan culture, as well as protect it.

Practitioners applied to the government for stricter regulations to protect the vultures and the custom. Some vultures have died after eating infected or diseased bodies in recent years.

Under the new regulations such bodies are not allowed a celestial burial.

Only relatives and friends of the dead can attend such funerals.

Organizations and people are forbidden to conduct activities that will disturb vultures including shooting, making loud noise, using chemical bait or polluting the water.

The civil affairs department said there are 1,075 celestial burial platforms and nearly 100 practitioners in Tibet.

Unaffected by the changes in burials across other parts of the nation, Tibetans adhere to their own customs.

In most cities, cremation has become common although the Han nationality, the majority of the Chinese population, once buried its dead in tombs.

The provisional regulations, the third of their kind in the past two decades since 1985, underscores that celestial burials are a Tibetan custom strictly protected by law.

To better protect vultures, creatures sacred to Tibetans, firing guns, blasting up mountainsides and mines around burial sites are also prohibited.

The regulations emphasize for the first time that celestial burial operators - a special group of Tibetans who preside over the procedures - should be esteemed as professionals. No discrimination should be directed against them.

The autonomous regional government has made a decision to offer financial aid to senior burial operators and those who fall short of having sufficient income, said Tan Jiaming, an official in charge of social welfare with the regional civil affairs department.

About 80 percent of Tibetans still prefer celestial burial, as it has been observed for hundreds of years, acknowledged Basang Wangdu, director of the Nationality Research Institute of the Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences.