Ritualizing the Disposal of the Deceased traces mortuary behavior from the early fossil record
to modern religious contexts in diverse cultural settings. By using archival and ethnographic
evidence from Buddhist traditions the author highlights the disparity between doctrines that
contradict actual practices performed by Buddhists themselves. By appealing to the evolved
cognitive architecture of human minds this book argues that ritualized disposal behavior is
the by-product of mental systems designed to handle living people. Due to complex social
intelligence humans are compelled to handle dead people in ritualized behaviors and to
represent them in counterintuitive ways. The author also examines the professional religious
guilds that have taken advantage of these ritualized compulsions over the last several thousand
years by giving and controlling the meanings behind these actions. Furthermore experimental
evidence is given to support this hypothesis providing the first mature cognitive and
evolutionary theory for mortuary behavior by humans.
