X: Xinran's Sky Burial (2004)

Xue Xinran is a British-Chinese journalist who has devoted her career to telling women’s stories. Her story Sky Burial is the one tome in the Penguin Drop Caps series that doesn’t fit snugly in one genre. Is it biography? Romance? Travel literature?


For her radio show, Xinran interviews Shu Wen, a grey-plaited woman in Tibetan dress. However, it takes Shu Wen two days to explain how she, a Chinese woman, came to be dressed in traditional Tibetan clothing, “smelling strongly of old leather, rancid milk, and animal dung.” So taken is Xinran with her tale of love and loss that she must write the whole story.

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As Xinran tells it, Shu Wen has only been married three weeks to Kejun, a medical officer, when he is transferred to Tibet. Months pass with no word of him so Shu Wen volunteers to serve with the army in Tibet in order to search for him. Her unit meets a Tibetan woman named Zhuoma who ends up saving all their lives. A hostile group of Tibetans overpower the small unit, strip them of their weapons, and take Shu Wen and Zhuoma, leaving the others to straggle back to China. Eventually, the two women are taken in by a family of nomads, with whom Shu Wen lives for close to thirty years, never giving up hope that she will find Kejun and learn his story. At last, an old hermit is able to tell her about a Chinese doctor who gave his life to end the fighting between Tibet and China, surrendering his body to sky burial.

On the bright fuchsia cover, the arms of the blue X drop cap are made of traditional Tibetan fabric motifs. The quote on the back, “Life starts in nature and returns to nature” gives a clue about what “sky burial” means. And it’s not pretty pink like the cover…

Gustave Doré, Rizpah's Kindness Toward the Dead, Doré's English Bible. 1866

​Thankfully, I read the sky burial scene before bed, well after digesting my supper. It did get me thinking about sky burial in the Bible, late as it was. There’s a tragic scene in 2 Samuel 21:1-14, where, to expiate the sins of Saul, seven of his descendants are handed over to the Gibeonites who execute them and leave their bodies exposed on a hill. By this point, Saul is long dead, but his concubine Rizpah is still alive. Two of her sons are among the seven chosen to die. After their execution, she dresses in sackcloth and stations herself by the dead to prevent a “sky burial”. I can see her waving her sackcloth in the air, screaming at the birds come to feast on their decaying flesh, running from corpse to corpse to chase them away. In the end, King David hears of her honourable deed and provides the princes with a royal burial with Saul and his other sons.

In Psalm 79, the psalmist laments, “The dead bodies of Your servants They have given as food for the birds of the heavens, The flesh of Your saints to the beasts of the earth.” (Psalm 79:2 NKJV)

Five times the prophet Jeremiah says—in fulfillment of Moses’ prophecy in Deuteronomy 28:26—that when the Babylonians would come to destroy Jerusalem, the carnage would be so great and the exile so swift that no one would be left to bury the dead and they would be consumed by beasts and birds.

Sébastien Norblin, Antigone donnant la sépulture à Polynice, 1825, Paris, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Wikimedia Commons

​In Western culture it is considered the ultimate shame and disgrace to be devoured by birds and beasts after death. (Sophocles’ play Antigone centres around this very thing. Declared a traitor, Polynices is left unburied outside the city to be devoured by carrion birds. Anyone attempting to bury him will be put to death. His sister, Antigone defies the tyrant Creon and secretly buries him. But of course, she is discovered…)

Yet while I was uncomfortable with the glorification of sky burial in Tibetan religion, a parallel to a familiar Judeo-Christian story emerged. Shu Wen learns that her husband, a doctor who did not come to Tibet to fight but to heal, willingly gives up his life to stop the two nations from warring. He identifies so strongly with Tibetan culture in his sky burial that the fighting ceases and a new era of dialogue opens. Likewise, Jesus, the Great Physician, surrendered his life to reconcile God and humanity. In identifying with sinful humanity, Jesus was able to intercede perfectly for us. “For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” (Romans 5:2). Then again, if it hadn’t been for Joseph of Arimathea burying him properly, Jesus would have been left to hang on the cross, exposed to the sharp beaks of birds of prey.

Sky Burial isn’t my favourite of the Penguin Drop Caps series, but it certainly opened a window into a fascinating and exotic culture. And in a book so infused with Tibetan Buddhism, I was surprised to find an echo of the gospel.