Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Transcription Introduction: Passing On: The Social Life of Death in South Asian Religions Liz Wilson 1. Ashes to Nectar: Death and Regeneration among the Rasa Siddhas and Nath Siddhas David Gordon White 2. Human Torches of Enlightenment: Autocremation and Spontaneous Combustion as Marks of Sanctity in South Asian Buddhism Liz Wilson 3. When a Wife Dies First: The Musivayanam and a Female Brahman Ritualist in Coastal Andhra David M. Knipe 4. Return to Tears: Musical Mourning, Emotion, and Religious Reform in Two South Asian Minority Communities Richard K. Wolf 5. Deanimating and Reanimating the Dead in Rural Sri Lanka Jonathan S. Walters 6. The Suppression of Nuns and the Ritual Murder of Their Special Dead in Two Buddhist Monastic Texts Gregory Schopen 7. A Funeral to Part with the Living: A Tamil Countersorcery Ritual Isabelle Nabokov 8. Dead Healers and Living Identities: Narratives of a Hindu Ghost and a Muslim Sufi in a Shared Village Peter Gottschalk List of Contributors Index

About the Author

Liz Wilson is Professor of Comparative Religion at Miami University and the author of Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature.