The Monks Who Spent Six Years Mummifying Themselves

Between roughly the 11th and 19th centuries, in the Dewa mountains of what is now Yamagata Prefecture in northern Japan, a small number of Shingon Buddhist monks attempted a practice called sokushinbutsu — becoming, on their own, a buddha while still in their body, by allowing and engineering that body to mummify before death.

The standard form took about six years. For the first 1,000 days, the monk gave up rice, barley, and most plant matter, eating only nuts, berries, seeds, and roots, and worked the temple's slopes hard enough to burn off body fat. For the next 1,000 days, his diet narrowed further to bark, pine needles, and sometimes raw clay. In the final stretch, he drank tea brewed from the sap of the urushi tree, the same lacquer tree used to varnish bowls. The sap contains urushiol, a toxin that thickens fluids, repels insects, and slowly poisons the drinker.

Then, on his chosen day, the monk had himself sealed alive in a small underground stone chamber with a bamboo tube for air, a bell, and a pot of charcoal. He sat in the lotus position and rang the bell once a day to indicate he was still alive. When the bell stopped, attending priests removed the tube and sealed the chamber. They opened it three years later. If the corpse had not decomposed, the monk was now a sokushinbutsu and would be enshrined. If it had decomposed, he was reburied without ceremony.

Of perhaps hundreds who attempted the practice, around twenty known mummies survive across Japan. Roughly 13 of them sit in temples around Mount Yudono, the most sacred peak of the Dewa Sanzan range. The Meiji government banned the practice in 1879 as a form of suicide. It has not been restored.