plz annotation these two paragraphs as one or two sentences? thank you The funer
ID: 442953 • Letter: P
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plz annotation these two paragraphs as one or two sentences? thank you
The funeral is eventually even more elaborate than that. The Malla clan of Kusinara organizes a magnificent ceremony at which "they honored, paid respects, worshipped, and adored the Lord's body with dance and song and music, with garlands and scents, making awnings and circular tents"-and this goes on for six days (6.13). On the seventh, the devas (whose will is interpreted by the adept Anuruddha) direct that the body be carried through the city in a certain way, at which "even the sewers and rubbish heaps of Kusinara were covered knee-high with coral-tree flowers" (6.16), and the body is prepared exactly as the Buddha had prescribed (6.17). Miracles also attend the cremation: despite great effort, the pyre cannot be lit until Kassapa the Great arrives, after which it bursts spontaneously into flame (6.21-22). Of the burned body only the bones are left, all else "vanished and not even ashes or dust remained"; thereafter "a shower of water rose from the sky, and another which burst forth from the sal-trees extinguished the pyre" (6.23). As for the relics, a great dispute arises among the claimants; a Brahmin eventually divides them equally in eight portions, with the urn making a ninth and the embers a tenth; all these are enshrined in stupas (6.24-28).^30 With that, the sutta comes to an end. Given the Buddha's great fame and favor, it is not difficult to imagine the Mallas conducting a lavish funeral along the lines described above. What strains credulity, however, is the attribution of such precise instructions to the Buddha himself, especially after his earlier statement of indifference, a statement that in fact accords better with the doctrine of impermanence that is one of the hallmarks of the Dhamma, and of this sutta in particular. The devotional strain that is everywhere apparent in the development of Buddhism quite naturally finds a place also in the Pali canon, and we may well suspect some such process at work here. In this reading, section 5.11, with its description of the obsequies for a "wheel-turning monarch" and the merit attached to the ritual adoration of the relics, will have been a later addition by way of magnifying the founder and encouraging the formal worship of the laity. Of course the murky textual tradition precludes any certainty in these matters, but the tension within the text at least justifies some suspicion. If this is accepted as plausible, it is worth noting that the later devotional passages did not displace the presumably earlier section, with its more austere indifference, but were simply appended to it. Thus the sutta seems to have grown by accretion rather than consistent editing, and if this is the case, it increases its value as a source for original doctrine.Explanation / Answer
The Malla clan of Kusinara organizes a cremation ceremony at which they worship Buddha with dance and song and music and in the presence of Kassapa the Great the body is prepared as Buddha prescribed and cremated after which only bones remain not even the ashes remain.
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