| ZHANG GUOYUN
I long heard of walls piled up with human skulls in the Dordorka Celestial Ground in north Tibet. But I never knew anyone who had seen such walls.
When I told some of my friends about my understanding of the phenomenon, one of them, a senior Tibetologist, advised me to visit Biru County.
"Go there, and you will see these walls piled up with human
skulls,'' he said.
Seeing suspicion in my eyes, he showed me pictures taken by Mr. Cao Changjin from Biru County. Indeed, these were pictures of human skull walls!
Lured by this discovery, I recently paid a visit to Dordorka in Biru.
Biru County is 300 km from Nagqu Town. Meaning "horn of female yaks,'' the county is home to the Dordorka Celestial Burial Ground. And the human skull walls are located inside the Ground.
Legend has it that Zhigungba Renqenbai set up the Zhigungti Monastery in Maizhokunggar County in 1179, and worked hard to press ahead with perfecting the celestial burial system to mark the legendary fact that Sakyamuni, founder of Buddhism, cut off his flesh to feed a tiger.
However, an analysis of what have been found from some ancient tombs in Tibet shows that the system began in the 7th century.
When a celestial burial ritual is held, aromatic plants are burnt for smoke to guide the soul to reach the Ground. The human body serves as a sacrificial object to the Goddess and other deities, who are requested to take the soul of the dead up to Heaven.
As a matter of fact, smoke resulting from burning aromatic plants lures the hawks, "holy birds'' in the eyes of the Tibetans. The body is laid on a piece of stone slab measuring 60 cm high, which lies by a pond built with pebbles. The body, in a sitting stance, is sliced. Its bones fall prey to hawks first. The Master in charge of the ritual does so because hawks tend to shun bones.
The Ground covers 4,000 square meters, and is surrounded by man-high clay walls on four sizes. The southern and western walls are complete with wooden frames each with four to five layers piled with human skulls. Only after seeing this did I come to understand that the human skull walls are product of the celestial burial system.
Historical records say there should be three human skull walls in the Ground. But downpours compressed them during a rainy season. The two human skull walls I saw were actually piled up in the past few decades, and are only half the height of the original.
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STORY OF HUMAN SKULL WALLS
There are two explanations as to why human skulls are preserved and used to build walls:
Explanation I: Some 80 years ago, a KMT army officer killed two civilians in Tibet. A boy who witnessed the tragedy reported to the 5th Living Buddha Dagbo in Biru County. The Living Buddha appointed him the master in charge of the Celestial Burial Ground of the Dharma Monastery. In the ensuing years, the boy master left heads of dead brought for celestial burial at the corner of the southeastern wall. When they were reduced to skulls, the master piled them up from the northeastern to the southwestern corners. He did so with a view to preventing the KMT army officer from sneaking into the Ground. The master kept doing this until he died when he was over 50.
Explanation II: Human skull walls were built according to the stipulation of the Living Buddha Dapu Dainba Wozhub (also called Baima Baizha) with the Qudai Monastery in Biru County during the period of the 13th Dalai Lama. This was intended to warning the living against perpetrating evil: Whomever you are when you live, you will be like this (human skull) after death.
SKULL WALLS
Seeing this wall piled up of skulls, a property from a horror film usually comes to the mind. But it's no fiction. Together with the charnel ground (where the sky burials are held), and the hovering vultures in the crystal blue sky, this mysterious world has always been an irresistible attraction on the ridge of the world - Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.
Location
The skull wall is near the Duoduoka Charnel Ground in the western part of Biru County, 300 kilometers on the southeast of Tibetan Autonomous Region's Naqu Region. The name "Biru" originally meant the "horn of female Tibetan yak", because according to a local saga, a "tribe of female yak" once settled down here.
The skull wall is a result of Tibet's unique sky burial tradition. The Duoduoka Charnel Ground occupies an area of about 4,000 square meters. Earthen walls roughly as tall as a man stand on the ground's four sides. On the south and west walls, there are some wooden shelves, about between four to five stories each, which each shelf displaying some orderly-placed human skulls.
The skull wall
Except for the Duoduoka Burial Stage where the skulls of the dead are kept and placed on the wall nearby, in other areas of Tibet where the sky burial custom is practiced, the whole human body is fed to the vultures, with not a single part spared.
There are two gates respectively on the west and south of the Duoduoka Charnel Ground's courtyard. The west gate is for living human beings, while the one on the south is where the bodies are carried in. The bungalow on the north is exclusively for the monks who carry out the religious sky burial ceremonies, and inside the rooms are some religious scriptures and figures.
Beneath the courtyard of the charnel ground is a cellar, whose floor and walls are built of stones, and which stores Buddha figures, the Tripitaka (the three major parts of Buddha's teachings), and religious tools and sacrifices.
In the center of the Duoduoka Charnel Ground lies a sky burial pool of about four square meters made of small cobbles. On the pool's north stands a rectangular stone about 60 cm above the ground. The stone is used to hold the bodies in sky burials. A pole more than ten meters tall with some prayer flags hung on top stands outside the charnel ground's south gate.
The winter here can be extremely cold, sometimes falling as low as 37-Celsius degrees below zero. However, no matter how frozen the body is, following a night in the sky burial pool, it will surely unfreeze the next day, thus ensuring a smooth sky burial. Nobody yet can explain this phenomenon. This mystery has made the Duoduoka Charnel Ground even more famous, even attracting some people from neighboring counties to choose it for their own death.
Why the skulls are kept?
According to Duoduoka's sky burial master, there were originally three monasteries where skulls were kept in sky burials: the Duoduoka Monastery, the Ridazeng Monastery opposite the former and the Quedai Monastery nearby. Biru has gained its fame from containing all three monasteries. Unfortunately, most of the skulls have been damaged both by natural and manmade disasters. By the early 1980s, most of skulls in the Ridazeng and Quedai monasteries have disappeared, despite a very supportive governmental policy in preserving religious relics.
But why skulls are kept in the sky burial of these three monasteries remains a mystery. There are currently many versions of this unique custom's origin, but two possible answers are prevailing and more accepted.
One version says that the custom was formed some 80 years ago, when an eight-year-old boy from a Tibetan tribe in witnessed the killings of three people. The little boy was so scared that he ran directly to the living Buddha in Biru County, who later appointed him as a sky burial master. He began to pile up all the skulls of the dead in the corners of the charnel ground. At his death, 42 years later he left behind a wall of skulls. It is said that he built the skull wall to prevent the killer he saw when he was eight from coming to the charnel ground.
The other version retains that the custom is a rule established by a living Buddha, whose motives remain unknown. According to Awangdanzeng, a sky burial master, the main purpose of keeping the skulls and piling them up against a wall is to remind the living to do more good deeds and restrain from secular desires, because everybody, regardless of their living status, is the same after death.
Artists call the Duoduoka charnel ground the "skull pyramid"; archeologists view the wall as significant in anthropological research; while the charnel ground's enigmatic philosophical and legendary glamour have greatly shocked the literati. But for Tibetans, it is just a way for them to have a closer link to nature and their Buddha.
When
There is no specific time; you can go to visit there all year round.
Where
The skull wall is near the Duoduoka Charnel Ground in the western part of Biru County, 300 kilometers on the southeast of Tibetan Autonomous Region's Naqu Region.
How
Fly to Gonggar airport, Lhasa, from Beijing or Kathmandu, or drive the Friendship Highway from Nepal. Then when you are in Tibet, You can take a bus or rent a car to Naqu Region.
Tip
There are two gates respectively on the west and south of the Duoduoka Charnel Ground's courtyard. The west gate is for living human beings, while the one on the south is where the bodies are carried in.
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