While funeral rites and ceremonies vary according to country and culture, Buddhism strongly favors cremation as the most natural way to deal with a corpse. The Buddha, himself, was cremated and his cremains divided among his key disciples. Cremation is preferred for a variety of reasons including:
- financial considerations - burial requires the expense of preparing the body such as embalming, the purchase of land, paying for coffins, tombs as well as markers and monuments;
- issues of land use - cremation eliminates conflicts over land for the living or land for the dead;
- as an act of compassion and generosity - sky burial is common in Tibet, Mongolia and parts of China where a body is placed on a mountaintop to be consumed by hungry birds and animals. Remaining bones are allowed to decompose naturally.
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