The Perfect Passage: Contemporary Buddhist Rites of Death

Marek Zemanek Charles University in Prague Introduction The aim of my paper is to briefly introduce what Buddhists in the 21 st century Korea do and believe in, in terms of death-related matters. I will inquire into the structure and meaning of the Korean Buddhist rites of death. In this paper I shall work with the set of rituals performed on behalf of a layperson. I have divided the rituals into five temporal phases: i) near-death rites, ii) postmortem rites, iii) funeral rites, iv) transitional rites and v) memorial rites which I understand them as one complex rite of passage having the three phases: separation, transition and reincorporation. 1 In this paper I will focus on the first four groups which cover the period of forty-nine days after death.