Liz Wilson is Professor of Comparative Religion at Miami University and the author of Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration and Transcription

Introduction: Passing On: The Social Life of Death in South Asian Religions
Liz Wilson

1. Ashes to Nectar: Death and Regeneration among the Rasa Siddhas and Nath Siddhas
David Gordon White

2. Human Torches of Enlightenment: Autocremation and Spontaneous Combustion as Marks of Sanctity in South Asian Buddhism
Liz Wilson

3. When a Wife Dies First: The Musivayanam and a Female Brahman Ritualist in Coastal Andhra
David M. Knipe

4. Return to Tears: Musical Mourning, Emotion, and Religious Reform in Two South Asian Minority Communities
Richard K. Wolf

5. Deanimating and Reanimating the Dead in Rural Sri Lanka
Jonathan S. Walters

6. The Suppression of Nuns and the Ritual Murder of Their Special Dead in Two Buddhist Monastic Texts
Gregory Schopen

7. A Funeral to Part with the Living: A Tamil Countersorcery Ritual
Isabelle Nabokov

8. Dead Healers and Living Identities: Narratives of a Hindu Ghost and a Muslim Sufi in a Shared Village
Peter Gottschalk

List of Contributors

Index