Shingon Priests and Self-Mummification

The practice of self-mummification seems somewhat macabre to today’s civilized population. However,for some sects of Buddhist priests, it was a form of further enlightenment. Many of these priests voluntarilywent through a ten-year gruesome process of self-mummifying, believing that extreme physical pain and denial created an opening to a higher spiritual level, the ultimate attainment of “passing into the state of nirvana.”

The process of self-mummification is broken down into three 1,000-day periods. Each period ischaracterized by physical and mental changes caused by phase-specific austerities and excruciating pain.The process is not some mystic secret, but rather a calculated scientific means for ridding the body ofmaterial that cannot cross over into nirvana. In the first phase the priest is restricted to a diet of only nuts and grains surrounding the temple complex. During this time the practitioner endures extreme hardships, such as meditating under icy cold mountain streams for hours on end. “Japan is a mountainous country.”Therefore, most of the Shingon temple complexes are in the proximity of large sacred mountains.

Through history, the bodies of a considerable number of deceased Catholic Saints and other blessed persons, have not undergone the normal processes of disintegration. Without any kind mummification or embalming methods, their corpses have thus remained incorrupt, a few even after 1500 years. The accounts of incorruptible bodies are a part of Christian history from the first century right through to the 21st.

Many of those, whose bodies have been found incorrupt, had died either by violence or diseases, conditions which normally would encourage the disintegration processes rather than preserve the bodies. Some had been buried in close proximity to other bodies that decomposed normally. Some had been consigned to the bare earth. Others survived burial in such damp conditions that their clothes rotted off their intact bodies. Some had been lying in lime, water or left in the open. But apparently unaffected by exterior influences, the bodies were found preserved as if they were still alive.

...

Because of the Vatican’s quite strict canonization process, these exhumations have usually been witnessed with oaths and affidavits by ordinary working people as well as
respectable doctors and medical specialists. The phenomenon is therefore among the most thoroughly documented of all alleged miracles.