Comment by mrexcess

1 month ago

From my understanding of the Buddhist process described here, the ritual often begins days or weeks before death, and includes exclusive consumption of substances like plant tars that dramatically reduce the presence of gut bacteria, and that this effect rather than anything supernatural is what most attribute to the most significant decay processes being temporarily inhibited - there's no gut bacteria left to decompose the body from the inside out.

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mrexcess

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trane_project  1 month ago

This is completely incorrect. The process of Tukdam has nothing to do with diet.

I can’t say what the actual process involves with too many details because it’s not appropriate to share with outsiders, but it involves meditating through sleep, which is considered a similar process to death.

The people doing this are good enough to practice through the night that they recognize a certain part of the death process and temporarily abide in it. When they stop, they die for real and their body decomposes.

free_energy_min  1 month ago

curious where you learned this. can’t seem to find anything in a quick google and LLM search about ingesting plant tar for tukdam

  • krackers  1 month ago

    There are references to it in https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1dzrho6/til_... but I cannot trace to a more authoritative source

    There is also an interesting comment

    >I'm in the seafood business and work with dead fish all the time... I see varying length of shelf life depending on how the fish was harvested. Whatever the metabolic state is when we die is what will be in the system when you die. High stress, metabolism running full speed, and high external/internal temperature leads to short shelf life. Fish harvested when their metabolism is less excited or in a state close to homeostasis will last much longer. So why any different with humans? If you died in the Sahara running a marathon vs. froze in Antarctica while meditating you would for sure see a difference lol.

    So I guess that the diet and low metabolic activity seem to be the most plausible explanation. Also supposedly in some (mythical?) very-deep meditative states the body's oxygen requirement is low enough that passive exchange suffices to keep the cells on the verge of aliveness.