Sky burial, jhator, meaning generosity to the birds, is the funerary custom of offering a deceased body to vultures at designated sites across the Tibetan Plateau, a practice that emerged from a combination of practical and religious circumstance rather than either alone. Much of the plateau is rocky, frozen for long stretches of the year, and largely treeless, conditions that make both burial and cremation genuinely difficult, burial hampered by hard, often frozen ground and scarce topsoil, cremation by the scarcity of fuel wood at altitude, and Tibetan Buddhist teaching supplies a religious reading of the same constraint that transforms necessity into meaning: the body, once consciousness has departed it in the process described by bardo teaching, is regarded as an empty vessel, and offering it to sustain other living beings, the vultures, is understood as a final act of generosity consistent with Buddhist teaching on compassion and non attachment to the physical body.
The specific ritual preparation and conduct of a sky burial is undertaken by trained specialists, rogyapas, working at designated sites, and the atlas records here the practice's existence, its religious rationale and its documented history, not a description of ritual procedure, in keeping with the closed and specialist nature of the rite itself.