History, Suppression and Modern Pressure

Sky burial has a long attested history in Tibetan regions and coexists with less common alternative Tibetan funerary methods, including cremation, generally reserved historically for high lamas and important religious figures, and water burial in some regions, reflecting a range of practice broader than sky burial's outsized reputation abroad might suggest. The custom has passed through periods of significant external pressure: it was suppressed for a time during the Cultural Revolution in China alongside much other Tibetan Buddhist religious practice, before being permitted to resume in subsequent decades, and it continues today to draw a degree of controversy and regulation from Chinese authorities, including restrictions on outside observers and photography at sky burial sites, framed variously by different parties as protecting the dignity and privacy of the rite or as restricting a distinctly Tibetan religious practice, a live and politically freighted disagreement the atlas records without adjudicating.

The custom has also become an object of considerable outside fascination and, at times, sensationalised or voyeuristic Western media coverage, against which Tibetan communities and Tibetan Buddhist teachers have pushed back, asking that the rite be understood through its own religious logic of generosity and non attachment rather than treated as spectacle by observers unfamiliar with its meaning.