Veneration, Legal Prohibition and Present Status

A number of the resulting self mummified remains, several dozen candidate cases are recorded across Japanese history though far fewer are confirmed and preserved, were subsequently venerated by their home temples as sokushinbutsu, living buddhas, enshrined and dressed in ceremonial robes and presented to pilgrims and devotees as objects of reverence rather than as ordinary relics, a practice several Yudono area temples continue to maintain today around their preserved historical sokushinbutsu even though the underlying ascetic practice that produced them has not been undertaken in well over a century.

Japanese authorities formally prohibited the practice in the late nineteenth century, during the Meiji era's broader modernisation and legal reform of religious practice, treating the underlying self starvation process as a form of suicide the modern state would not permit regardless of its religious framing, a legal prohibition that effectively and permanently ended sokushinbutsu as a living practice from that point forward. What survives today is exclusively the veneration of the historical preserved remains and continued scholarly, including some invasive and non invasive medical, study of them, alongside broader popular and academic interest in the tradition's history, none of which the atlas treats as any form of endorsement or instruction regarding the underlying historical practice itself.