They Pickled Themselves On Purpose
Category: Morbid Curiosities 10th July 2026
Years ago some Japanese monks quite literally mummified themselves on purpose. Proper daft, but true. The practice has a name: sokushinbutsu. It was done by mountain ascetics who treated their own bodies like a project and slowly turned themselves into shrines.
The method was grimly practical. For years they ate a brutal diet to strip away fat and moisture: mostly roots, bark, pine needles and very little else, so the body had less to rot. They drank a poisonous lacquer-tree tea to discourage microbes and make the tissues disagreeable to decay. Then they went into a small stone tomb with a narrow breathing tube and a bell for signalling the outside world. The bell was rung each day. When it stopped ringing the attendants knew the monk had died, they plugged the tube and sealed the tomb.
Months later priests would open it. If the corpse was desiccated and unrotted it was declared a sokushinbutsu, a kind of living Buddha, and sometimes placed on display as a holy relic. If the body had not preserved, the tomb stayed closed and the enterprise was quietly called a failure. The Meiji government banned the practice in 1879 as part of a push against what it called barbaric customs, which politely ended the neat human-jerky hobby.
It is gruesome and oddly organised. These men were not being dramatic for attention; this was the endpoint of years of ascetic training and a belief that the body could be the final teaching. Temples in the remote mountains around Yamagata and the Dewa Sanzan region kept a few of these mummies and people still pay respects to them. I once saw a photo and felt two things: respect for the commitment and the sudden urge to eat a sandwich.
It reads like the ultimate DIY project for someone who hated funerals. You do not need to reinvent dying, but they did, with ritual, patience and a very particular taste. In the end they got a shrine, a title and a tidy corpse. Proper devotion, awful aesthetic.