ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter discusses about the traditional India in its myth and art assimilated and the human response to death and the transformative and transcendent aspects of a heroic death freely offered to the gods. Some Indian religious traditions accepted an abandonment of the body for spiritual reasons, but other systems roundly condemned all forms of self-destruction as the sin of suicide. The chapter also focuses on Tantric developments in Hinduism that advocated socially transgressive behaviour and explorations of the dark and macabre which were accepted as a part of the dangerous, but effective path of Tantra. Buddhism used the mythic motif of self-sacrificial behaviour, such as the self-offering of the bodhisattva as a metaphor for the Buddhist objective of compassion. The sacrificial tradition in India was fully explored in myth and imagery, the sacrifice or violent loss of the head was an important part of self-sacrificial imagery.
