49 days

Those who are familiar with the Buddhist traditions of East and Southeast Asia may be familiar with the 49-day ceremony for the deceased. This ceremony reflects the prevailing beliefs in these traditions that rebirth occurs seven weeks after death. The Southern Buddhist tradition, however, does not have this belief. So we see that what we may think of as "Buddhist," in the sense of the tradition at large, may in fact be "buddhist," if we may think of that word as pertaining to a subset of the larger tradition.

The Buddhist tradition has often found ways to accommodate itself to the indigenous beliefs and practices of various cultures. In fact, the tradition's facility with handling death in large part accounted for its success in spreading beyond India!

Death indeed was and is at the centre of Buddhist culture and has on a ritual, ideological and even economic level played a crucial role in its development and spread. Death was from its beginning an event that was seen as particularly central to Buddhist interests. Throughout Asia it has always been recognised that Buddhists are specialists in death. One of the things that attracted Chinese (and Tibetans, for that matter) to Buddhism was its clarity about what happens at death, the processes needed to ensure a successful death – the welfare of the dead person and his or her mourners – and its clarity about what happens after death and its links with the whole way someone has lived their life. No other rival religion in Asia had at that time such clarity. It was a major factor in the successful transmission of Buddhism from its original Indian cultural context. (from the introduction to Buddhist Funeral Cultures of Southeast Asia and China)

So we find in certain regions of Asia in which the ancestor tradition is very strong, this practice of the 49-day ceremony, which incorporates certain features of preexisting traditions without compromising the overall principles of Buddhism. A lovely description of the Vietnamese approach to death ceremonies, which crosses religious boundaries, may be found here.

This blog offers resources on some of the regional traditions, which may promote better understanding of this phenomenon of adaptation.