HOW CAN A DEAD PERSON HAVE FRESH BLOOD POURED OUT OF HIS MOUTH?

A lay Buddhist follower narrated a story: we had an uncle who had two children, a son and a daughter. The son drank himself into a complete mess. The daughter was wanton. They were both perverse.

 

 When he was about to die, he had forbidden both of them to be in mourning but they drank and with company interrupted and behaved badly in the funeral and made the relatives discontent. At that time, his body was shrouded in a glass coffin, and so everyone there could see fresh blood pouring out of his mouth.

One person asked why the person had died but still got too angry to have fresh blood poured out of his mouth.

The person died but the body was not destroyed therefore the imagination was still working, if the body was destroyed like a mass of flesh, the imagination would stop working.

When the imagination still worked, greed, anger, ignorance, conceit, doubt of that person still existed, therefore when the children were disobedient and behaved badly, though at that time the body was dead i.e. the body stopped breathing, the whole body of five khandhas was still intact, then the fact that the person got too angry to throw up fresh blood was not difficult to understand because their ears, eyes, nose, mouth were still intact without any loss.

 As such, people without understanding thought the body which had stopped breathing was like a log. Such understanding is wrong, the body of a newly died person is not like a log. They do not breathe but they feel all happenings outside, at that time, they are like people in their dream.