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monhan
So, who's hungry?
AKRA
I am.
Mr.Obake
Implementing a method to control the youkai's diet while promoting the youkai's public relationship among humanity. A pure and saintly Buddhist, yet indistinguishable from a demon in behavior.
Jonathan Smith -- A modest proposal.
To me this Byakuren is very much the truest Byakuren. So awesum
Nero3X
Well at least they don't run around eating random people
Alignn
Well, that's... that.
Lightdreamer
This certainly is an interesting interpretation and I like it.
Sigfried666
Nice way to misinterpret the story.
Neo X
She doesn't eat babies, she uses their dead corpse for fertilizer.
Personally, I don't see what's wrong, they are just speeding up the decomposing process, and using it for their benefit.
Freya211
I'd say it was the morality of desecrating the bodies of dead children.
pokerfaced
I'm pretty sure we've dug up many ancient tombs/crypts/graveyards to make way for a new shopping centre, golf course or housing complex and either not thought twice about it or were ignorant to the history behind the location. Imagine how many centuries worth of human and animal corpses you may be sitting on top of right now.
Cort321
Not to mention using the fossilized remains of dead babies as fuel.
Sigfried666
Good subject for a moral debate.
"The use of the bodies of the dead for the good of the living."
Freya211
True, but they probably didn't use the remains as fertilizer for their fields either. The fact that the child just died doesn't help either though. Hypocritical as it may be, desecrating bones and of the such doesn't sound as bad as hacking up one that hasn't even started to decompose yet.
Not that I don't like the series, I think its a good plot and nicely drawn.
Lightdreamer
You mean dinosaurs.
Baby dinosaurs.
Exactly. Just try to do this on real life without getting scorned for it.
That part where they hit the dead baby to make a fertilizer out of it was just wrong.
If the villagers know about this, well, I won't be surprised that they'll bring their torches and pitchforks to kick those "evil, baby-desecrating youkai" out of the shrine, or at least forbidding them from visiting the village. And frankly, you can't blame them for that.
So much for the peaceful coexistence between humans and youkai.
TheGrueHunter
Let me start by saying that I did like quick story, and I thought that the plot was well presented. But as for the controversy...
This pretty much sums up my view of this. I get the fact that there's a practical reason for it. I understand that using the corpses as fertilizer isn't done out of malevolence. Yet it is still is hypocritical to try to achieve peace with the humans while at the same time horribly desecrating their dead. It's sort of like trying to be friends with your neighbor while spitting in his/her mother's face.
The Shadow
The problem lies in the fact you are attempting to assert your personal sense of morality onto people - characters in this case of course - that are not you and likely very different from you. It's not going to match.
ithekro
Remember...Buddhists. The body is just a shell for the soul. Once the soul has past...what use is the body?
Also remember, these are not Christians.
MNT
This is exactly why this doujinshi hits kind of hard to me. I'm a Buddhist, and quite frankly, in our belief, the body is a possible attachment for the soul-stuff after one dies. In essence, it's supposed to be destroyed to prevent the spirit from lingering near it, lamenting death and being unable to pass on to the next life. Hence why cremation is popular in Asia, in contrast with Christianity, where the body is supposed to be preserved for the day when Jesus comes back to raise the dead (for judgement?).
The thing that makes this doujin bite is how casual and how NOBLE the intentions are.
Byakuren, being a Buddhist serves two populations in this: youkai and humans. By taking the corpses of humans dead from other causes, she provides an outlet for her youkai friends to maintain civility and control over their baser instincts.
For the humans? She provides a spiritual service. She provides them detachment in death. As for the bodies, lifeless and soulless?
She doesn't give three fucks, properly, if rather coldly, being a Buddhist. They're just vessels of attachment to a life already ended.
However, the entire process is completely peaceful. No one got hurt to do it, and less are potentially hurt. The fact that she's brought together a loop of NET-GOOD karma from what is unmistakably brutal but dogmatically defensible and understandable is what amazes and terrifies me. It's at once full of impartial compassion for each being she contacts, and hideously raw.
Real Tibetan funerary ritual itself has the monks ritually taking apart a corpse with prayer and knives to vultures and hatchets much like Myouren and her gardening tools and her garden.
It took me a day or two of hard reading the raw of this doujinshi to get a spiritual handle on it, even it being fiction.
As for if Byakuren is using this as a method for eternal youth, could be exaggeration (since peaches are the fruit of immortality in Chinese myth), or...could very well have a selfish purpose (good karma or not in helping human-eating youkai like Shou, cannibalism, even offhand, is definitely not good mojo in Buddhism).
Red Inugami
Hebrews and Christians traditionally bury or entomb the dead, but that's a cultural thing rather than doctrinal. I don't recall the Old Testament listing a law against using human corpses as fertilizer. Speaking as a Christian.
Scripture says that God will empty the graves and take back the bodies, but he'd not going to be thwarted if there is nothing of the body left. (And consider how little of most bodies would actually be left anyway. You think the God as described in the Bible would call it Paradise if most of his subjects spent forever as cremated ashes or worm-gnawed scraps?)
Graveyards are for the sake of those who have not yet died. Emptying the graveyards is a warning sign for the sake of those who have not yet died. Those who have already died are past caring.
The real crimes in this story are the on-going deceptions.
They really need to find a way to convince Shou that it's not healthy for her to abstain from meat; all they need to do is point out how ravenous she gets during the full moon and convince her that she's going to go berserk without meat. They don't even need to tell her that it already happened once.
Likewise, the problem isn't what they did to the baby's corpse, or even how they did it. (Some of them had a proper attitude of giving respect and thanks.) The problem is that they are decieving the living, who are the only ones who really care about what happens to the corpses.
The baby will not care, but the parents who wanted the corpse treated much differently...
(On another note, if it's just "meat", why human corpses instead of livestock? Well, that wouldn't have the dramatic punch the artist wanted, I suppose.)
Everchanging
Youkai are beasts risen specifically from human fears and such evidently they need to feed on them.
bogbrush
I like how this wouldn't even be half as controversial if it had been the corpse of a grown man, as not a single eyelid being batted at the wheelbarrow 4 pages ago proves.
I'd suggest anyone who enjoyed this should go read Souku no Kiba by the same artist, I liked it even more.
Alignn
I believe people just saved their comments and issues with that page for this one, where all the action is