Sokushinbutsu
Practitioners followed a tree-bark and resin diet for years before, by tradition, being entombed alive to die in meditation. The Meiji government banned the practice in 1877, yet the monk Bukkai was still interred for it in 1903, and more than a dozen such preserved bodies survive today.
Ichirō Hori, 'Self-Mummified Buddhas in Japan', History of Religions 1:2 (1962); the Meiji government's 1877 ban; Bukkai's interment (1903), exhumed by Tohoku University researchers (1961)
A Japanese Buddhist practice of self-mummification through years of extreme dietary discipline, aimed at achieving a preserved body after death.