Of Relics And Rascals

Relics are important. They tell you a lot about people. Take Buddhist relic worship for example. It implies a focus on the external and the material rather than on the internal and the spiritual. And of course it is also evidence of a naivety almost completely divorced from reality. No old piece of junk is large enough or weird enough to be accepted as a ‘genuine’ relic. An organization in Tibet holds a relic exhibition every year here in Singapore. It’s a really big thing; advertisements in all the papers, held is a huge conference centre and thousands attending. One of the relics in last year’s exhibition was a dirty-white crystalline-like object about a meter long, as thick as my wrist and labeled ‘Buddha’s Finger Relic’. I asked one of the organizers, ‘How do they know it’s the Buddha’s finger? It could be a section of his femur or perhaps even his penis’. He didn’t laugh. A relic museum has just opened in Thailand which displays over a million relics which, together with all the other ‘genuine’ ones in the world, mean that the Buddha must have had an enormous body. But of course this plethora of relics is easy enough to explain. Any pious Buddhist will assure you that relics have the ability to multiply. Such is the intellectual state of Buddhism in the 21st century – happily frolicking in the 13th century.
And the weirdest thing about traditional Buddhism’s divorce from reality is that it is highly likely that real fragments of the Buddha’s material body actually do exist. The bone fragments found in the Piprahwa stupa in 1898 look like burnt human bone, they have not been touched since they were placed there in perhaps the 5th/4th century BCE and an inscription found with them mentions that they were placed there by the Sakyans, the tribe of people the Buddha belonged to. Of course, none of this has attracted much attention or excitement from traditional Buddhists. They are too busy worshipping any one of the 240 Buddha’s teeth in circulation, the ‘flesh’ relics that look like brightly-colored glass balls as big as a gobstopper and the white, meter long, thick as your wrist, Buddha’s finger relic that can multiply.
Charles Allen’s new book, The Buddha and Dr. Fuhrer, is the full story about the Piprahwa relics and the events surrounding their discovery. Allen has spent the last 30 years chronicling the history of the British in India but as I discovered when I met his in 2003, he has more than a passing interest in the Buddha’s Dhamma. He has written probably the best book on Mt. Kailash (A Mountain in Tibet, 1982), on the enduring appeal of Tibetan culture and religion (The Search of for Shangri-La, 1999) and the beginnings of Buddhist archeology in India (The Buddha and the Sahibs, 2002). His new book is in a sense a continuation of this last one. It tells of the search for Kapilavatthu, the discovery of the Asokan pillar marking the Buddha’s birth place, and the discovery of what are very likely to be the only genuine relics of the Buddha. It’s a complicated story, including as it does, high adventure, idealism, professional jealousy, nationalism and even fraud, but Allen unravels its many tangled strands and makes it clear. He also tells, I think for the first time, the full story of the notorious Dr. Fuhrer who committed a series of blatant frauds in his desire to win recognition as an eminent archeologist and glory for discovering the lost city of Kapilavatthu. It’s a great story and I sat up all night until I’d finished reading it.
If you want to know more about the Buddha Relic Museum have a look at
http://www.thailandtriptour.com/thailand-festival/buddha-dharma-relics-museum
And if your planning to visit you’ll be pleased to know that there is ample free parking.