The Famen Temple Finger-Bone Relic is a bone relic venerated as a finger of the Buddha and kept at Famensi, a monastery in Fufeng County, Shaanxi Province, in central China. It is among the most fully documented relics in Buddhism because of the extraordinary circumstances of its rediscovery: in 1987, when archaeologists excavated the base of the temple's collapsed pagoda, they opened a Tang-dynasty crypt that had been sealed in 874 and never disturbed.
Inside were four finger-bone relics, one held to be the actual bone, the lingu or "true bone," and three "shadow bones," replicas made to shield and multiply the sacred original, along with an inscribed inventory stele and more than two thousand offerings of gold, silver, glass, textiles and porcelain deposited by the Tang court. The relic had been one of the great objects of imperial devotion in the Tang, carried to the capital in grand processions, and the crypt preserved both it and the material world of ninth-century Chinese Buddhism around it.