Overview

The Skull Relic of Xuanzang is a fragment of human parietal bone venerated as a relic of Xuanzang, the great Tang-dynasty pilgrim, translator and scholar-monk who journeyed from China to India in the 7th century in search of Buddhist scriptures. His seventeen-year journey and the enormous body of translations he produced on his return reshaped Chinese Buddhism, and his memory was later mythologised in the classic novel Journey to the West, in which he appears as the monk Tang Sanzang.

Because Xuanzang is a fully historical figure with a documented life and death in 664, this relic differs from those attributed to the Buddha: the person is not in doubt. What rests on tradition is whether this particular bone, recovered in Nanjing in 1942, is genuinely his. The relic has since been divided among temples in several countries, so that Xuanzang's cult, like his life, now spans much of Buddhist Asia.