Skull Relic of Xuanzang

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.

Xuanzang died in 664 and was interred near the Tang capital Chang'an; his remains were moved more than once in later centuries, and their location eventually became obscure. In the winter of 1942, during the Japanese occupation of China, soldiers carrying out construction work at a former temple site in Nanjing unearthed a stone casket containing a fragment of skull bone. Inscriptions accompanying it identified the bone as a relic of Xuanzang that had been transferred to Nanjing in earlier dynasties.

The find quickly became politically charged. Amid protest from the people of Nanjing, part of the relic was returned to Chinese custody, while a portion was taken to Japan and enshrined at Yakushi-ji in Nara, and a further fragment reached a temple in Saitama Prefecture. Over the following decades the relic was subdivided further and shared out as an object of both devotion and diplomacy, with portions kept in Nanjing and elsewhere in China, in Taiwan, and in India, where a fragment was given in recognition of Xuanzang's pilgrimage to the Buddhist homeland. Today a number of temples across Asia each enshrine a share.

The tradition holds that the 1942 Nanjing bone is a genuine relic of Xuanzang, an identification supported by the inscriptions found with it, which named the relic and recorded its transfer to the city. Because Xuanzang was a historical person whose death and burial are documented, the claim is more tractable than relic claims reaching back to the Buddha; it concerns the provenance of a specific bone rather than the existence of the person.

Even so, the identification cannot be regarded as proven. It depends on the reliability and reading of the accompanying inscriptions and on a chain of medieval transfers of the remains that is only partly documented; no independent physical test has confirmed that the bone is Xuanzang's. The circumstances of the discovery, unearthed by an occupying army in wartime and rapidly divided and dispersed for devotional and political reasons, also complicate a clean provenance. Scholars therefore treat the relic as a venerated object credibly but not certainly linked to Xuanzang, and its subsequent subdivision among many sites means that several bones now all carry the same attribution. The status recorded here is accordingly debated.