Tooth Relic of Lingguang Temple

The Tooth Relic of Lingguang Temple is a tooth venerated as a relic of the Buddha and enshrined at Lingguang Temple, one of the Eight Great Sites, or Badachu, in the forested Western Hills of Beijing. Buddhist tradition speaks of two surviving tooth relics of the Buddha: one is the celebrated Sacred Tooth of Kandy in Sri Lanka, and the other is the tooth that, by a long chain of transmission, is said to have reached China and come to rest in Beijing.

The Beijing relic has a concrete documentary anchor in the Zhaoxian Pagoda, a thirteen-storey brick tower built at Lingguang Temple in 1071 expressly to hold it, and again in the dramatic recovery of the relic from that pagoda's ruins after foreign troops destroyed the temple in 1900. Re-enshrined in a modern pagoda in the 1960s, it serves today as an object of veneration and as a focus of Buddhist cultural exchange, having been shown to visiting delegations from Buddhist countries.

The traditional account gives the relic a long westward-to-eastward journey: from the Indian world across Central Asia to Khotan, then to Nanjing in the 5th century, on to Chang'an under the Sui dynasty, and finally to the area of present-day Beijing during the Five Dynasties. Under the Liao dynasty, in 1071, the octagonal thirteen-storey Zhaoxian Pagoda was raised at Lingguang Temple to enshrine the tooth, and its deposit was recorded in an inscription.

In 1900 the temple lay in the path of the Eight-Nation Alliance during the Boxer Uprising, and the Zhaoxian Pagoda was destroyed by shelling and fire. As monks cleared the ruins of the pagoda base, they found a stone reliquary holding the tooth and an inscription confirming its enshrinement in 1071. The relic was safeguarded through the upheavals of the twentieth century, and in the early 1960s the temple built a new Buddha Tooth Relic Pagoda to receive it; the tooth was re-enshrined there in 1964. Since then it has been venerated at Lingguang Temple and periodically presented to Buddhist delegations from abroad.

The tradition presents the Lingguang tooth as one of the two genuine dental relics of the Buddha, its keeping at Beijing vouched for by the 1071 pagoda and its inscription and by the recovery of the relic, with that inscription, from the ruins in 1900. That documentary chain gives the relic a secure history at Beijing from the eleventh century onward, and the 1900 discovery is a real and datable event.

The deeper claim, that the tooth is physically a tooth of Gautama Buddha, carried intact from India across a thousand years and thousands of kilometres, rests on the traditional narrative of its transmission rather than on any physical study, and the relic has not been subjected to examination. As with the Kandy tooth, sceptics note the difficulty of authenticating a single dental relic of such claimed antiquity, while the tradition holds that the object is not to be judged by ordinary means. The balanced assessment is that the relic is well documented as the venerated Buddha tooth of Lingguang Temple since 1071, while its origin in the historical Buddha is a matter of faith, so the artifact is recorded as debated.