Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Buddhist Relics gathers six bone and tooth fragments venerated across the Buddhist world as physical remains of Gautama Buddha or, in one case, of a revered later monk, and the group divides on how each remnant reached its present home.

Two trace to the same ancient deposit. The Piprahwa Stupa Relics and Gems are the bone, ash and roughly eighteen hundred gems and gold ornaments excavated from a brick stupa at Piprahwa in Uttar Pradesh in 1898, one reliquary bearing an early Brahmi inscription read as naming the deposit as the Sakya clan's share of the Buddha's cremated remains. The Kapilavastu Relics are further charred bone fragments the Archaeological Survey of India recovered from that same stupa in 1971 to 1977, beneath the level the earlier dig had reached, now held at the National Museum in New Delhi and lent abroad with the ceremonial status of a visiting head of state. A third find stands entirely apart: the Famen Temple Finger Bone Relic is four Tang dynasty finger bones sealed in a crypt at Famensi in Shaanxi in 874 CE and rediscovered in 1987, one held to be the true bone and three shadow bones made to protect it.

Two more, the Sacred Tooth Relic of Kandy and the Tooth Relic of Lingguang Temple, are teeth that Buddhist tradition holds both survived the Buddha's cremation, one carried to Sri Lanka and the other eventually to China, where each became bound up with royal or imperial legitimacy in its own land. The Skull Relic of Xuanzang stands apart as the group's one exception: a parietal bone fragment venerated not as the Buddha's own but as that of Xuanzang, the historical seventh century monk and translator, its identification resting on inscription and tradition rather than on any claim to the Buddha himself.