Relics of the Buddha

Buddhism is popularly seen as a religion stressing the truth of impermanence. How, then, to account for the long-standing veneration, in Asian Buddhist communities, of bone fragments, hair, teeth and other bodily bits said to come from the historic Buddha? Early European and American scholars of religion, influenced by a characteristic Protestant bias against relic worship, declared such practices to be superstitious and fraudulent, and far from the true essence of Buddhism. John Strong's Book, by contrast, argues that relic veneration has played a serious and integral role in Buddhist traditions in the south and Southeast Asia and that it is in no way foreign to Buddhism. The book is structured around the life story of the Buddha, starting with traditions about relics of previous buddhas and relics from the past lives of the Buddha Sakyamuni. It then considers the death of the Buddha, the collection of his bodily relics after his cremation, and stories of their spread to different parts of Asia. The Book ends with a consideration of the legend of the future parinirvana (extinction) of the relics prior to the advent of the next Buddha, Maitreya. Throughout, the author does not hesitate to explore the many versions of these legends and relate them to their ritual, doctrinal, artistic, and social contexts. In 1561, an interesting ceremony ing a military operation in Sri Lanka, Portuguese troops captured what "local idolaters" (i.e., Buddhists) claimed was the tooth of the Buddha, and delivered it as a prize to their viceroy, Don Constantino da Braganca. The viceroy had hoped to hold it for ransom, but now the archbishop of Goa, Don Gaspar, was insisting that it be destroyed. On a porch overlooking the river, in the presence of a great crowd of Christians and "pagans," he called for the tooth and "placed it in a mortar, and with his own hand reduced it to powder, and cast the pieces into a brazier which stood ready for the purpose; after which the ashes and the charcoal together were cast into the river, in sight of all those who were crowding the verandahs and windows which looked upon the water" (Tennent 1859, 2:215. See also chapter 7 in this book). As benighted as such an action may seem to us today, it can at least be said that the Portuguese archbishop appreciated the nature of relics. Conscious of the power of holy objects from his own tradition, he felt that the tooth had to be utterly and permanently eradicated. In his mind, this was not just a piece of bone that he was destroying but a "relic of the devil" (reliquia do demonio) something alive that had to be killed (Tennent 1859, 2:214; text in De Couto 1783, 17:429) Rather different were the attitudes of some of Don Gaspar's Protestant contemporaries in Europe. John Calvin, to my knowledge, never said anything about Buddhist relics, but in 1543 he wrote a whole treatise on Roman Catholic ones (Calvin 1970). And although he too, given the chance, would probably have crushed the Buddha's tooth to bits, he would have done so for different reasons. For him, relics embodied no sacred or even demonic presence, and it was wrong and exploitative to pretend that they did. Relics were nothing but material things, as he pointed out when he got rid of what had been two of Geneva's prized relics-the arm of Saint Anthony and the brain of Saint peter; the one, he proclaimed, was but the bone of a stag, and the other a piece of pumice (Calvin 1970:53)

Contents

List of Tables, Preface, Note and Abbreviations, Introduction: Relics of the Buddha, Relics and the Biographical process, Types of Buddha Relics, Bones and Books, Bones and Beads, Relics, Bones, and Burial Practices in India and Beyond, Bones and Bodies, Relics and images, Limitations of this study, outline, 1. Relics of previous buddhas, 2. Relics of the Bodhisattva, 3. Relics of the Still-Living Buddha: Hairs and Footprints, 4. The Parinirvana of the Buddha, 5. Asoka and the Buddha Relics, 6. Predestined Relics: The extension of the Buddha's life story in some Sri Lankan traditions, 7. Further Extensions of the Buddha's Life Story: Some Tooth Relic Traditions, 8. Relics and Eschatology, Conclusions, Bibliography, index.

About the Author(s)

John S. Strong is a Professor of Religion at Bates College.  Among his book, one is the Legend and Cult of Upagupta and another Guide to Buddhist Religion co-author with Frank Reynolds and John Holt.

Sometime in the middle of the fifth century, the Chinese pilgrim Daorong set out for India on foot. When he and his companions arrived in what is now Afghanistan, they proceeded to visit various sites of pilgrimage, places that were, in one way or an- other, associated with the historical Buddha Sakyamuni. In Nagarahara, they found "a piece of bone from the top of the Buddha’s skull . . . , four inches long and beige in color" (Wang 1984: 243-44; text in T. 2092, 51:1021c). A bit further on, they visited a monastery, where the Buddha’s staff was enshrined, and, in the city itself, they stopped at another sanc- tuary, where some teeth and hair of the Buddha were kept in a jeweled reliquary. Outside of town, they went to a famous cave, where they saw the "shadow" of the Buddha, an image he was said to have projected on a wall of the grotto.'! Near the cave, they venerated a set of Buddha foot- prints imprinted on a rock, and, a bit further away, a spot where the Bud- dha had washed his robe. Beyond that was a large stupa, said to have been built by the Tathagata himself, which was gradually sinking into the ground; its final disappearance would mark the end of the Buddha’s teaching. By the side of the stipa was an inscription in Sanskrit report- edly written in the Buddha’s own hand (T. 2092, $1:1021c-22a = Eng. trans., Wang 1984: 243-45; see also Chavannes 1903: 427-29). Throughout the Buddhist world, pilgrims have long visited and vener- ated a great number and variety of buddha relics. Indeed, from Kandy to Kyoto, there was hardly a Buddhist site that did not enshrine some physical remains of the Buddha, some object that once belonged to him, some trace of his presence enlivened by association with his body, his teaching (dharma), or his community of followers (samgha). Simply put, buddha relics, broadly defined, were "everywhere." For hundreds of years, pilgrims to India commonly came across stapas believed to have been built by the third-century B.Cc.E. emperor ASoka, who was reputed to have enshrined relics of the Buddha in 84,000 places throughout his realm." Shrines for hair relics (often associated with fingernail-clipping relics) were likewise numerous; a Southeast Asian tradition, for instance, asserts that, after the Buddha’s parinirvana, the gods distributed his 800,000 body hairs and 900,000 head hairs "throughout this universe of ours" (Halliday 1923: 46). In the seventh century, the pilgrim Xuanzang reported that, at the site in India where the Buddha was cremated, one could find any number of relics simply by praying earnestly (T: 2087, 51:904b = Eng. trans., Li 1996:190). In China, by the Tang dynasty, the proliferation of relics was so great that one scholar has spoken of it as a "hemorrhage of the sacred" (Faure 1996: 163). The same could be said of early medieval Japan, where relics were avidly collected by monks and aristocrats alike (see Ruppert 1997: appendix). Along with such prolifer- ations went the assumption that relics were able to reproduce themselves, to grow, multiply, or appear miraculously (see Faure 1991: 138-39; Bar- rett 2001: 41; and Martin 1992). An eleventh-century Chinese author, for example, reports how once, when he was examining a buddha’s tooth in a monastery, it suddenly started producing small relic pellets: "They wafted away in countless numbers, some flying up into the air and others falling to the ground. ... They sparkled brightly, filling the eyes with light. When I arrived back at the capital they circulated among ranking officials there who passed them among themselves" (Kieschnick 2003: 51). Similar phenomena may be seen even in modern times. In 1970, for instance, buddha relics began to grow spontaneously out of the east side of the stapa of Svayambhanatha in Kathmandu. "There were thousands of them all over the ground," reported one observer, "and all the monastery, including the highest lama, who almost never left his room, were outside picking them up" (Allione 1984: 203-4; see also Martin 1994: 283).

In the Theravada world, according to Buddhaghosa (fifth century), possession of a relic was one of the definitional criteria for what consti- tuted a proper monastery (AA., 4:186), and still today, relics of the Bud- dha are found in virtually every community, sometimes in very large numbers.* Richard Gombrich (1971: 106) remarks that, in all of his time in Sri Lanka, he "came across only one temple that did not claim to possess a relic," and he goes on to remind us of the routine nature of the phenomenon:

2 Though they are of course handled with the greatest veneration, in a wider sense these relics are casually dealth with: I invariably asked after the origin of a relic, but never got any reply more interesting than that it was inherited from the monk’s teacher. . . . These village relics are indeed not very impres- sive objects: as a special favour I was shown those in Migala, precious cas- ket removed to reveal precious casket, until the last tiny stapa contained a couple of minute white balls of what I presume was bone. (106-7)

This is not to say that there are not famous relics of the Buddha, with impressive pedigrees and a full complement of myths attached to them. Indeed, in this book, I will primarily be considering traditions about such relics, but, in doing so, it is important to remember from the outset that these represent only the most visible and renowned parts of a heritage of relic veneration that was always, to some extent, extraordinary, but often routine and including common, generic objects of devotion.

I first became interested in Buddhist relics while working on a book on the legends of King Agoka (Strong 1983). That interest then broadened into more general endeavours in the comparative study of relics (Strong 1987, 1995, and forthcoming) before narrowing once again to a "focus" on bodily relics of the Buddha. In the chapters that follow, I will be concerned primarily with South and Southeast Asian legendary and cultic traditions about relics of the Buddha’s physical body, although I shall also pay some attention to "secondary" relics such as his footprints, his bowl, his robe, and his bodhi tree. Though not totally oblivious to questions of dating and historicity, I will not hesitate to mix together sources from the beginnings of the Buddhist record almost right up to the present, and rep- resenting a whole gamut of genres. Here, the stuff of legends, the stances of doctrine, the records of inscriptions, the makings of myth, the reports of pilgrims, even the comments of modern travellers, will all be combined in a "method" that I have called elsewhere "exegetical exploration" (Strong 1992: xii). In this approach, particular texts or particular issues are taken as focal points for presenting and discussing the problematics of a given tradition, and the effort to understand these texts and issues is further developed by the perspectives of different contexts and co-texts. Since relics tell stories, much attention will be given to telling the stories of relics, and seeking to understand their significances and connotations. To a large extent, then, I shall proceed anecdotally, presenting and discussing a succession of stories about Buddhist relics, admitting that many of these texts are only partially representative of an overall tradition whose full complexity undermines generalizations. Nonetheless, it is my hope that, as Wendy Doniger ({O’Flaherty] 1988: 2) once put it, "stories reveal things that are not easily gleaned from the harder disciplines," especially if we can remember that "stories are not designed as arguments, nor should they be taken as arguments."