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By Mu Qian (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-02 10:51 Despite 39 C heat last weekend the Yunju Buddhist Temple in the southwest of Beijing received a record number of visitors. Yun Guirong, director of the administration of cultural relics at Yunju Temple, said there were 10,000 visitors a day, compared with the usual hundreds. The influx is because of the Buddha sarira (or sheli in Chinese) that were found in the cremation ashes of Shakyamuni. The exhibition opened on June 23 and closes today.
The sarira on display at Yunju Temple consists of two crystal-like reddish beads about the size of rice grains. Unearthed at Yunju Temple in 1981, the sarira was entrusted to the care of the Capital Museum by the Beijing Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage. This is the first time the sarira has been exhibited at the temple. Although it is impossible for visitors to clearly see the sarira, which is kept in a bulletproof glass box 3 m from a safety barrier, people have flocked to worship the sarira. "We believe that seeing the sarira equals seeing Buddha himself. I can feel great power here," says Li Dong, a lay Buddhist from Beijing, after praying for a long time before the sarira. "One ought to see through not only the eyes but also the mind." Another visitor from Tianjin, who declines to give his name, says that he feels "incomparably at ease" after seeing the sarira. It is a general Buddhist belief that emotions of peace, inspiration, or even spiritual transformation can be felt in the presence of sarira, which is found in the cremation ash of spiritual masters, among whom Shakyamuni, or Buddha, is the greatest. The sarira is purported to embody the spiritual knowledge, or living essence of masters, and is taken as evidence of the masters' enlightenment and spiritual purity. Some believe masters deliberately left sarira to be venerated. However, like the Shroud of Turin, in Christianity, there is intense debate over the sarira. Some people hold they are mostly bladder or kidney stones, but Buddhists usually deny such an assumption. Liu Qingzhu, director of the Academic Committee of the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who has closely inspected several sarira, including those unearthed from the Famen Temple of Shaanxi province and the Yunju Temple, says that the substance of sarira awaits scientific analysis. "A simple scientific examination will disclose the physical substance of the sarira without causing any damage, but because of the unique religious status of the sarira, it is difficult to conduct such an examination," he says. Bao Shengyong, dean of the department of sociology, Central University of Finance and Economics, believes the worship of sarira is a unique religious phenomenon incompatible with scientific research. "The belief in sarira goes beyond the sphere of the rational," he says. "For believers, the power of a belief is not subject to scientific interpretation, which disintegrates the consecration of belief." In China, sarira are mostly recognized on account of the consistency of their places of discovery and historical records. It was said that after the passing away of Shakyamuni, 84,000 sarira were found in his cremation ashes, and buried in 10 places in India. During the reign of Ashoka (304-232 BC), an ardent propagator of Buddhism, he unearthed the sarira and delivered them to different areas in order to promote the religion. Some of these sarira ended up in China, brought by monks from India who came to preach in China, or Chinese monks who came back from study in India, like the famous Xuan Zang (AD 602-664), who is portrayed in the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West. |
