Are relics proof of Arahantship?
Greg, can you elaborate? I also heard from the Sayadawgyi himself that they stuff rubies into the bowels. I also heard that you can get relics from chicken bones (a Sri Lankan monk told me).
The Buddha’s hair relics are in some pagodas. They are called living hair (strands) because they are indeed alive and moving nonstop.
The real relic of the Buddha is the Dhamma and the Sangha. He who sees the Dhamma sees the Buddha. It is those relics that free us all from suffering.
If you recollect the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha then are you in a way a Buddha reliquary?
Each of us have relics of the Buddha in our minds.
One of my favourites is
Not to do evil actions, to cultivate what is good, to purify ones own mind. This is the teaching of all the Buddhas.
And coincidentally they say that when no one understands what that means anymore then this sasana is finished.
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A lot of people in burma think the relics are little balls that form in the ashes. It appears those can be formed if you fire peoples bones the right way especially from the thigh bone that have a lot of marrow. If you heat them too much it all turns to ash. There are lots of hearsay and speculation. My friends father died and he took him to yangon crematorium and the cremator asked him what he wanted cooked to ashes or cooked to buddha relics. He was able to turn down the heat and produce some bones and balls.
I have seen buddha relics in India (patna museum) and in Mandalay (peshawar relics) these were dug up from stupas in India identified by Cunningham a british Archeologist and others. These are the most authenticated historic relics known. Also the relics of Sariputta and Mogallana in Sanchi and some in Kaba aye pagoda yangon. The nature of the containers and the articles in the soap stone caskets and inscriptions show that the fabulous stories made up over time about such relics say in Myanmar are likely not true. There are no balls in any of those relics like people think are relics today. People just embellish stories with no way to examine. Faith and imagination overcomes wisdom.
There are two monasteries in Myanmar mon state near Pa Auk which were run by two monk brothers and they are right across the road from each other. They had huge. Let me repeat huge collections of relics. Balls and river pebbles and ones manufactured and they have jars filled with them and all sorts of stuff. There is no way these were all real and they just kept adding to them in a form of relic competition.
The Relic Stupa of Vaishali was built by Lichhavis in Vaishali as a mud stupa in the 5th century BCE. Noted archaeologists Anant Sadashiv Altekar and Sitaram Rai of the K.P. Jayaswal Research Institute led an archaeological excavation of this stupa from 1958 to 1962. A reliquary was discovered and removed from the core of the stupa; it was dated to the 5th century BCE. It was later determined that this reliquary contained ashes of the Buddha mixed with earth, a copper punch-marked coin, and several other items. The casket was brought to the Patna Museum in 1972, where it remains to this day.
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