The "Bones of the Buddha" (video)

Wudu1982 (National Geographic video); Amber Larson, Ananda M. (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

The Buddhist burial mound or stupa at Piprahwa discovered by William Peppe (wiki)

 

Do the jewels, bones, and cremation ashes (relics) found in an Indian burial mound tomb (stupa) in 1898 mark one of the eight final resting places of the Buddha himself, or was it all an elaborate hoax?

• Piprahwa (Excavation by William Claxton Peppe) led an excavating team and discovered by Peppe, a British colonial engineer and landowner of an estate in January 1898...

An ideal stupa, Buddhist reliquary

When Colonial estate manager, William Peppe, set his workers digging at a mysterious hill in Northern India in 1898, he had no idea what they'd find.
 

Over 20 feet down, they made an amazing discovery: a huge stone coffer, containing some reliquary urns, over 1,000 separate jewels and some pyre ashes and bones.
 

One of the jars had an inscription that seemed to say that these were the remains of Shakyamuni the Buddha himself.

Stone casket that contained gold urn

This seemed to be a most extraordinary find in Indian archaeology.
 

But doubt and scandal have hung over this amazing find for over 100 years. For some, the whole thing is an elaborate hoax.

For others, it is no less than the final resting place of the Maitreya (Messiah) of one of the three great world religions. For the doubters, suspicion focuses...