Bones of the Buddha is a made-for-TV documentary produced by Icon Films and commissioned by WNET/THIRTEEN and ARTE France for the National Geographic Channels.
It concerns a controversial Buddhist reliquary from Piprahwa Stupa in Uttar Pradesh, India. It was released in May, 2013, and was broadcast in July in the US on PBS as part of the Secrets of the Dead series.
Writer and host Charles Allen investigates the Buddhist burial mound and reliquary in Piprahwa, a large Buddhist stupa, which is argued to be one of the eight storage sites of the historical Buddha's ashes.[1]
In 1898 estate manager and amateur archaeologist W.C. Peppé excavated the stupa, finding a large brick dome with a coffer at the center. Inside were four vessels (three stoneware, one glass) along with about 1600 small jewels and gold jewelry pieces — the Piprahwa treasure — all of undetermined age.
One of the stoneware vessels — the "Piprahwa reliquary" — contained jewels mixed with pyre ashes and bone fragments.
Peppé made the mistake of consulting Dr Alois Anton Führer, a German archeologist who soon became notorious for forging other Buddhist relics (according to Dr. Ranajit Pat and other Buddhist historians).
In presenting the background to the story, Allen visits the Buddhist sites of Kushinagar and Sanchi, as well as the old Peppé family manor house, now in a state of extreme neglect.
Allen interviews Harry Falk (professor of Indology at the Freie Universität in Berlin and said to be the "world's foremost expert" in ancient Indian languages and history), who states that Führer could not have forged the Piprahwa reliquary inscription.
This is, Falk says, because he lacked sufficient knowledge of the language (Prakrit) in which its inscription is written and, more importantly, he could have never known the Sanskrit word nidhane ("container"), which is written on the reliquary, a hapax legomenon (unique example) in the entire corpus of Brahmi script.
That said, however, Führer had taught Sanskrit for three years at St. Xavier's College, Bombay,[2] and was one of the editors of Epigraphia Indica;[3] that he had translated Sanskrit texts, and that nidhane occurs commonly enough in such Sanskrit textual sources.
Falk concludes that the reliquary found at Piprahwa in 1898 did contain a portion of the ashes of the Buddha[Note 1] and that the inscription is authentic.[Note 2]
According to Falk the inscription translates as, "These are the relics of the Buddha, the venerable one".[6]
The conclusion is that the Piprahwa stupa was built by India's Emperor Ashoka 150 years later in 245 BCE over the original and simpler interment site created by the Shakyian (Scythian) clan for the 1/8th of the Buddha's funerary ashes they had been apportioned.
Falk points to the close similarity of materials used at Piprahwa and its grand size with other Ashokan stupas, and that the coffer containing the reliquary found at Piprahwa closely reflects Ashokan workmanship, design, and the type of sandstone used for monuments like the Lumbini pillar erected during his reign.
(In 1971 Indian archeologist K.S. Srivastava excavated deeper into the stupa than Peppé had, uncovering two chambers each containing a soapstone casket with redware fragments. This is taken as confirmation of the existence of an earlier, deeper burial site at Piprahwa dating back to the final nirvana of the Buddha).
Notes
- ^ Theodor Bloch commented on the bone relics exvacated by Peppe: "one may still be permitted to maintain some doubts in regard to the theory that the latter monument contained the relic share of Buddha received by the Sakyas. The bones at that place, which have been presented to the King of Siam, and which I saw in Calcutta, according to my opinion were not human bones at all."[4]
- ^ In his review of Harry Falks new book "Aśokan Sites and Artefacts", Michael Willis comments: "As the question of fakes is raised by Falk himself, it is noteworthy that the author has side-stepped the Piprahwa reliquary in the India Museum, Calcutta, in all likelihood a forgery made by A. A. Führer whose activities are explored elsewhere in this JRAS special issue. The decision to side-step this problem was a wise one as its inclusion would only detract from the volume as a reference work."[5]
References
- ^ The Buddha and Dr Führer, (2008) Charles Allen, Haus Publishing, London
- ^ Arx, Urs von (2005). In Marco Jorio, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz vol. 4, Basel: Schwabe
- ^ Führer, Alois Anton; Hultzsch, E; Burgess, James (1892-1894). Epigraphia Indica: a collection of inscriptions supplementary to the Corpus inscriptionum Indicarum, Calcutta: Government printing
- ^ Bloch, Theodor, ‘Notes on the Exploration of Vaisali’, Annual Report, Bengal Circle, Archaeological Survey of India, year ended April 1904, p. 15 OCLC 64218646
- ^ Willis, Michael (2012). Review: Aśokan Sites and Artefacts. A Source-Book with Bibliography (Monographien zur Indischen Archäologie, Kunst und Philologie, Band 18) by Harry Falk, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series 22 (1), 187-188
- ^ Excerpt from The Bones of the Buddha
