The cremated remains of the Buddha may have been discovered in a 1,000-year-old chest in China.
More than 2,000 pieces of cremated bones were found in a box in Jingchuan County along with more than 260 Buddhist statues, LiveScience reported. Jingchuan is about 800 miles west of Beijing.
The bones are believed to belong to Gautama Buddha, also known as Siddhārtha Gautama, who founded the Buddhist religion.
At the site where the statues and alleged Buddha remains were buried, archaeologists also found the remains of a structure that could be from the now-lost Mañjuśrī Hall.
The translated inscription on the box reads: “The monks Yunjiang and Zhiming of the Lotus School, who belonged to the Mañjuśrī Temple of the Longxing Monastery in Jingzhou Prefecture, gathered more than 2,000 pieces of śarīra, as well as the Buddha’s teeth and bones.”
“[They] buried them in the Mañjuśrī Hall of this temple.”
Monks from Mañjuśrī Temple of the Longxing Monastery in China’s Jingzhou Prefecture have spent more than two decades gathering the remains of the Buddha.
The statues, which are up to six and a half feet high, were created between the time of Northerners Wei dynasty (A.D. 386 to 534) and the Song dynasty (A.D. 960 to 1279).
It is unclear if the statues were buried along with the remains.