WHEN workers stumble upon an ancient Indian tomb in 1898, they uncover one of the most amazing discoveries in Buddhist history: A huge stone coffer containing stone jars and urns, over 1,000 separate jewels — as well as ash and bone.
A screenshot of the upcoming movie Bones of the Buddha.
From www.nst.com.my
One of the jars has an inscription indicating that these are the remains of the Buddha himself. But the most extraordinary find in Indian archaeology has been marred in doubt and scandal for over 100 years. For some, it is an elaborate hoax. For others, it is the final resting place of the messiah of one of the world’s great religions.
Premiering tomorrow at 10pm on National Geographic Channel, Bones Of The Buddha follows renowned historian on ancient India, Charles Allen, as he retraces the steps of this incredible find. When British colonial estate manager William Peppe sets workers digging at a mysterious hill on his Birdpore, India, property in 1898, he has no idea what they will find.
Over six metres down, they are shocked to find 1,600 individual precious and semi-precious jewels mixed in with fragments of bone and ash, and an inscription in an indecipherable language. Peppe immediately copies the inscription from the urn, and sends it off to the local district officer and archaeologist Dr Anton Fuhrer. Both believe these could be the remains of the Buddha himself.
But, just a few months later, Fuhrer resigns after a scandal breaks that the archaeologist has sold bogus Buddha relics, falsified reports, and faked at least one ancient inscription. With doubt cast on Peppe’s find, the British Government quickly makes a diplomatic move to present the relics to Siam’s Buddhist King, Rama V.
In Bones Of The Buddha, Allen is on a mission to determine the truth behind the 1898 find, and has enlisted the help of Harry Falk, a leading world authority on ancient Indian languages and a professor at Germany’s oldest institute of Indology in Berlin.
They travel to a Calcutta Museum, which holds the original inscribed urn. Falk confirms that the inscription is authentic and that it says the urn holds the remains of the Buddha, but creates another mystery. The text of the inscription did not exist at the time when the Buddha died around 410 BCE, but was from at least 150 years after the Buddha’s death.
After Buddha died, his body was cremated and the remains were distributed to eight kings.
But, 150 years after Buddha died around 410 BCE, his benevolent philosophies have been abandoned by the ruthless emperor Ashoka, whose reign has thrown his ancient Indian empire into violence. However, Ashoka had an extraordinary change of heart, and suddenly converted his kingdom to Buddhism. In this process, he dug up Buddha’s remains and redistributed them to new sites. The inscription on the urn is in Brahmi, the script used at the time of Ashoka.
Could this emperor have re-buried Buddha’s remains, adding his own majestic tribute in the form of jewels? Returning to Peppe’s site to investigate this mystery, an Indian archaeology team makes an even more compelling discovery: an earlier, humbler, burial site with two chambers is unearthed beneath the tomb found in 1898.
Allen evaluates the connection between these lower and upper chambers. Could this earlier tomb be the original burial site of the Bones Of The Buddha?