[Talk] The Buddha’s Relics and the Wandering Thai Monk: The Piprahwa Controversy in Colonial India and its Siamese Afterlife

Readers in Bangkok may be interested in this talk by John Guy at the Siam Society on 23 May 2024 on the Piprahwa Buddhist relics and Thailand’s role in their redistribution.

The excavation of the Piprahwa relics in January 1898 – the most important Buddhist relic deposit ever recovered in India – immediately sparked enormous interest and controversy across the Buddhist world. Piprahwa stupa is located in northern India close to Lumbini, the site of the historical Buddha’s birthplace in western Nepal. This lecture presents the discovery of the Piprahwa relics, which included the first reliquary inscription to credibly claim that it contained the holy remains (sarira) of Sakyamuni Buddha, and examines their remarkable fate due to the interventions of a learned Thai monk. The redistribution of part of the relics by Rama V, in the manner of the Mauryan emperor Asoka, served as an affirmation of the Siamese monarch as a Buddhist cakravartin at the moment that Siam was debating how to engage with implications of modernity.

Source: The Buddha’s Relics and the Wandering Thai Monk: The Piprahwa Controversy in Colonial India and its Siamese Afterlife | The Siam Society Under Royal Patronage