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PERSONAL PRETEXTS OVER THE YEARS, I HAVE HAD THE CHANCE TO VISIT THREE DIFFERENT Buddhist temples claiming to house various tooth relics of the Buddha. The first was the Dalada Maligawa in Kandy, Sri Lanka, which I first went to in 1969. As I filed past the open doors of the inner sanctum, along with other pilgrims, I caught a brief glimpse of the outermost of the famous relic’s reliquaries. But I did not see the Buddha’s tooth itself; it was concealed from view, set, we are told, in the innermost of seven nesting containers , which encase and protect it. For my notions of what the Kandyan tooth actually looked like, I could only rely on the disparate descriptions of more privileged persons.1 Second, in the summer of 1972, in the Western Hills outside of Beijing , I visited the new Buddha’s Tooth Relic Pagoda, built in the 1960s just prior to the Cultural Revolution. Together with our hosts from the Chinese Buddhist Association, my wife and I climbed a spiral staircase and emerged in a chamber specially constructed to house the relic. The tooth, said to have been that which long ago was brought from Khotan to Chang’an, had been found in the ruins of the old pagoda, destroyed during the Boxer rebellion. But did we see it ? Alas, though we were able to come up quite close to the altar, the tooth itself was effectively concealed in its reliquary, behind a glass window that was frustratingly opaque.2 For several years, I thought little about my failures to see the Buddha ’s tooth on these occasions. Not seeing a relic seemed normal to me or, at any rate, perfectly acceptable, for I viewed the Buddha in nirvana in the 27 CHAPTER TWO BUDDHIST RELICS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE: BEYOND THE PARALLELS John S. Strong words of the Heart Sutra as “gone, gone, gone beyond.” Then, in 1993, my wife and I had a chance to visit another tooth of the Buddha, at the Sennyu \-ji temple in Kyoto. We wrote and asked for permission to enter the usually locked reliquary hall (shariden), and, on the appointed day, we were kindly ushered into the building. But again, we did not see the tooth. Though its magnificent reliquary was open for close-up inspection, the relic itself was kept elsewhere. For security reasons, it had been removed permanently to a storehouse.3 This time, however, the failure to lay eyes on the actual relic did occasion some reflection, for, about a month earlier, I had been in Rome, visiting the ancient basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, and there I realized that not all relics are routinely “unseen.” All alone, in the Chapel of the Holy Cross, I was able to go right up to the relic cases, and inches away, I could gaze to my heart’s content upon three slivers of the wood on which Jesus was crucified, upon one of the spikes that had nailed him to the cross, upon two thorns from his crown of thorns, upon the titulus—the inscription plate—that Pontius Pilate had set up above his head, declaring, in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, that this was “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” There too was the finger bone of Doubting Thomas—the very finger that that apostle had stuck into the wounds in Jesus’ flesh after the resurrection ; and there, on a side wall, was the whole beam from the cross of the good thief Dysmas who had been crucified by Jesus’ side. All of this and more was on display, open to view, in reliquaries designed to expose rather than enclose, and labeled in six different languages. Moreover, close-up photographs were available in the basilica shop along with amulet replicas of each of the relics.4 It has been customary, in the comparative study of relics, to emphasize or imply similarities between Christian and Buddhist traditions.5 Sometimes, the pursuit of these similarities has been very fruitful. Many years ago, for example, Leonardo Olschki creatively elucidated certain parallels between the tale of the Buddha’s begging bowl (seen by Faxian in Peshawar) and a Uigur story about the stone crib of the baby Jesus (a corner of which he broke off so as to have something to give the three Magi in exchange for their offerings of gold, frankincense, and myrrh).6 More recently, Gregory Schopen has made brilliant use of the work of Philippe Ari...

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