(RNS) — On May 6, just days before Buddhists around the world celebrate the holiday of Vesak, Sotheby’s Hong Kong will put relics of the Buddha — what Sotheby’s calls the “Piprahwa Gems of the Historical Buddha”— on the auction block.
The relics were found buried in a stupa, or funerary monument, in Piprahwa, in present-day Uttar Pradesh, India, in 1898. According to an inscription carved into one of the reliquaries, the stupa contained the remains of the Buddha himself.
As the first credible find of the Buddha’s relics in modern times, they immediately captured the attention of Buddhist scholars and devotees alike.
In the Sotheby’s catalog, the auction house distinguishes the “gems” on sale from the bone fragments and ash found inside. Buyers are invited to appreciate the relics for their material value and fine workmanship. The art market presentation cleanses the “gems” of their inherent association with human remains, while still celebrating their sacred nature to enhance market value. The estimated cost is “upon request,” per Sotheby’s.
For the Buddhists who deposited them — as for Buddhists today — the gems, and his bone and ash, all belong to the Buddha and shouldn’t just be sold to the highest bidder. And as researchers of Buddhist material culture engaged with current global debates around restitution, we see this sale as perpetuating colonial violence.
Back in 1898, British landowner William Claxton Peppé ordered the desecration of the stupa on his colonial Indian estate and found the relics inside the reliquaries. He separated them into two distinct sets: bone and ash in one, gems and precious objects in the other.
The Piprahwa Stupa in India. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia/Creative Commons)
The British Crown, which ruled over colonial India from 1858 to 1947, claimed Peppé’s finds under the 1878 Indian Treasure Trove Act and distributed the spoils accordingly. The bone and ash went to King Chulalongkorn of Siam in Thailand, a portion of the “gems” went to the colonial museum in Calcutta, and the remaining “gems” went back to Peppé. The gems claimed by Peppé are now being sold by his descendants through Sotheby’s.
We live in a day of increased demand for provenance, or the documented history of ownership of artworks. Sotheby’s buyers are reassured by the claim to legal ownership clearly set out in the catalog, which reads, “Property from the descendants of William Claxton Peppé.”
Do the legal terms established by colonial powers hold today? Is “consent” even a viable concept for colonized peoples? Where are the ethics in this case, where the coercion inherent in colonial contexts ultimately engenders the artful commodification of materials which are of the highest sacred value for vast populations of religious practitioners?
The repatriation of cultural objects wrongfully acquired by European powers from South and Southeast Asia and Africa during the colonial era lies at the heart of today’s movement for an ethical reboot of the art market. In our view, colonial legacies of violence are perpetuated in this sale.
The Sotheby’s auction raises other pressing ethical questions. Can human remains be legally traded in our day, who defines what constitutes “human remains,” and how?
The inscribed reliquary found in the Piprahwa stupa is a baseline for considering these questions. Esteemed Indologist Harry Falk authoritatively read the inscription as: “This enshrinement of the corporeal remnants (sharira) of the Buddha [of the Shakyas], the Lord, (is to the credit) of the [Shakya] brothers of the ‘highly famous,’ together with their sisters, with their sons and wives.”
Part of the collection of gems and bone relics from the Piprahwa Stupa in India. (Courtesy photo)
What does this mean? The relics deposited in the stupa by members of the Buddha’s family clan, the Shakya, were considered the sharira of the Buddha. Sharira, often imperfectly translated as “relics,” refers broadly to all remains of the Buddha’s body. There is no categorical difference between “bones and ash” and “gems and stones” here — both are “sharira.”
In the fifth century, the philosopher Buddhaghosa described how the sharira of the Buddha “found in the remains of the Buddha’s cremation fire were of three types —’like jasmine buds, like washed pearls, and like [nuggets] of gold’” (as quoted and translated by John Strong in his 2004 book “Relics of the Buddha”).
The slippage between bone and gem here is not rhetorical; it is a real identification. Buddhists today still look for such gemlike sharira in the cremation pyre of acknowledged masters. For the vast majority of Buddhist practitioners, sharira are not inanimate objects: They are imbued with the living presence of the Buddha or Buddhist masters, who have not truly died, but have reached Awakening.
Some of the contents of the Piprahwa reliquaries may also have been donations made during stupa renovation campaigns or other holy celebrations. Donors make such offerings intending for them to remain in the presence of the Buddha’s remains, effectively melding with them. The relic-offerings are meant to ensure donors’ well-being in this and future lives.
Bringing Buddhist perspectives from the Piprahwa case into the global conversation about transforming arts sector practices, could sharira be seen as “belongings”?
Jordan Wilson, Musqueam Cultural Education Resource Centre curator, in 2015 coined the term “belongings” to reframe cultural “artifacts” in museums and private collections as the personal belongings of the Canadian First Nations communities whose ancestors made them. These communities have maintained intangible connections with these belongings, including knowledge of their power and of how to care for them.
Sharira are belongings in more ways than one. They are belongings of the Buddha, and they are belongings of those worshippers seeking through donation to assimilate their own bodies with that of the Buddha. They have always belonged to Buddhist communities.
As curator at Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum until 2023, one of the authors of this op-ed was responsible for borrowing the Piprahwa relics for the exhibition “Body & Spirit: The Human Body in Thought and Practice (2022-23),” which was supported by money raised from local Buddhists. On the last day the relics were on display, people came to meditate in their presence. Over the last six years, the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have also hosted these relics.
The Peppés, who couriered the relics in person to the Asian Civilisations Museum, repeatedly shared their motivation for the exhibit: to make the relics publicly accessible, particularly somewhere like Singapore with a substantial population of practicing Buddhists. Accordingly, the ACM did not charge visitors ticket fees. Which is why the news of this sale came as a shock to us.
While the Peppé family said its wish was to share this sacred heritage with Buddhists worldwide, putting it up for auction makes their museum collaborations look like market strategy.
(Conan Cheong is a specialist of Southeast Asian Buddhist art. Ashley Thompson is the Hiram W. Woodward Chair of Southeast Asian Art at SOAS University of London. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)