Skull of Buddha Found, Archaeologists Say

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 | July 5, 2016 | By Lauren Boudreau

Archaeologists in China believe they have found the remains of Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, in a small chest buried beneath a Buddhist temple in Nanjing. The 1,000-year-old chest has inscriptions on it from a man named Deming who wrote that Buddha’s parietal bone, which forms part of the skull, had been hidden inside the chest.

The chest is no ordinary chest, though. As Mic reports, it has many layers that archaeologists had to get through in order to find the bone. Inside the chest was an iron box. Inside the iron box was a supta model four-feet tall. Inside that was a silver casket, which housed a gold casket.

Ancient Stupa Holding Bone of Buddha Discoveredhttps://t.co/XHZTA6OILt pic.twitter.com/DPOUplfHx3

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The inscriptions written on it were transcribed, according to Live Science, and say that the supta was created during the Song Dynasty when Emperor Zhenzong ruled. It also allegedly lists the names of builders and people who contributed money and materials to its construction.

Another inscription written inside the chest by Deming details how the skull fragment found its way inside a chest in China.

Apparently, Buddha’s skull was originally underneath a temple in India that was destroyed after violence ravaged the area. The king at the time, King Ashoka, then divided Buddha’s remains into 84,000 shares.

“Our land of China received 19 of them,” Deming wrote.

Even though this discovery is only going viral now, it actually happened back in 2012. Only recently was the find published in Chinese Cultural Relics journal.