This Buddha Statue Hid a Mummified Monk for a Millennium

The 1,000-year-old statue, currently housed in the Netherlands, had a little surprise inside.

Researchers at the Drents Museum in the Netherlands found an unexpected guest inside a 1,000-year-old Buddha statue: a mummified Buddhist monk sitting in lotus position. Found during CT scans of the statue, the body is believed to be Lin Quan, leader of a meditation school around the year 1,100 CE.

The monk went through a grim and grueling process known as "self-mummification." He would have eaten nuts and seeds for 1,000 days before eating only bark for another 1,000, then drank varnish to poison himself. Lin Quan would have then lived in a stone tomb with an air tube, ringing a bell to indicate that he was still alive. Once the bell stopped ringing, the body would be left for 1,000 days, and venerated as a Buddha if successfully mummified. 

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The golden statue Quan sat inside was built to fit his mummy to near perfection. Prior to being placed inside the statue, his organs had been removed and replaced with a series of scripts. The self-mummification process originated in China before being practiced more widely in Japan, where two dozen such mummies have been found.

Source: Discovery News

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