Union Minister Kiren Rijiju has left for Mongolia with four relics of Lord Buddha for an 11-day exposition as a part of Mongolian Buddha Purnima.
The Union Minister is accompanied by 25 member delegation. The Holy relics, which are housed in the National Museum, will be displayed at the Batsagaan Temple within the premises of Ganden Tegchenling Monastery.
“The teachings of Lord Buddha are relevant even in today’s time and will guide humanity towards greater peace, harmony and prosperity,” tweeted the Union Ministers’ office. It posted a video on Sunday (June 12) which showed the Union Minister boarding an Indian Air Force Plane along with the 25-member delegation and the holy relics at Hindon Airbase in Ghaziabad.
Union Minister Rijiju said, “This will give a message of peace to the world. The friendship between India and Mongolia is very old. After Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Mongolia in 2015, the bond between both countries have become very strong.”
The Indian government allowed putting these relics on display at the request of the Mongolian government.
The relics would arrive in Ulaanbaatar on June 13, and after ceremonial reception at the airport, the relics would be directly taken to Ganden Tegchenling Monastery. The relics are returning to Mongolia after 29 years. Devotees are allowed to pay respects to the relics till June 24.
Indian ambassador to Mongolia M P Singh told ANI, “The shared heritage of Buddhism has connected us and this connection has actually now become a connection of hearts. For an average, India looks Mongolia as its spiritual neighbor and that spiritual connection translates into his goodwill for India and in recent times, especially in the last 7 years, since the historic visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Mongolia this relationship with Mongolia has traversed much beyond cultural realms”.
“This heritage is not only connected at leadership level but on average Mongolian looks upon India as a country of what we call as “Vishwa Guru” or a world leader,” he said.
Munkhbaatar Batchuluun, the administrative board member at Ganden Tegchenling Monastery, said, “It is the rarest event in history, the most precious opportunity for Mongolians to witness, to get boundless blessings from it”.
Batchuluun added that maybe India and Mongolia are geographically distant, but in terms of spirituality and shared heritage, both countries are close. “In our thinking, India is regarded as the sacred land of Buddha and Buddhism first,” he said.
Mahavamsa mentions that “When the relics are seen, the Buddha is seen”. And in Śālistamba Sūtra (Rice Seedling Sūtra), the Buddha Shakyamuni said, “One who sees the Dharma sees the Buddha”. In the Buddhist tradition, various classifications of relics are divided into 1. Body relics 2. Contact relics (pāribhogika), i.e., objects that the Buddha owned or used or with which he closely associated, such as bowls, robes, bodhi trees 3. Dharma relics, by which as meant either whole sutras or a dharma verse (such as the “ye dharmā hetuprabhavā hetuṃ teṣāṃ tathāgato hyavadat, teṣāṃ ca yo nirodha evaṃvādī mahāśramaṇaḥ”, or a dhāraṇī, or anything somehow recording the Buddha’s teaching.
In the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, after the Buddha Shakyamuni’s passing away, his remains were divided and distributed among the princes of eight of the sixteen mahājanapadās- Kapilavastu, the capital city of the Shakya kingdom 1/8th of the Buddha’s Relics was stored. About 300 years later, Emperor Ashoka opened seven of these stupas and removed the Buddha relics. His goal was to redistribute the relics throughout the Maurya Empire into 84,000 stupas which he planned to construct.
According to legend, the serpent king was guarding the Ramagrama stupa and prevented Ashoka from unearthing the relic, making it one of the eight undisturbed stupas.
Holy Relics of Buddha Shakyamuni
One of the world’s pre-eminent discoveries of relics of Gautama Buddha occurred at Piprahwa in 1898. William C. Peppé, a British landowner, excavated an ancient Buddhist stupa on the Birdpur estate near the border of India and Nepal. After digging through 10-18 ft. of brickwork, he unearthed a large stone coffer containing gold, jewels, fragments of bone and five reliquary urns. An inscription in Mauryan Brahmi script on one of the urns identified the pieces of bone as the relics of the Lord Buddha, which had been given to his own Sakya clan following his cremation. The bone relics were given to the King of Siam (Thailand) to distribute among the world’s Buddhists. The coffer, the reliquary urns and the jewels were given to the India Museum in Kolkata. W. C. Peppé was permitted to keep a small amount of the jewels.
In 1971, K. M. Srivastavaan, an archaeologist with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), excavated at a depth of 20 ft. and discovered 22 bones in soapstone urns dating to the 5th cent BCE. K. M.
Srivastava’s Report on Kapilavastu and Holy Buddha Relics was filed to ASI in 1991. The Holy Relics of the Buddha brought for this exposition in Mongolia are part of the Piprahwa Relics, 1898, 1971.
