50 CHAPTER TWOstiipas throughout his empire. Early chronicles record the arrival of a collar-
bone and a bowl relic to Sri Lanka. A medieval Sri Lankan text catalogs the
characteristics of the relics of the Buddha and those of his principal disciples.
The Chinese pilgrims who came as spiritual seekers to India showed great in-
terest in famous relics of the Buddha and well-known arhants. Hsi.ian-tsang
saw a tooth relic of the Buddha, his skull bone, hair, and nail parings, and vis-
ited the place where the Master's begging-bowl had once been enshrined. A
tooth relic enshrined in Kandy, Sri Lanka, is the subject of a yearly summer
festival (Strong EB, sec. 6.5.2); a finger bone relic exists in the Famen Temple,
near Ch' ang-an, China. A Royal Air Force bombing in Southeast Asia during
the Second World War resulted in the discovery of a hair relic of the Buddha.
In 1956, on the 2,500th anniversary of Buddhism, the relics of Sariputra and
Maudgalyayana, which had been removed to the British Museum during the
long restoration of Sanchi, were returned and reenshrined. In the 1960s, a
New Tooth Relic Pagoda was built near Peking. The great veneration with
which Buddhists treat these relics is one of the clearest expressions of the reli-
gious, as opposed to the philosophical, dimension of the Buddhist tradition.
Another expression of this dimension, with similar roots in the Sutta of the
Great Total Nibbana, is the practice of making pilgrimages to the locations as-
sociated with four major events in the Buddha's life: his birth, his Awakening,
the delivery ofhis first sermon, and his Parinirval).a (Strong EB, sec. 1.1). The
Buddha is reported to have recommended to Ananda that monks, nuns, and
lay followers should visit these places to develop a sense of chastened dispas-
sion. Anyone who happened to die with an attitude of true faith while taking
such a pilgrimage, he said, would be assured a heavenly rebirth. This promise
seems to have encouraged Buddhist pilgrims to make the journey from far
distant places ever since the early days of the religion. Some of the earliest ex-
tant Buddhist artifacts are votive tablets stamped with the symbols of the four
locations-a lotus for Lumbini, a Bodhi Tree for Bodhgaya, a Dharma wheel
for Sarnath, and a stiipa for Kusinagari-as mementos of the trip. These have
been found not only in India, but as far away as the Malay Archipelago. The
volume of pilgrimage has varied over the centuries, reaching a nadir during
the Muslim rule oflndia, during which all of the buildings erected at the holy
sites, except for the great temple at Bodhgaya, were destroyed. Even though
there is now little left to see at the various sites, there has been a recent up-
swing in the number of pilgrims, due largely to the availability of modern
transportation, the relative stability oflndian politics, and the health of the
Asian economy. Buddhist teachers may downplay the importance of making a
pilgrimage, saying that the true Buddhist holy spot is in the present awareness
of the mind, but this has not discouraged large num hers of Buddhists from
taking the journey and finding inspiration in the sense of immediacy that these
sites give them to the events of the Buddha's life.