Piprahwa
Piprahwa is a village near Siddharthnagar city in Siddharthnagar district of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Kalanamak rice, a scented and spicy variety, is grown in this area. It lies in the heart of the historical Buddha's homeland and is 9 miles from the world heritage site of Lumbini that is believed to be the place of Gautama Buddha's birth.
Piprahwa is best known for its archaeological site and excavations that suggest that it was the burial place of the portion of the Buddha's ashes that were given to his own Shakya clan. A large stupa and the ruins of several monasteries as well as a museum are located within the site. Ancient residential complexes and shrines were uncovered at the adjacent mound of Ganwaria.
Passing of the Buddha
The history of the Piprahwa stupa begins with the death of the Buddha. The Mahāparinibbāna Sutta says that an argument arose following his cremation around 480 BCE. 'The Sakyas of Kapilavatthu came to know that at Kusinara the Blessed One had died. And they sent a message to the Mallas of Kusinara, saying: "The Lord was the chief of our clan. We are worthy to receive a share of the Lord's remains, and we will make a great stupa for them." The Mallas replied "The Lord passed away in our parish. We will not give away any share of the Lord's remains." The Brahman, Dona, then intervened to remind them about the Buddha's teachings and suggested that they avoid 'strife, war and bloodshed' and split the relics between the eight kingdoms demanding a portion so that "far and wide Stupas may rise".The Buddha's own Sakya clan received a share as did seven other kingdoms. They deposited them in eight stupas with two further stupas being built over the ashes of the cremation pyre and over the vessel in which the bones and ashes had been gathered.
In the centuries after the Sakyas built their stupa, all signs of Buddhism disappeared from the Buddha's homeland. A Brahmin Hindu revival saw the decline of Buddhism which migrated to Thailand, Sri Lanka, China, Cambodia etc. Statues were destroyed or decapitated during a succession of invasions by Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Mughals and assorted Hunas or Huns.
Excavation by William Claxton Peppé
For over 2,000 years the stupa built by the Sakyas remained intact and covered with vegetation outside the village of Piprahwa on the Indian side of the border with Nepal. It even survived 50 years of stupa archaeology by the many Indophiles to be found in the British civil service. For all their efforts, they failed to find any reliquaries that claimed to hold the Buddha's relics. In 1897 a particularly large kot or earthen mound caught the attention of William Claxton Peppé, a British colonial engineer and landowner who had been inspired by the recent discovery of the Lumbini pillar that marked the birthplace of the Buddha. The Indian famine of 1896–97 had decimated the region leaving the tenant farmers on his estate in need of work. Peppé led a team excavating what Indologist Vincent Smith advised him was an unusually early example of an ancient Buddhist stupa 'probably dating from the era of Asoka the Great.' Having cleared away scrub and jungle, they set to work building a deep trench through the mound. After digging through 18 feet of solid brickwork, they came to a large stone coffer which contained five small vases containing bone fragments, gold ornaments and intricately fashioned jewellery. These reliquaries together held the largest group of precious offerings ever recorded in a single deposit: around 1,800 gemstones and semi-precious stones, rock crystal, pearls, shell, coral, embossed sheet gold and silver, granulated gold, as well as bone and ash assumed to be of great sanctity.The inscription
On one of the vases was a Brahmi script which was translated by Georg Bühler, a leading European epigraphist of the time, to mean:"This relic-shrine of divine Buddha of the Sakya-Sukiti brothers, associated with their sisters, sons, and wives."
This translation implied that the bone fragments were part of the remains of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. The challenge in interpreting a language that was new to all lay in finding uses of less familiar words in other contexts to reach a definition. To make it harder, the hand copies of the inscription were not always accurate. Peppé's original copy had one minor omission but, when he passed it over to his assistant for more copies, other errors were made. Ambitious Pali scholars approached their translations with a passion that led to competition and grandstanding, often when they were working from different texts. Throughout the following decade or so, epigraphists debated the precise meaning of the inscription. Vincent Smith, William Hoey, Thomas Rhys Davids, and Emile Senart all translated the inscription to confirm that these were relics of the Buddha.
In 1905, John Fleet, a former epigraphist of the Government of India, published a translation that agreed with this interpretation. However, on assuming the role of Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society from Thomas Rhys Davids, Fleet proposed a different reading:
"This is a deposit of relics of the brethren of Sukiti, kinsmen of Buddha the Blessed One, with their sisters, their children and wives."
This interpretation was firmly rejected by his contemporaries. Following such criticism Fleet wrote: "I now abandon my opinion". It took almost a decade to reach a consensus on the exact meaning of the inscription which resulted in it being subsequently labelled as 'controversial'. Ultimately epigraphists of the time subscribed to the translation by Auguste Barth:
"This receptacle of relics of the blessed Buddha of the Śākyas of the brothers of Sukīrti, jointly with their sisters, with their sons and their wives."
Over a hundred years later, in the 2013 documentary, Bones of the Buddha, epigraphist Harry Falk of Freie Universität Berlin confirmed the same interpretation that these were the remains of the Buddha. Having spent time with the reliquary in the Indian Museum in Kolkata, Falk translated the inscription to mean:
'This enshrinement of the corporal remnants of the Buddha , the lord, of the brothers of the 'highly famous', together with their sisters, with their sons and wives.'
Where earlier translations had debated the word Sukirti as being either a proper name or a reference to the Buddha as 'possessed of good fame' or 'the well famed one', Falk focuses on the word nidhane. Rather than it simply meaning container or reliquary box, Falk finds evidence to read it as meaning the whole stupa construction installed by the Sakyas for the relics of the Buddha. He concludes that the reliquary found at Piprahwa contained a portion of the ashes of the Buddha and that the inscription is authentic. In the catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Tree and Serpent exhibition, Curator John Guy writes that 'it is reasonable to surmise that the Piprahwa bone relics represent the Shakya clan's share of the original division by the Brahmin Drona, as implicit in the reliquary inscription, and that the seven surviving reliquary containers and their precious-material contents represent deposits at the time of the stupa's rebuilding in brick during or shortly after the reign of Ashoka.'
Dating the reliquary urn and the stupa
In 1997, epigraphist and archaeologist Ahmad Hasan Dani noted the challenges that isolated finds present to paleographical study and to dating materials. He concluded that "the inscription may be confidently dated to the earlier half of the second century B.C." but noted that "the Piprahwa vase, found in the Basti District, U.P., has an inscription scratched on the steatite stone in a careless manner. As the inscription refers to the remains of the Buddha, it was originally dated to the pre-Mauryan period, but it has been brought down to the third century B.C. on a comparison with Asokan Brahmi". Dani's dating of the inscription puts it around 250 years after the generally agreed 480 BCE death of the historical Buddha which suggests that the 'stupa' itself was built after the Buddha's lifetime. The time difference is most likely explained by the Emperor Asoka's conversion to Buddhism. Asoka the Great was a ruthless and bloody Emperor who ruled from around 268-232 BCE. He supposedly killed his brothers to ascend to the throne but, after the brutality of the Kalinga War where he slaughtered '100,000 men and animals', he renounced all violence and embraced Buddhism. He then issued a decree to build 'stupas' and redistribute the Buddha's remains across his kingdom.It was not until the 1970s that the evolution of the Piprahwa stupa was established. K. M. Srivastava knew that 'instances are not wanting when relics of the same individual have been enshrined at two different levels'. He led an Archaeological Society of India expedition that dug deeper than Peppé. They discovered two soapstone casket containing fragments of small bone in two burnt brick chambers measuring 32 inches square and 14 inches deep. Some broken dishes that may have covered the caskets proved to be Northern Black Polished Ware which dated this find to 400-500BCE, which is consistent with the 480 BCE date given for the Buddha's passing.
Srivastava concluded that the stupa was built in three phases. The first would have been undertaken by the Sakyas shortly after the Buddha's death. It most likely adhered to the Buddha's instruction to be buried under earth that was 'heaped up as rice is heaped in an alms bowl' and that the stupa be sited beside a crossroads so that passersby might pause to pay their respects and by their veneration gain in understanding and merit. The resulting circular mud adobe structure was 62 ft in diameter and 12 ft in height.
Peppé unearthed the second Asokan phase which was characterized by well fired mud bricks made with rice and straw and laid in clay mortar in concentric circles. The stupa and the coffer it held show all the trademarks of high quality Asokan craftsmanship but the enlargement likely extended for years after the Emperor's death. The base measured 116 ft in diameter and 22 ft in height.
During the third stage of construction the height of the stupa was raised and the base was squared off. Monastic buildings were also constructed around the stupa. This all happened at an unknown date, although most likely during the Kushan era, approximately two hundred and fifty years after the reign of Ashoka.