The Finger Bone the Tang Emperors Venerated

Famen owes its fame to a single relic: a piece of finger bone held to be the Buddha's, one of very few such sarira recognised in the Chinese Buddhist tradition. Under the Tang the relic was the object of extraordinary state devotion. Roughly once a generation the court had it escorted from Famen to the palace at Chang'an, where it was venerated for days amid processions, almsgiving and public displays of piety, before being returned to its crypt.

The receptions were as political as they were religious, demonstrations of imperial merit that not everyone welcomed; in 819 the Confucian scholar Han Yu submitted his famous Memorial on the Bone of the Buddha, denouncing the cult as barbarous superstition, and was banished to the far south for his boldness. The relic's prestige shaped the layout of the crypt itself, an underground palace furnished like an offering hall, so that the objects excavated in 1987 amount to a complete, dated record of how the Tang court dressed and honoured a relic of the Buddha.