A Long Journey Before Beijing

Chinese Buddhist tradition traces the tooth relic's journey over many centuries before it ever reached Beijing: from the Indian subcontinent, where it is said to have survived the Buddha's cremation, through Central Asia to the oasis kingdom of Khotan, and onward into China proper, reaching Nanjing in the fifth century before later moving to the Tang capital Chang'an and eventually to the Beijing region during the Five Dynasties period in the tenth century, well before the founding of the present temple complex. As with other tooth relics venerated across Asian Buddhism, more than one tradition claims to hold an authentic tooth of the Buddha, most notably the separate relic kept at Sri Dalada Maligawa in Kandy, Sri Lanka, and the atlas records each tradition's claim without adjudicating between them, since no method exists to test whether either, both or neither preserves an authentic remain from the fifth century BCE.

The temple's own presentation of the relic rests on this continuous chain of custody as transmitted through monastic record keeping rather than on physical examination, and its 1900 survival, hidden inside a collapsed structure until rediscovery, is treated by the temple as confirming rather than complicating that transmitted identity.