A Relic of the State and the Road

Lingguang stands among the eight temples of Badachu, a much-visited belt of monasteries and springs in the hills west of Beijing that has drawn pilgrims and day-trippers for centuries. The tooth relic gives the temple a reach far beyond the capital: since the 1950s it has repeatedly been carried abroad on official tours, to Myanmar in 1955 and again in 1994 and 2011, to Sri Lanka, and to Thailand, each loan an act of religious diplomacy in which a relic of the Buddha stands in for goodwill between states. At home it remains a focus of ordinary devotion, its pagoda circled by pilgrims and framed by the wooded slopes of the Western Hills. In June 2024 the temple and the Buddhist Association of China marked the sixtieth anniversary of the modern stupa, an occasion that underlined both the relic's continuing veneration and its role in the public religious life of contemporary China.

The Buddha's cremated remains are traditionally described as divided among multiple claimants and redistributed by Ashoka into thousands of stupas, an origin story that makes any surviving tooth relic's chain of custody from ancient India to China impossible to verify independently, since the canonical accounts are religious narrative rather than documented custody; the Lingguang tooth's own transmission narrative places it moving from Udyana in the northwest into China before its arrival near the Liao capital. The tooth relic at Lingguang is one of only two teeth generally recognised across the Buddhist world as authentic survivals, the other kept at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, Sri Lanka, and the two occupy different roles, the Kandy relic tied for centuries to Sinhalese royal legitimacy, the Lingguang relic emerging as an instrument of state Buddhist diplomacy only after its 1900 rediscovery.