Authenticity and Scholarship

The tradition holds that the 1942 Nanjing bone is a genuine relic of Xuanzang, an identification supported by the inscriptions found with it, which named the relic and recorded its transfer to the city. Because Xuanzang was a historical person whose death and burial are documented, the claim is more tractable than relic claims reaching back to the Buddha; it concerns the provenance of a specific bone rather than the existence of the person.

Even so, the identification cannot be regarded as proven. It depends on the reliability and reading of the accompanying inscriptions and on a chain of medieval transfers of the remains that is only partly documented; no independent physical test has confirmed that the bone is Xuanzang's. The circumstances of the discovery, unearthed by an occupying army in wartime and rapidly divided and dispersed for devotional and political reasons, also complicate a clean provenance. Scholars therefore treat the relic as a venerated object credibly but not certainly linked to Xuanzang, and its subsequent subdivision among many sites means that several bones now all carry the same attribution. The status recorded here is accordingly debated.