Famen Temple (Famensi)

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.

When archaeologists opened the digong in May 1987 they found not one relic but four, disposed through the crypt's chambers. One, yellowish and granular in texture, is venerated as the true bone, the ling gu or spirit bone; the other three are shadow bones, ying gu, two carved of jade and one of bone. Chinese scholarship reads the arrangement as a protective strategy: during the ninth-century persecutions of Buddhism the authentic relic could be hidden among convincing decoys, so that any confiscation or destruction might fall on a substitute.

Whether or not each object is what tradition claims, the four-relic set is itself a remarkable window on how medieval Buddhists thought about authenticity, substitution and the presence of the sacred in matter. The crypt also yielded a stone stele inventorying its contents, allowing the finds, some 2,500 objects of gold, silver, glass, ceramic and silk, to be matched against a Tang list, an unusually secure footing for an archaeological discovery of this importance.

The crypt survived because it was forgotten. Sealed in 874 under Emperor Yizong, the last of the great Tang receptions, the underground palace lay undisturbed beneath successive pagodas for more than a thousand years. The Ming rebuilt a thirteen-storey brick pagoda over it in the sixteenth century, and there matters rested until heavy rain in 1981 brought half the structure crashing down, leaving a precarious ruin. When conservators dismantled the remains to rebuild in 1987 they uncovered the sealed stone door of the digong beneath the foundations.

The excavation that followed, between 5 and 12 May, revealed the intact Tang deposit. The temple has since been restored and greatly expanded; the original relics and treasures are conserved and displayed in the Famen Temple Museum, while a vast modern namaskara stupa hall, opened in 2009, enshrines the true finger-bone relic for veneration. Famen is today both a functioning pilgrimage temple and one of the most studied Buddhist archaeological sites in China.