The fate of the Buddha's begging bowl (The Nation, Thailand)

The fate of the Buddha's begging bowl, published by The Nation in Thailand in 2017, is a feature on the monumental greenish grey stone alms bowl, about 1.75 meters across with a lotus petal base and later Quranic inscriptions, now held in the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul, examining its debated identification with the begging bowl of the Buddha described by Chinese pilgrim monks who visited the region. Its strength is that regional journalism situated close to the object's own context, reporting the bowl's physical description and its layered later history, including the Islamic inscriptions added long after any Buddhist use, directly. Its limit is that it is journalistic feature writing rather than an archaeological or art historical study, so a claim resting on the bowl's precise dating or the specific historical basis for identifying it as the Buddha's own bowl, rather than a later devotional object associated with the tradition, needs the archaeological and Chinese pilgrim textual scholarship this feature draws on but does not itself present in full.