The Piprahwa Gems are a collection of over 300 sacred relics, discovered in an inscribed reliquary urn with the Shakya clan’s share of the remains of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. The gems, which date back to c. 240-200 BCE, were excavated at Piprahwa Stupa in India [3236×7242]

The gems will be auctioned at Sotheby’s next week in Hong-Kong.

> These wondrous gem relics, discovered in an inscribed reliquary urn with the Shakya clan’s share of the bones of Shakyamuni Buddha, are of unparalleled religious, archaeological and historical importance. Excavated by William Claxton Peppé (1852-1936, fig. 1) in 1898 at Piprahwa (fig. 2), now widely considered to be the site of the ancient city Kapilavastu, they have been handed down through the family to the present day. Nothing of comparable importance in early Buddhism has ever appeared at auction.

> Articulated by Mahinda (285 – 205 BCE), the first-born son of Ashoka, this timeless quote encapsulates the importance of relics, and the power of śarīra in embodying the actual person of the Buddha, not merely memorialising him. The cult of relic worship in early Buddhism, frequently depicted carved in relief on stone, originated when the remains of Shakyamuni Buddha were subdivided into eight parts after his death at Kushinagar. According to the Mahāparinibbāna-sutta, originally his ashes were to go only to the Shakya clan in which he grew up, but after competing tribes fought for a share, a Brahmin named Drona divided the ashes of the Buddha into eight portions. Each of the eight claimants were said to have placed them within stupas. Buddhist worshippers venerating these actual relics saw them as revealing the person of the Buddha.

> The first contact relic to be revered was the clay pot retained by Brahmin Drona after the subdivisions. Gem relics donated as relic offerings by Buddhists seeking merit, became contact relics after being mixed in with the bone relics of Shakyamuni Buddha. For Buddhist pilgrims, to visit the sacred landscape of places where the Historical Buddha had passed through and lived was also as much a part of this cult of relic worship as the veneration of relics themselves.

> In the late 19th century, archaeologists in north India were focused on mapping out this sacred landscape, drawing closely on the recently translated diaries of the early Chinese pilgrim monks Faxian (337-422) and Xuanzang (602-664), whose accounts of their pilgrimages were remarkably detailed, noting all the places they had visited, including Bodh Gaya, Kushinagar and Kapilavastu, the capital of the Shaykas where early Pali texts record that Siddhartha Gautama spent 29 years of his life. As John Guy expounds in ‘Buddha and the Jewel-filled Casket: The Piprahwa Reliquaries and the Cult of Relics in Early Indian Buddhism’, Orientations, Vol. 54, July/August 2023, no. 4, pp. 35-45, the first breakthrough happened in 1896 with the excavation at Lumbini in Nepal of a pillar inscribed by royal order of Ashoka, identifying the location as the birthplace of Shakyamuni Buddha. Inspired by the discovery, William Claxton Peppé, an English estate manager and trained engineer began to excavate the largest of several ancient mounds on his land at Piprahwa, just 19 kilometres south of Lumbini (fig. 3). The discovery of a fired brick core indicated that this was indeed an ancient stupa. Proceeding with a full excavation, Peppé’s workers found a vaulted chamber consistent with Mauryan construction of the 3rd century BCE which revealed a spectacular sandstone reliquary coffer (fig. 4), the largest monolithic coffer ever discovered in Buddhist India. Inside it were five reliquaries (fig. 5) containing a magnificent group of close to 1800 gems and precious metal sheets, together with bone and ash, all consistent with reliquary forms known from other important Mauryan Buddhist sites. One of the reliquaries was a unique masterpiece of rock crystal carved with a fish-form handle, the other four of steatite. The short inscription in late Mauryan Brahmi script (in the local Prakrit, Magadhi, likely the language spoken by the Buddha) incised on the upper cover of one of the steatite reliquaries (fig. 6) was deciphered initially by the Indologist Vincent Smith (1848-1920), who identified that it revealed the presence of the remains of the Historical Buddha. The inscription has recently been revisited by the Indologist Harry Falk in ‘Ashes of the Buddha’, Bulletin of the Asia Institute, 27, 2013, pp. 59-60, translating as:

> “This enshrinement of the corporeal remnants of the Buddha [of the Shakyas], the Lord (is to the credit) of the [Shakya] brothers of the highly famous, together with their sisters, with their sons and wives.”

> An early extant Pali text, the Mahāparinibbāna-sutta, corroborates this translation, recounting how, after hearing of the passing of the Buddha at Kushinagar, the Shakyas sent a message to the rulers of the regions:

> “The Blessed One was the greatest of our clan. We are worthy to receive a portion of the relics[and] will erect a stupa over the relics and hold a festival in their honour’.”
It can therefore be surmised that the first stupa at Piprahwa would have been built at the time of the Buddha’s death around 400 BCE and rebuilt at the time of Ashoka, around 240 BCE, when the Lumbini pillar was erected. The reliquaries and the gems were likely to have been commissioned by wealthy donors, or Ashoka himself, to be installed as an act of merit within the renovated stupa.

> News of the momentous discovery at Piprahwa reached a Thai monk, the Ven. P. C. Jinavaravansa (1851–1935), second cousin of the Siamese monarch King Rama V (1853-1910, fig. 7), who promptly visited Peppé at his estate in Birdpur. After intense lobbying by Jinavaravansa, the Government of India decided to gift the corporeal relics (śarīradhātu) for presentation to the King of Siam, the sole remaining Buddhist sovereign in the world. In the spirit of Ashoka, Rama V had the relics subdivided. Ever since, the relics discovered at Piprahwa have been enshrined at two of the most important Buddhist sites in Asia – the Wat Saket in Bangkok and the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon – and across Sri Lanka.

> The bulk of the gems and precious metal sheets were sent to the Indian Museum in Kolkata, but Peppé was permitted by the government to retain ‘duplicate items’ comprising approximately one fifth of the total find. A small number of these was donated by him, including a group of 21 given to the influential Sri Lankan scholar monk Waskaḍuwe Subhūti (1835–1917). The remainder was brought back to England and has been carefully looked after by the family ever since.

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