I gotta have faith, faith, faith ...

topic of the day 041

CT Scan of 1,000-year-old Buddha sculpture reveals mummified monk inside

What? Who? How? Why?

Radiologist Ben Heggelman slid the ancient artifact slowly into a high-tech imaging machine for a full-body CT scan and sampled bone material for DNA testing. Gastroenterologist Reinoud Vermeijden used a specially designed endoscope to extract samples from the mummy’s chest and abdominal cavities.

Now it is known that the tests have revealed a surprise—the monk’s organs had been removed and replaced with scraps of paper printed with ancient Chinese characters and other rotted material that still has not yet been identified. How the organs had been taken from the mummy remains a mystery.

The body inside the statue is thought to be that of Buddhist master Liuquan, a member of the Chinese Meditation School who died around A.D. 1100. How did Liuquan’s body end up inside an ancient Chinese statue? One possibility explored by the Drents Museum is the gruesome process of self-mummification in which monks hoped to transform themselves into revered “living Buddhas.”

The practice of self-mummification among Buddhist monks was most common in Japan but occurred elsewhere in Asia, including in China. As described in Ken Jeremiah’s book “Living Buddhas,” monks interested in self-mummification spent upwards of a decade following a special diet that gradually starved their bodies and enhanced their chances of preservation. Monks eschewed any food made from rice, wheat and soybeans and instead ate nuts, berries, tree bark and pine needles in slowly diminishing quantities to reduce body fat and moisture, which can cause corpses to decay. They also ate herbs, cycad nuts and sesame seeds to inhibit bacterial growth. They drank a poisonous tree sap that was used to make lacquer so that the toxicity would repel insects and pervade the body as an embalming fluid.

After years of adhering to the strict diet and nearing starvation, a monk was then buried alive in an underground chamber. Breathing through a bamboo tube, the monk sat in a lotus position and chanted sutra in the darkness. Each day he rang a bell inside the tomb to signal that he remained alive. When the peals finally ended, the air tube was removed and the tomb sealed. After three years, followers opened the tomb. Had the body mummified, it was taken to a nearby temple to be venerated. If the body did not mummify, an exorcism was performed and the monk reburied.

To some practicing Buddhists, mummified monks are not dead but in a deep meditative state known as “tukdam.” Odds were low that the self-mummification process would work, but in rare cases it did.

Then?

It is amazing how strong faith is, so strong that it would make those who have an unshakable faith to do unspeakable deeds (not that it's wrong or anything, it's just not someone would do in a whim). Every religion have their own rules and beliefs especially on the concept of afterlife and with the monks' faiths on a whole new level and having the clear belief of achieving that state of nirvana at the end of it, it is nevertheless a risky process that for outsiders would be viewed as extraordinary as it could be.

So?

Just remember that everyone have faiths and sometimes people would go to extreme lengths in its name for better or for worse.

Lesson Learned:

Faith is a strong state of mind that people would even go to extreme lengths to prove them, putting into perspective how wide the spectrum is (from self-mummification to the misguided suicide bombers).

source: r/WTF, vienna95