India enshrines Buddha's remains after 2000 years

MUMBAI (Reuters) - Thousands of Buddhists gathered in India's western city of Mumbai on Sunday to lay to rest part of the ashes and bones of Lord Buddha in a ceremony resurrected after almost 2000 years.

Monks in flowing orange robes chanted hymns from scriptures as the remains were lowered into a shallow pit on top of a 90-ft (27 metres) high stone dome, as part of celebrations to mark the 2250th anniversary of the spiritual leader's enlightenment.

Organisers of the ceremony said this was the first time in around 2,000 years that Buddha's mortal remains were being enshrined.

"The relics now kept in this magnificent pagoda came from an ancient dome discovered during an archaeological expedition in south India in early-1900s," Acharya S.N. Goenka told reporters.

After Buddha's death, his remains were divided and kept in eight separate domes built by his disciples across Asia.

They were later taken by Buddhist convert Indian emperor Asoka, who placed them in many smaller domes about 2000 years ago.

The remains being enshrined on Sunday were found in an ancient pagoda in southern India in 1920 and have been kept in a Buddhist monastery for over 85 years, before being handed over for enshrining.

Buddhists, some of whom came from other parts of the world, including the United States, Britain, Australia and Cambodia, sat in meditation inside the dome, which can accommodate 8,000 people, many looking up in the direction of the roof where the remains of their guru lay.

According to believers, the enshrined relics of their leader emit spiritual energy and vibrations which helps meditation.

The organisers said the newly-constructed dome was unique as it was not only the world's largest stone dome unsupported by pillars, but was built with millions of inter-locking stones using ancient architectural techniques.

"No cement, concrete or metal has been used. There are no pillars to support the dome which is 280 feet (85 metres) in diameter," said Subhash Chandra, a Buddhist and an Indian media baron.

Maybe you could tell the hundreds of scientists who've studied it how the "art" was created, since they don't seem to know. There isn't any pigment on the Shroud. The uppermost fibers of the image were scorched.

USSMA_83, I am glad you are so certain... but I doubt your certainty is based on the science surrounding the Shroud. The Shroud of Turin is literally the most studied and examined single object in history and it is probably thousands of scientists instead of hundreds. Every answer we get adds more questions.

There are scattered flakes of pigment on the Shroud... but not any correlated to form the image. The flakes are found over the entire Shroud including imge and non-image areas in a random, patternless distribution. The flakes of various pigments, including Red Ocher and Vermilion, are probably from copies of the Shroud that were laid on it to transfer "potency" from the authentic Shroud to the copy. Most importantly, the image areas do not show any type of applied pigments all the way down to scanning electron Microscope levels.

The Shroud image is NOT made of scorched fibrils; if it were, the "scorched" image areas would fluoresce under ultraviolet light along with the actual scorches caused by the fire of 1532 which almost destroyed the Shroud. The images don't fluoresce.

We now know what the image is composed of and it isn't paint or anything related to paint. It is a microscopically thin layer (100 times thinner than a human hair) of melanoidins formed when starch fractions left behind from the fullering (part of the process of converting flax into linen) combined with certain gasses (cadaverine and putrecine) that exude from newly dead bodies. This layer of melanoidins does not penetrate into the fibers and exists only on the surfaces, including the back surfaces of the fibers.

Besides that, there are many other corroborating facts, including the fact that the blood type of the blood found on the Shroud is AB, the same as the blood type found on the Sudarium of Oviedo and the eucharistic miracle of Lanciano.

The blood stains are composed of human blood and blood sera, weakly typable as AB, contains porphoryns, decedent fractional remnants of hemoglobin, and other degraded forms of blood components. It has been analyzed by some of the world's foremost experts on blood and its remnants. The blood stains preceded the image's placement on the Shroud.

The Sudarium (literally "sweat cloth") of Oviedo has a known history taking it back to at least 600AD, 750 years before the known history of the Shroud. Why it has any importance to authenticating or providing provenance to the Shroud is because, although it bears no image aside from a blood stained hand print, the blood stains on the Sudarium match the wounds on the image of the head on the Shroud, showing 79 points of congruence.

USMMA_83, if you are basing your thinking on the optical microscopic "findings" of the late Walter C. McCrone's examination of some Shroud threads, he is the wrong person on which to base any argument. He refused to submit his work for peer-review, published in his own self-published and self-editied magazine, The Microscopist, and his findings cannot be duplicated by any other scientists, some of whom have far greater expertise than does he. In fact his findings have been refuted by far more discriminating test than mere optical observation through a microscope. Those findings have been duplicated, peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals.

Incidentally, USMMA_83, the 1988 carbon dating has been discredited... the three C14 labs accurately tested a 16th Century patch interwoven with between 40% and 60% original Shroud material. The newer material is distinctly different from the original material:

Its thread is spun with a Z twist as opposed to the S twist seen ALL of the original threads.
The average diameter of the patch threads is slightly smaller than the average diameter of Shroud threads.
The threads of the sample are dyed to match the aged color of the Shroud with a dye that was developed in the 15th Century while the Shroud's material shows no signs of any dyes at all.
The patch's linen was retted with different chemicals than the shroud's linen.
The threads of the patch have inclusions of a cotton grown only in France while no cotton is found at all in the original threads of the Shroud.

The failure occurred because the people who took the sample decided, literally at the last hour, to ignore the agreed test protocols and cut the sample from the one area all the scientists involved agreed should have been avoided.

Harry Gove, the inventor of the technique used in these C-14 tests, when asked about the skewing of the results and the shift in dating caused by using a non-homogenic mixture of older and newer materials in the observed ratios found in the sample, did some quick calculations. He stated that the approximate dating of the original material, if combined with 16th Century material in the ratios observed in the sample, would place the original in the 1st Century with a degree of confidence of plus or minus 100 years.

All of this has been published in peer-reviewed, scientific journals.

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