The Times of India reports that the Chinese government has returned two Buddhist relics to the Beijing Yunju Temple for display. The relics, believed to be from the body of the Sakyamuni, have been kept in an underground vault in the Capital Museum:
Chinese authorities have taken several other measures of similar nature in recent months. In early June, it ordered restoration of a thousand-year-old site called the “Caves of a Thousand Buddhas”, near the city of Turpan in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. This is the biggest effort to renovate the site since 1949 when the atheist state of the People’s Republic of China was established
Communist leaders have also promoted a World Buddhism Conference for two successive years with the dual purpose to attracting the attention of Buddhists across the world to China while trying to establish that Tibetan Buddhism can stand on its own without the need of the Dalai Lama. This is why it has been encouraging the Panchan Lama, who was handpicked by China, to play an important role in these conferences.
“I hope the traditional culture can be passed on through viewing the Buddha relics. I hope people’s hearts can be purified,” the official media quoted Master Chuan Yin, a senior monk at the Beijing Yunju Temple as saying after performing the ceremony for receiving the relics from the government-run museum.
