The mummy was found sitting on a bundle of cloth with Chinese writing on it. He lived and died almost a thousand years ago. But researchers couldn’t figure out why his mummified body was placed inside the statue. The team at the Drents Museum looked into the idea that Liuquan tried to turn himself into a “living Buddha” by basically mummifying himself inside the statue to prepare for life after death.
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Self-mummification was most common among Buddhist monks in Japan, including places in Asia, like China. The process of turning oneself into a Buddha involved certain extremely difficult steps. First, they would have to slowly starve themselves by eating nuts, berries, tree bark, and pine needles. This is because fat and water in the body can speed up the decaying process.
For the same reason, they ate herbs, cycad nuts, and sesame seeds. They drank poisonous tree sap that was used to make lacquer so that the poison would keep insects away and spread through their bodies like an embalming fluid. After a few years of this, the monk would be buried while still alive. He would breathe through a tube made of bamboo and ring a bell to let people know he was still alive.
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Once the bell stopped ringing, the tomb would be completely sealed, and the monk’s body would be left there for three years. If the monk had been properly mummified, the body would then be taken to a temple and worshiped. However, historical accounts reveal that the process usually didn’t work out, and the bodies weren’t well preserved. In most cases, the bodies were exorcised and buried.
Img Src: asia.si.edu
People had heard that this monk, who had meditated inside the statue for 1,000 years, was still alive in some way. This was because of bad translation and crossed wires that led to confusion, as the mummified monk was found in the “lotus position vajra” inside the Buddha statue.
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