Piprahwa Relics Returned to India After Global Outcry

A precious casket of 334 gems has returned to Indian soil—not mere jewels, but votive remnants believed to have been entombed beside the body of the Buddha. His bones, if the epigraphists are correct, were placed within a stupa by the Sakyas themselves. The jewels—rock crystals, pearls, beaten gold—were offerings, not treasure. They are what Buddhist ontology calls sarira: relics imbued with the presence of the Enlightened One. Their purpose was not decorative, but devotional.

The return of the Piprahwa relics, nearly lost to the anonymous gavel of a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong in May 2025, is no mere act of restitution. It is a palimpsest moment, where empire, archaeology, and sacred history collapse into one another. The relics had been listed as a Premium Lot, viewable only to high-value bidders with prior financial vetting.

The Piprahwa mound lies in the dusty borderlands of what was once the Sakya Republic—now Siddharthnagar district in Uttar Pradesh—just south of Nepal. There, in 1898, an indigo planter named William Claxton Peppé made an incision into history. He was not an archaeologist, but a late-imperial amateur: an Aberdeen-trained engineer who inherited the Birdpore estate after his father married the widow of a fellow indigo manager who had served the Company in Oudh. With a crew of labourers and a surveyor’s sensibility, Peppé opened the stupa known as Bhawan Deeh to the locals and found, at its core, a sandstone coffer with five miniature vases, bone fragments, and—most beguiling of all—a Brahmi inscription dated to Asoka’s reign. The line, as translated by epigraphist and Indologist Harry Falk, reads: “This deposit (nidhana) of the bodily relics (sarira) of the Blessed Buddha of the Sakyas”

It was the first time the Buddha’s name had appeared in direct association with physical remains. For Vincent Arthur Smith—British district judge, colonial historian and Peppé’s epistolary confidant—it was a revelation. He advised the British government to split the find: bones and ash as “actual relics” to be sent to Siam (now Thailand); the gems and reliquaries as “objects of interest to European scholars”. It was Smith who first defined this classificatory rupture—one that would persist into the 21st century, now reinforced by auction catalogues, display cases, and price estimates withheld except on request. As Sraman Mukherjee argues in his article ‘Relics in Transition’, the lifecycle of these relics embodies a process of cultural translation, transforming from sacred deposits to colonial artefacts, diplomatic gifts, museum exhibits, and finally, auctionable commodities.”

Peppé published his findings in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, corresponded extensively with Smith and Alois Führer—the disgraced archeological urveyor later exposed for forging inscriptions—and donated the bone relics to the Indian Museum in Calcutta, from where they were dispatched to King Chulalongkorn of Siam. He retained 433 “duplicates” from the total of 1,153 items. Some he gifted to Buddhist dignitaries. The rest remained with his family, and it is this portion—the final fifth—that nearly vanished into private hands this year. Peppé died in 1937, remembered in colonial lore less for his relics than for having “transformed a wilderness into a going concern”—to quote a grandson.

But the story doesn’t rest there. In 1971, KM Srivastava of the Archaeological Survey of India excavated deeper into Piprahwa and found additional caskets buried in older layers of the stupa. Stratigraphy revealed three distinct phases: an early Sakya-era mud stupa, an Asokan brick expansion, and a Kushana-period monastery encasing it. These confirmed the stupa’s use as a devotional site soon after the Buddha’s death, and revived claims that Piprahwa might be ancient Kapilavastu.

And yet the question remained: Were these truly the Buddha’s relics, or the result of colonial overinterpretation? John S Strong, one of the foremost scholars of Buddhist relic culture, believes the answer lies not in their materiality, but in the ritual economy they inhabited. In his essay “Beads and Bones”—echoed by Conan Cheong and Ashley Thompson in their recent article “Selling the Buddha’s Relics Today”, Strong argues that the gems were not mere offerings but themselves sarira—agents of spiritual continuity, indistinguishable from bone in meaning if not in matter. The Sakyas who made the offering saw themselves not as donors to a museum, but as kin of the Enlightened One, literally placing their flesh beside his. To divide the offering is to desecrate the wholeness of the stupa.

That desecration was not incidental. As Cheong and Thompson explain, it was coded into the colonial legal apparatus itself: under the 1878 Indian Treasure Trove Act, the Crown claimed rights over “moveable antiquities” and parcelled the relics along lines of scientific utility. Thus the gems were reclassified as “artefacts”. Even today, Sotheby’s acknowledges their religious significance—quoting the Mahava?sa, “where the relics are seen, the Buddha is seen”—but stops short of embracing the full implications.

This is not a rhetorical complaint. In ancient Buddhist law, to breach a stupa with malicious intent—to expose sarira—was tantamount to drawing the Buddha’s blood. One inscription at Sanchi explicitly warns that anyone removing stones from the stupa will incur the karma of the five anantarya sins, which include matricide and regicide. The stupa is not an object. It is a being.

Today, the primary reliquaries from Piprahwa—including the inscribed vase—are held in the Indian Museum, Kolkata, though several are now untraceable. Others were distributed in 1898 and after to Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Japan. The gem relics returned in 2025 have previously been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rubin Museum, the Museum Rietberg, and the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, where many visitors meditated in their presence. The Peppé family’s stated reason for these exhibitions was to honour Buddhist reverence, but such exposure may well have been a prelude to the intended sale.

Now that sale has been stopped. The gems are back in India. They are expected to join the reliquaries already in national custody—reunited, however imperfectly, with the remains from which they were severed.

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