History and Provenance

The tradition behind the bowl reaches back to the travel records of Chinese pilgrims. Faxian, in the early 5th century, and Xuanzang, in the 7th, both described a revered alms bowl of the Buddha kept in the Gandhara country, an object of great sanctity said to have been moved between kingdoms. Gandhara, the Buddhist heartland of the northwest, extended into what is now eastern Afghanistan, and later memory attached those pilgrim accounts to the monumental stone bowl that survives.

For a long period the bowl stood in the Kandahar area; in the later twentieth century it was transferred to the museum in Kabul. At some point in the Islamic era its rim was carved with verses from the Qur'an, a mark of its continued veneration within a new faith. The bowl came through the destruction and looting that struck the Kabul museum during the Afghan wars of the 1990s and remains in the national collection. Its fame has prompted periodic interest from India and from Buddhist communities abroad, and Archaeological Survey of India specialists have been reported examining its claimed association with the Buddha.