History and Provenance

Xuanzang died in 664 and was interred near the Tang capital Chang'an; his remains were moved more than once in later centuries, and their location eventually became obscure. In the winter of 1942, during the Japanese occupation of China, soldiers carrying out construction work at a former temple site in Nanjing unearthed a stone casket containing a fragment of skull bone. Inscriptions accompanying it identified the bone as a relic of Xuanzang that had been transferred to Nanjing in earlier dynasties.

The find quickly became politically charged. Amid protest from the people of Nanjing, part of the relic was returned to Chinese custody, while a portion was taken to Japan and enshrined at Yakushi-ji in Nara, and a further fragment reached a temple in Saitama Prefecture. Over the following decades the relic was subdivided further and shared out as an object of both devotion and diplomacy, with portions kept in Nanjing and elsewhere in China, in Taiwan, and in India, where a fragment was given in recognition of Xuanzang's pilgrimage to the Buddhist homeland. Today a number of temples across Asia each enshrine a share.