Authenticity and Scholarship

The tradition presents the Lingguang tooth as one of the two genuine dental relics of the Buddha, its keeping at Beijing vouched for by the 1071 pagoda and its inscription and by the recovery of the relic, with that inscription, from the ruins in 1900. That documentary chain gives the relic a secure history at Beijing from the eleventh century onward, and the 1900 discovery is a real and datable event.

The deeper claim, that the tooth is physically a tooth of Gautama Buddha, carried intact from India across a thousand years and thousands of kilometres, rests on the traditional narrative of its transmission rather than on any physical study, and the relic has not been subjected to examination. As with the Kandy tooth, sceptics note the difficulty of authenticating a single dental relic of such claimed antiquity, while the tradition holds that the object is not to be judged by ordinary means. The balanced assessment is that the relic is well documented as the venerated Buddha tooth of Lingguang Temple since 1071, while its origin in the historical Buddha is a matter of faith, so the artifact is recorded as debated.