Piprahwa

Stupa at Piprahwa
Piprahawa
Piprahava
village
Piprahawa

Location in Uttar Pradesh, India

Coordinates: 27°26′35″N 83°07′40″E / 27.443000°N 83.127800°E / 27.443000; 83.127800Coordinates: 27°26′35″N 83°07′40″E / 27.443000°N 83.127800°E / 27.443000; 83.127800
Country  India
State Uttar Pradesh
District Siddharthnagar
Languages
 • Official Hindi
Time zone IST (UTC+05:30)

Piprahwa is a village near Birdpur in Siddharthnagar district of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Kalanamak, a scented and spicy variety of rice is grown in this area.[1]

Piprahwa is best known for its archaeological site. A large stupa and the ruins of several monasteries are located within the site. Ancient residential complexes and shrines were uncovered at the adjacent mound of Ganwaria. Some scholars have suggested that modern-day Piprahwa-Ganwaria was the site of the ancient city of Kapilavastu, the capital of the Shakya kingdom, where Siddhartha Gautama spent the first 29 years of his life.[2][3][4] Others suggest that the original site of Kapilavastu is located 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) to the northwest, at Tilaurakot, in what is currently Kapilvastu District in Nepal.[2][5][6][note 1]

Excavation by William Claxton Peppe

A buried stupa was discovered by William Claxton Peppe, a British colonial engineer and landowner of an estate at Piprahwa in January 1898. Peppe led a team in excavating a large earthen mound on his land. Having cleared away scrub and jungle, they set to work building a deep trench through the mound. Eventually they came to a large stone coffer which contained five small vases containing bone fragments, ashes and jewels.[2] On one of the vases was a Brahmi inscription which was translated by Bühler to mean "This relic-shrine of divine Buddha (is the donation) of the Sakya-Sukiti brothers, associated with their sisters, sons, and wives",[3] implying that the bone fragments were part of the remains of Gautama Buddha.[8] In the following decade or so epigraphists debated the precise meaning of the inscription. One scholar, John Fleet, challenged the opinion of such fellow academics as M. Senart and M. Barth and proposed that it referred to the Buddha’s kinsman rather than the Buddha himself.[9] [10] However, academics today agree with the original interpretation as translated by Georg Buhler, Vincent Smith, the Sri Lankan Pali scholar, Subuthi, and others that the depositors believed these to be the remains of the Buddha himself.

In the National Geographic documentary Bones of the Buddha, Harry Falk translates the inscription as "these are the relics of the Buddha, the Lord" and concludes that the reliquary found at Piprahwa did contain a portion of the ashes of the Buddha and that the inscription is authentic.[11]

Noting the challenges that isolated finds present to paleographical study, Epigraphist and archaeologist Ahmad Hasan Dani observed in 1997 that "The Piprahwa vase, found in the Basti District, U.P., has an inscription scratched on the steatite stone in a careless manner. The style of writing is very poor, and there is nothing in it that speaks of the hand of the Asokan scribes". He concludes that "the inscription may be confidently dated to the earlier half of the second century B.C."[12]

Involvement of Alois Anton Führer

Terry Phelps and the late Andrew Huxley[13] believe the inscription to be a forgery by Alois Anton Führer, an archaeologist who became notorious for forging similar Buddhist relics and inscriptions. And, although he has not published any work on the subject, Michael Willis has also expressed doubts stating that the inscription is ‘in all likelihood a forgery made by A. A. Fuhrer’.[14]

Phelps suggests that the inscription on the reliquary vase discovered by Peppe was part of a complex conspiracy and was a forgery by Alois Anton Führer, an archaeologist who became notorious for forging similar Buddhist relics and inscriptions. In a number of different scenarios, Phelps suggests a conspiracy by the British Government for political gain [15]while Huxley focuses on the behind the scenes machinations of the Royal Asiatic Society. None of the theories address what, if anything, is supposed to have existed inside the excavated stupa before the alleged fraud took place.

Führer, who was then the Archeological Surveyor to the Government, received notification of the find and an invitation to view it in a letter from Peppe. However, Führers letters in the Royal Asiatic Society's archives in London indicate that he was unable to leave his own excavations.[16] University of Washington Professor, Richard Salomon states that "The Piprahwa inscription rings true in all regards... It is hard to imagine that Führer or anyone else for that matter, could have created such a convincing forgery".[17]

Harry Falk states that Führer could not have forged the Piprahwa reliquary inscription because Führer lacked sufficient knowledge of the language (Prakrit) in which the inscription was written, and, more importantly, he could have never known the Sanskrit word nidhane (container), which is written on the reliquary, a hapax legomenon in the Brahmi corpus otherwise. The conclusion reached in the documentary Bones of the Buddha is that the Piprahwa stupa was built by the Emperor Ashoka 150 years later in 245 BCE over the original and simpler interment site of one eighth of the Buddha's ashes. Falk points to the close similarity of materials used at Piprahwa and its grand size with other Ashokan stupas and that the coffer containing the reliquary found at Piprahwa closely reflects Ashokan workmanship, design, and the type of stone used for monuments such as the pillar erected at Lumbini during his reign.[18]

In 2006 an informal conference was held at Harewood House in Yorkshire, England, to review current evidence and theories and discuss the authenticity of the Piprahwa stupa and its inscription. Several world-renowned experts in Indology, Indian philology, Prakrit and Sanskrit attended this conference. The organiser of the event, Charles Allen, notes that "With the exception of these two speakers (Phelps and Huxley) those who saw and heard the evidence presented and the opinions of the highly qualified historians, archaeologists and epigraphists present came away with no doubts as to the validity of the Piprahwa excavation of 1898."[19]

Distribution of the relics

At the urging of Jinavaravansa, a Siamese Monk who arrived at Piprahwa soon after the discovery, the bone relics from Peppe´s excavation were offered by the government of India to the King of Siam, who shared them with buddhist communities in other countries.[20][21] They are now distributed across several locations, including:

Today, the relics from the original and the 1970s excavations of the Piprahwa stupa are revered by many Buddhists the world over. In 1978 the Indian government allowed their share of the discovery to be exhibited in Sri Lanka and more than 10 million people paid homage. They were also exhibited in Mongolia in 1993, Singapore in 1994, South Korea in 1995 and Thailand in 1996 and again in Sri Lanka in 2012.

Excavations by the Archaeological Survey of India

Southern monastery

From 1971-1973, a team of the Archaeological Survey of India led by K.M. Srivastava resumed excavations at the Piprahwa stupa site. The team discovered a casket containing fragments of charred bone, at a location several feet deeper than the coffer that W.C. Peppe had previously excavated. Srivastava dated the find to the fifth-fourth centuries BCE, which would be consistent with the period in which the Buddha is believed to have lived.[4]

The bone fragments recovered by Srivastava's team are currently located at the National Museum, New Delhi.[23] More than ten million people reportedly paid homage to the relics when they were first exhibited in Sri Lanka in 1978, and in August 2012 the Indian government once more allowed the relics to be exhibited in Sri Lanka.

Location of ancient Kapilavastu

Some scholars have suggested that modern-day Piprahwa was the site of the ancient city of Kapilavastu, the capital of the Shakya kingdom, where Siddhartha Gautama spent the first 29 years of his life.[2][3][4][24] Others suggest that the original site of Kapilavastu is located 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) to the northwest, at Tilaurakot, in what is currently Kapilvastu District in Nepal.[7][5][6] This question is especially important to scholars of Buddhist history, as Kapilavastu was the capital of the Shakya kingdom. King Śuddhodana and Queen Māyādevī lived at Kapilavastu, as did their son Prince Siddhartha Gautama until he left the palace at 29 years of age.

Notes

  1. ↑ According to Allen, "The best hypothesis we are ever likely to arrive on the basis of what we know at present at is that the Kapilavastu in which the Prince Siddhartha grew to manhood was a settlement enclosed within a walled palisade beside the modern River Banganga, pretty much where the ruins of Tilaurakot are today."[7]

References

  1. ↑ Mishra 2005.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Peppe 1898, pp. 573–88.
  3. 1 2 3 Bühler 1898, p. 388.
  4. 1 2 3 Srivastava 1980, pp. 103–10.
  5. 1 2 Tuladhar 2002, pp. 1-7.
  6. 1 2 Sharda 2015.
  7. 1 2 Allen 2008, p. 262.
  8. ↑ Peppe 1898, pp. 584–85.
  9. ↑ Fleet 1907, pp. 129-130.
  10. ↑ Museums of India.
  11. ↑ Secrets of the Dead.
  12. ↑ Dani 1997.
  13. ↑ Huxley 2013.
  14. ↑ Willis 2012, pp. 187-188.
  15. ↑ Allen 2008, pp. 259-261.
  16. ↑ Allen 2012, pp. 1-19.
  17. ↑ Allen 2008, pp. 261-262.
  18. ↑ Secrets of the Dead 2013.
  19. ↑ Allen 2008, p. 261.
  20. ↑ Smith 1898, p. 868.
  21. 1 2 Jinavaravansa 2003, p. 214.
  22. ↑ Allen, Charles (2008). The Buddha And Dr Fuhrer. Haus Publishing. p. 207.
  23. ↑ Srivathsan 2012.
  24. ↑ Srivastava 1979, pp. 61-74.

Sources

External links

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