Auctioning the Buddha's relics is perpetuating colonial violence

Auctioning the Buddha's relics is perpetuating colonial violence

(RNS) — On May 6, just days before Buddhists around the world celebrate the holiday of Vesak, Sotheby’s Hong Kong will put relics of the Buddha — what Sotheby’s calls the “Piprahwa Gems of the Historical Buddha”— on the auction block. The relics were found buried in a stupa, or funerary monument, in Piprahwa, in present-day Uttar Pradesh, India, in 1898. According to an inscription carved into one of the reliquaries, the stupa contained the rema…