AMSTERDAM – A Buddha statue, originally found in China, but that was subjected to CT scans at the Meander Medical Center in Amsterdam has revealed an age-long surprise: the 1,000-year-old remains of a monk.
According to researchers, the monk remains was of a man aged 30-50 years; and CT scans showed that he self-mummified himself by burying himself alive inside a chamber while meditating. He was then probably kept in a monastery for some 200 years before being covered with paper and enamel to produce a statue in which he was found.
“The object is a rarity,” Wilfried Rosendahl, head of the German-Mummy-Project at the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen in Mannheim, Germany, said. He further stated that nothing like it has been studied in Europe before.
Rosendahl and his fellow researchers think the mummified monk must be dated around 900 to 1,000 years – and even though it was first discovered in China, it is now available at the Natural History Museum in Budapest for anyone that wants to have a look at it.