Imagine if you could leave behind in your cremation ashes a scattering of crystal pearls that embodied all your best elements; a sort of epitaph in the form of glass beads. This is what certain Buddhist masters are believed to be capable of: a crystallised manifestation of their compassion and wisdom spontaneously spills out of their bodies during the funeral rites.
A collection of these relics, known as ringsel in Tibetan, are coming to the Aula Maxima in UCC this weekend. Some are reputedly more than 2,500 years old and came from the supreme Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, who died in the fifth century BC. They have been donated to the tour by the Dalai Lama. Other ringsel have been rescued from monasteries destroyed by the Chinese or offered by former custodians of deceased masters.
As with any sacred relic, claims are made for their power and transformative ability, but unusually these assertions have actually been tested by a Stanford University physicist and a former Mayo Clinic doctor, who claim the relics rearrange the atoms and molecules in the space around them into a more coherent order (more of which later).
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Some 2.3 million people in 68 countries have already come to see the relics on they tour the world. The relics will eventually be enshrined in a 45m bronze statue of Maitreya Buddha to be built in Bodh Gaya, northern India. The sense of serenity emanating from them is the prime attraction: as with visitors to the Virgin Mary in the tree stump in Rathkeale; or to Amma, the Hugging Nun, some people describe an exquisite energy in their presence.
Alongside the pearls (dismissed by cynics as carbonised kidney stones) are strands of hair and bits of bone belonging to Buddhist masters from India, Tibet, Korea and China. The relics are amassed in the same haphazard way as the body parts of saints were collected in the early Irish church: some gathered from old monasteries and museums in Tibet, Nepal and Burma; others randomly received from followers of the deceased masters who meet up with the tour as it tracks around the world and offer bits picked from the cremation ashes of their old lamas or yogis.
A haircut in Holland
In the case of Geshe Lama Konchog, who meditated for 25 years in a mountain cave, his ringsel along with bits of bone, tooth and some of his heart were collected by his attendant after his death in 2001. The hair relics of the 16th Karmapa were collected after he got a haircut in the Netherlands in 1977 and a local woman had the presence of mind to gather a few locks, which she donated to the tour 25 years later.
The tour also features relics of the first Karmapa, who died in 1193. His heart was left intact in the funeral pyre, as were some of his bones, which apparently morphed into images of the buddhas. These relics were offered to the tour by a man who turned up in Taiwan in 2001, and a further relic was donated by a woman in Ventura, California, in 2005.
While the concept of ringsel is somewhat exotic, the veneration of relics is familiar to Irish Catholics of a certain age. This is just one of many elements common to Catholicism and Tibetan Buddhism, such as a fondness for incense, bells, elaborate robes and rituals, and the building of grandiose temples that impoverish the congregation for generations.
Quack mysticism?
Regarding the scientific claims of their potency, credibility depends on one’s receptivity to certain pioneering theories in “new physics”, a branch of science dismissed by some as quack mysticism.
Dr William Tiller, a retired Stanford physicist whose Institute for Psychoenergetic Science studies the quantifiable impact of human consciousness on the physical world, claims to be able to measure the intent inputted into an inert object through concentrated thought. He demonstrates this by imprinting an electrical device through focused thought with instructions to raise or lower the pH of a glass of water. He then carries the device to a different location where it will adjust the pH of a different glass of water according to the initial instructions. He claims this is due to deltrons, high thermodynamic particles, that exist between atoms and molecules and are capable of storing focused thought or intent.
At a University of Arizona conference in 2012, his co-researcher, Dr Nisha Manek from the Mayo Clinic, claimed that the relics have been imprinted with the consciousness of the original Buddhist masters and then primed by the many devotees who interact with them.
Their potency was such that they could change the thermodynamics of the space they were in, re-ordering the molecules (groups of atoms bonded together) into a more “coherent” form. While such thinking is unlikely to pass muster with this newspaper’s science editor, the power of the relics to entrance is evident in the ecstasy, tears and silent veneration one sees at every venue the tour visits. They attract the faithful and faithless, and children and animals seem especially affected.
