A Tang Dynasty Chan Mummy [Roushen] Anda Modern Case of Furta Sacra?

In recent years many long-dead mummies have come back to life in scholarship on Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. ¹ This new interest has developed despite the excoriation of the practice of venerating mummified corpses of Buddhist monks among modern scholars of Buddhism and the tendency, as Gregory Schopen phrases it, for scholars of religion to be more comfortable dealing ‘with ideas than with things’, especially when those ‘things’ are dead things. ² Holmes Welch, for example, once wrote that ‘meat bodies’ (roushen) were the product of superstition and that ‘the whole concept of the meat body would seem to exemplify the antithesis of the doctrine of impermanence … as in other religions, the saintly and the sordid seem to be inextricable’. ³ Through a series of foundational articles, Bernard Faure and Robert Sharf have stated the case well for why Buddhist mummies have been perceived as incongruous with key Buddhist tenets and neglected in modern scholarship on Chinese Buddhism. They have also begun to redress many entrenched misunderstandings of the role of mummified Buddhist priests by emphasizing the important, indeed central, role they have played within medieval Chan Buddhism. ⁴ While other evidence further suggests that the veneration of mummified Buddhist monks may have been at the heart of Buddhism since its arrival in China, and is a practice found in a wide range of Buddhist lineages, it was within the Chan school that techniques for deliberately aiding the mummification process by wrapping the corpse in lacquer-soaked hemp cloth were developed. ⁵