ABSTRACT
Have Buddha’s Ashes Been Found at Last? Casket Found in India Contained Burned Human Ash Supposed
to be Dust of the Founder of the Faith.1
This article in the New York Times of April 10, 1910, was mentioned in Chapter 1 as an example of the making of a public discourse through a subliminal intermeshing of the visual and the text. e story of the discovery of relics of the Buddha at Shahji-ki-dheri near Peshawar in present-day Pakistan, was widely reported and appeared in the Baltimore American on May 22, 1910, and several other US newspapers, such as the Morning Oregonian on September 22, 1909; Lexington Herald on October 10, 1909; Idaho Daily Statesman on April 17, 1910; Baltimore American on May 22, 1910; Dallas Morning News on May 22, 1910; Colorado Springs Gazette on September 19, 1910; and Kansas City Star on September 19, 1914. e New York Times, however, carried the most detailed write-up with a discussion of its historical value and a critical assessment of the find:
Asoka is said to have erected 84,000 stupas . . . e impression throughout the Buddhist world is that the ashes of the Great Teacher were by him so finely subdivided that for three charred bones to be afterward found together in any single deposit would be impossible. Now, as the writer in the Brahmavadin2 pointed
1 Have Buddha’s Ashes been Found at Last?, The New York Times, April 10, 1910: 5.
