The Buddha's Tooth

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Hair, teeth, fingernails, pieces of bone-bodily fragments supposedly from the Buddha himself have a complicated history. These relics have long served as objects of veneration for many Buddhists, and unsurprisingly, when Western colonial powers subjugated populations in South Asia, they used, manipulated, and even destroyed these relics to exert control. In this account of colonial Portuguese and British dealings with one of the most famous relics of the Buddha-the tooth relic-John S. Strong treats us to a masterful analysis of this relic's contested origins, its manipulation by colonial powers, and its multiple functions across several colonial contexts. Strong revisits two well-known stories about the West's encounter with Buddhism in South Asia. The first story concerns a tooth identified by the Portuguese as being a relic of the Buddha in the mid-sixteenth century. This tooth was taken by the Portuguese from Sri Lanka back to Goa where it was publicly crushed, burned, and thrown into a river as a display of colonial power. The second story concerns another tooth, also identified as a relic of the Buddha and first enshrined at the end of the sixteenth century. After the British conquered Kandy in the second decade of the nineteenth century, they realized the value of this tooth for furthering their colonial ambitions, and what followed was a long and complicated history of British interactions with the tooth up through Sri Lankan independence in 1948 and beyond. Through a meticulous study of these two encounters, Strong reveals the importance of multicultural cosmopolitan objects for understanding the history of Buddhism in South Asia"--