And
it was solemnly pounded to atoms by the prelate, then cast into a charcoal
fire, and finally its ashes thrown into the river of Goa.
The King of Pegu was, however, informed by a crafty minister of the King
of Ceylon that only a sham tooth had been destroyed by the Portuguese, and
that the real relique was still safe. This he obtained by extraordinary
presents, and the account of its reception at Pegu, as quoted by Tennent
from De Couto, is a curious parallel to Marco's narrative of the Great
Kaan's reception of the Ceylon reliques at Cambaluc. The extraordinary
object still so solemnly preserved at Kandy is another forgery, set up
about the same time. So the immediate result of the viceroy's virtue was
that two reliques were worshipped instead of one!
The possession of the tooth has always been a great object of desire to
Buddhist sovereigns. In the 11th century King Anarauhta, of Burmah, sent a
mission to Ceylon to endeavour to procure it, but he could obtain only a
"miraculous emanation" of the relique. A tower to contain the sacred tooth
was (1855), however, one of the buildings in the palace court of Amarapura.
A few years ago the King of Burma repeated the mission of his remote
predecessor, but obtained only a model, and this has been deposited
within the walls of the palace at Mandale, the new capital. (Turnour in
J.A.S.B. VI. 856 seqq.; Koeppen, I. 521; Tennent, I. 388, II. 198
seqq.; MS. Note by Sir A. Phayre; Mission to Ava, 136.)
Of the four eye-teeth of Sakya, one, it is related, passed to the heaven
of Indra; the second to the capital of Gandhara; the third to Kalinga; the
fourth to the snake-gods. The Gandhara tooth was perhaps, like the
alms-bowl, carried off by a Sassanid invasion, and may be identical with
that tooth of Fo, which the Chinese annals state to have been brought to
China in A.D. 530 by a Persian embassy. A tooth of Buddha is now shown in a
monastery at Fu-chau; but whether this be either the Sassanian present, or
that got from Ceylon by Kublai, is unknown. Other teeth of Buddha were
shown in Hiuen Tsang's time at Balkh, at Nagarahara (or Jalalabad), in
Kashmir, and at Kanauj. (Koeppen, u.s.; Fortune, II. 108; H. Tsang,
II. 31, 80, 263.)
[Illustration: Teeth of Budda.
1. At Kandy, after Tennent. 2. At Fu-Chau from Fortune.]
NOTE 7. - Fa-hian writes of the alms-pot at Peshawar, that poor people
could fill it with a few flowers, whilst a rich man should not be able to
do so with 100, nay, with 1000 or 10,000 bushels of rice; a parable
doubtless originally carrying a lesson, like Our Lord's remark on the
widow's mite, but which hardened eventually into some foolish story like
that in the text.
