The Piprahwa Gems: A Four Generation Story of Custodianship

T he first time I saw the Piprahwa gem relics was when I was a child of about seven visiting a great uncle's house. They lay in a glass case and were talked about by the grown-ups but I didn’t really understand what they were. I assumed that the gems were no more interesting than those long stories about India that my grandmother would tell over lunch when it was clearly time for me to be allowed to leave the table and play. But over the years my interest in history grew. When I returned to the house at the age of 12 I began to grasp the significance of these little gems that I was told had been discovered with the bones of the Buddha. At the time I had been captivated by the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum, so I imagined the excitement of excavating a stupa, which I gathered was something like a pyramid. but I still could not fully appreciate the importance of this discovery. It was only after I chose theology as one of my three A level subjects at school that I came to learn more about the Buddha and his teachings.

The Piprahwa gem relics were passed down from my great uncle to his son, then in 2013 they came to myself and two cousins. It was at this point that I began in-depth research into the discovery of the gems by William Claxton Peppé, my great-grandfather. 

I found newspaper articles from 1898 announcing the discovery of Gautama Buddha’s remains in Reuters, the New-York Tribune and The Minneapolis Journal. I learned about the interest of European academics in the historical Buddha. The colonisation of India by the British had been a source of some cultural shame for me (and continues to be) but, amidst the treasure hunters who hauled their finds back to England, there had also been people focused on the pursuit of knowledge. Scholars tried to decode the journals of Chinese pilgrims from centuries ago for clues as to where the Buddha’s hometown of Kapilavastu might be. The discovery of an Ashokan pillar that marked his birthplace at Lumbini deepened the mystery. The inscription on the reliquary urn that my great-grandfather discovered inside the Piprahwa stupa created a wave of excitement among the leading ancient language translators of the time who interpreted it to mean that the bone relics were the remains of the Buddha given to his own Shakya clan after his cremation.

One of the results that I hadn’t expected from the research was that I learned a lot more about my ancestors. They wrote their letters left to right and then rotated the page ninety degrees to write on the top to bottom axis creating a criss-cross effect that saved money on postage. I had dismissed them as being prejudiced Victorians from a bygone era but I saw a different side to them in these letters. I learned that Willie Peppé’s first wife chose to travel around India for her honeymoon and loved the country and its culture. Sadly, she died from an unspecified illness. I learned that my grandmother was outraged at the land laws that applied to Indian women. And I learned that the excavation of the stupa was an attempt by Willie Peppé to provide work for his tenant farmers who had fallen victim to the famine of 1897. His technical diagrams of ramps and pulleys suggest that he was also a trained engineer who couldn’t resist a project. He gave the gems, the relics and the reliquaries to the Indian government. The bone relics were gifted to the King of Siam (Rama V) and all the major pieces of gold and jewellery were donated to the museum in Kolkata. It is the small portion of duplicates that he was allowed to keep that have been kept in our family.

From the time we received the Piprahwa gem relics, my cousins and I have sought to make them available for viewing by the public (ideally a Buddhist public) to see at no cost to the institution borrowing them. This took a lot of work and, because we are not curators or connected to museums and have our own day jobs, it probably took longer than it should have done. But, over the past six years, the Piprahwa gem relics have been exhibited in museums around the world – from the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore and the National Museum of Korea in Seoul. We set up a website, The Piprahwa Project, that allows people to access all the research materials that we have gathered. We posted Willie Peppé’s letters that authenticate the discovery on the site and donated them to the Royal Asiatic Society.

Related Article

Buddha and the Jewel-filled Casket: The Piprahwa Reliquaries and the Cult of Relics in Early Indian Buddhism

Because of the upheaval that Covid-19 caused to museum schedules in 2019, the gems stayed at the Rubin Museum for longer than was intended. When I visited the exhibition, I was alone in the room with the gems and able to contemplate them in silence and without interruption. We can talk about the impact of Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great but, when it comes to the impact that individuals have over the fabric of the lives of millions on this planet, on their daily beliefs, rituals and behaviour, then we are really only talking about a handful of people. These are the founders and cornerstones of the world’s great religions. And the Buddha is one of them. And here I was, standing in front of gems that had been offered up by his devout Shakya clansmen to be buried with his ashes.

I wondered if other people felt that way about the gems. My question was answered during a visit to the arts storage facility in the East End of London where the gems were housed. The technical assistant asked me what it was we were looking at. We had just walked down long corridors lined with David Hockneys, Francis Bacons and a Monet and I wasn’t sure how he would react to a Buddhist antiquity. I explained what the Piprahwa gem relics were and he said nothing. He just looked at them. And then he said sincerely “I’m gobsmacked,” a British way of saying “I’m in awe,” which told me that I wasn’t the only one who felt that way in their presence. I wanted the power of these gems to reach everyone, Buddhist or not.

So as our custodianship of the Piprahwa gem relics ends, I hope they will go to someone who really values them. And I hope that many people will be able to see the gems and connect with the Buddhists who gave them over two thousand years ago, with our shared human experience of wonder and awe and with the Buddha and his teachings.