'Relics, they always are'
For all believers, there are objects revered as sacred
Christianity 101 stipulates that the body of Jesus isn't available for viewing. Other religions have it easier.
Several hundred people turned out in 2005 to view a touring collection of Buddhist relics at the Thousand Buddha Temple in Quincy. The exhibition displayed relics of Siddhartha, the religious figure most outsiders know simply by his title -- Buddha.
The relics included flakes of dried blood, fragments of bone, and cremated remains believed to be those of Buddhism's founder, who died about 2,500 years ago. For Buddhists, viewing a relic is an intense experience.
"I can attain pure mind at the moment of seeing a relic," said Bhiksuni Kuan Yen, the abbess of the Thousand Buddha Temple, through a translator.
Relics of Siddhartha are the most auspicious in Buddhism, but others are kept and venerated as well, including relics of bodhisattvas -- revered figures somewhat akin to Christian saints. Two such relics are kept at the Quincy temple.
A buddha's body is believed to literally become one with spiritual teaching and cosmic law. Relics are therefore seen as the actual wisdom of a buddha manifested in physical form, said Yen.
"Not only are relics the embodiment of wisdom and virtues, it also sets an example to inspire the worshipper or viewer to be a better person," she said.
In virtually all religions, relics are thought to convey direct spiritual benefits.
For instance, praying before a relic in Catholicism sometimes earns an "indulgence," a fairly complicated religious concept that involves reducing a sinner's divine punishment in the afterlife.
"All religions have some objects that are understood to have particular power because of the objects' relationship to divinity," said Robert Orsi, a professor of the history of religion at Harvard Divinity School.
"Different religions at different times have had different relationships to relics, or have tried to minimize or deny the centrality of relics," he said.
"But relics, they always are."
The world's religions have widely varying attitudes toward relics and sacred objects.
For instance, relics can be a contentious subject in Islam.
All Muslims consider the Koran to be the literal Word of God. Thus, copies are treated with great reverence in any printing.
Ancient copies are especially esteemed, such as a seventh-century one in the custody of the mufti of Tashkent, Uzbekistan. It is stained with what is believed to be the blood of Uthman, the third successor of the prophet Mohammed under Sunni tradition, who is held to have compiled and organized the Koranic texts in a single volume for the first time.
Beyond this, controversy looms. For instance, Mohammed is buried in Medina, Saudi Arabia, but the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam that dominates the country strongly discourages the veneration of relics.
The Saudis recently initiated construction projects designed to play down important religious sites in order to discourage "idolatry." Several newspapers reported that one plan under consideration would build a parking lot over the founder of Islam's tomb. The tomb of Mohammed's wife was razed in the 1920s for similar reasons.
Christian Protestantism also rejects the veneration of relics, albeit usually stopping short of paving over them.
During the Reformation in the 16th century, relics and indulgences were hotly contested issues between Catholics and Protestants, with Protestants objecting to their sale to the highest bidder, a practice eventually banned by the Vatican.
The controversy owed, too, to the fairly high incidence of fraud.
Protestant disenchantment with relics was aggravated by dubious claims that were rampant in medieval times, running the gamut from merely unlikely to patently absurd.
The most coveted were supposed relics of Jesus. Creative enthusiasts claimed to have samples of his hair and blood, his crib and clothes -- even his foreskin, known as the Holy Prepuce, which could be found in several competing venues, including one kept in a 14th-century abbey in France.
"This holy relic had the power of rendering all the sterile women in the neighborhood fruitful -- a virtue, we are told, which filled the benevolent monks of the abbey with a pardonable amount of pride," wrote Dr. P.C. Remondino in a history of circumcision published in 1891.
But even Protestants have certain objects that receive a special esteem, said Orsi.
For instance, the thumb of George Whitfield, an early Methodist leader, is preserved at the Methodist Library at Drew University in New Jersey. Although there are no specific religious benefits attached to the thumb, such remembrances feed a basic human impulse, the Harvard Divinity professor said.
"I think that whatever the religious psychology of relics are, that it's so fundamental to humans that I see them present in all religions," said Orsi. "There's something about the way humans live in the world." 