Above: historians Charles Allen (left) and Harry Falk with the chest Peppe found.
THE REAL BUDDHA?: Actors (above) re-create William Peppe’s discovery in India. Inset: historians Charles Allen (left) and Harry Falk with the chest Peppe found. (
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Are those the bones of Buddha or is this Al Capone’s vault all over again?
If you were alive in the 1890s, when an amateur archeologist by the name of William Peppe uncovered a giant tomb in India on his land, you might say it was the real deal.
But if you were in the Indian government, you’d call it an “Al Capone,” for sure. On tomorrow night’s quite interesting segment of PBS’ “Secrets of the Dead: Bones of the Buddha,” historian, Charles Allen goes in search of what could be the most important archeological find in 1,000 years.
Turns out that when Peppe and his men dug on his land, they found a tomb, and inside it a burial chamber with a sarcophagus, and inside that four small reliquary pots containing water, jeweled flowers, ashes and pieces of bone. Beneath that were thousands of tiny hand-carved jewels and gold ornaments — Allen’s first stop on the show.
From there, he journeys to India to trace the whereabouts of the jars, and the history of what happened to the jar that contains what could be the remains of Buddha himself — the holiest relic in the world to over 400 million Buddhists.
Shockingly, it turns out that at the time of the discovery (1897), Peppe had written of his find to two prominent researchers in India at the time. One, a renowned German archeologist, Dr. Anton Fuhrer, who was on the Indian government’s payroll, turned out to be a fraud who disgraced the government by forging information — and even, in some cases, creating what he said were ancient finds.
Peppe was tarred with Fuhrer’s brush and he, too, was disgraced as a fraud despite the fact that he’d found the burial place well before ever meeting or contacting Fuhrer. Allen has painstakingly investigated the case, and PBS goes along with him as he meets with experts and finally uncovers how the burial jars could have ended up in the obscure place where Peppe found them.
It’s a fascinating journey, even if Allen does say something incomprehensible for a scholar: “It would be like finding the bones of Jesus.” Of course Christians believe that there are no bones of Jesus since He was supposed to have resurrected.
That aside, for those who love history and mystery, “Bones of the Buddha,” has plenty of both.