Thai PM Prayut Chan-o-cha prays to Buddha’s sacred relics at National Museum in Delhi - Museum houses four bone fragments of Buddha

June 18, 2016, NewsCrunch

Thai PM Prayut Chan-o-cha, a devout Buddhist, made time to visit NationalMuseumat New Delhi on Friday and prayed to the sacred Buddha relics.

Prayut Chan-o-cha, a former Army chief and follower of  Theravada Buddhism, is known for intense faith in Thailand. He wears an elephant hair bracelet to ward off bad luck and has a collection of lucky rings. He is known to consult a fortune teller and has in the past blamed his political rivals for casting spells to make him fall ill.

The NationalMuseum houses four bone fragments stated to be of Buddha at a replica of stupa. The fragments, which are kept in caskets, are part of the trove of 22 bone fragments that were discovered in the 1970s in Kapilavastu, Uttar Pradesh.

The caskets were excavated from a stupa during an excavation at Piprahwa in 1972 by K M Srivastava, a former director of the Archaeological Survey of India.

Nepaldisputes that the bone fragments belong to Buddha and also contends Piprahwa is not the Kapilavastu of the past.

But the Buddhists a over the world worship the fragments as sacred relics of Buddha himself.

Indiaearlier used to send these relics to other countries on a goodwill tours to allow local Buddhists worship them. The practice has since stopped.

Last year, Modi had requested for a display of these relics at a function outside the NationalMuseum. But the Director General of the Museum Dr Ven Vasudevan had refused to part with them saying they were too fragile to be disturbed.

The IAS officer was abruptly transferred to sports ministry though he had completed only half of his tenure.

Various individuals including Minster of State for Home Kiiren Riiju have demanded that the Buddha’s relics should be shifted from the museum to a temple to make it easy for the faithful to worship them.