Once you read the story, you may never look at a Buddha statue the same way again.
What initially appeared to be a Buddha statue of a meditating monk may actually be a mummy. The statue, which dated back to around a thousand years ago, originally came from China. Currently it's on display in Hungary's Drents Museum since last year. It's the first time for the statue to leave China.
Last December, the statue was brought to Meander Medical Centre, where it underwent a CT scan and an endoscopy. What the researchers discovered were simply mesmerizing: inside was a mummy believed to be Master Liuquan.
There's not much information about Liuquan out there except that he was a Buddha master who lived sometime in 1100. When he died, he might have opted for a process called self-mummification.
Website i09, which also ran the story, has comprehensive information about self-mummification. According to one of its articles, the process is very common among Buddhist practitioners, and those who adhere to it are then called sokushinbutsu. The word is roughly translated as "Buddha in the flesh."
The article believed that self-mummification first started in China and was first introduced by those who practiced Taoism. There were also cases of the process in India.
However, the most popular examples of self-mummification were first discovered in Japan. More than 20 of them were followers of Shingon Buddhism, and they may have lived as early as the twelfth century. Niigata University researchers including Kosei Ando found out about these mummies around the 1960s.
The process to self-mummification is quite long, spanning for about 3 years. The practitioner has to undergo a very lengthy training and maintain a very restrictive diet, including eating herbs and certain nuts that can help preserve the body once the person has already died.
When he's ready, the person gets into a small chamber with only a very little hole to himself breathe. He rings a bell to signal that he's alive. Then if it has already stopped, the chamber is sealed securely, opened only after 3 years to confirm if the mummification is successful.
The mummified body of Master Liuquan contains not organs but papers with Chinese characters.