NETHERLANDS, February 23, 2015 (Discovery): Researchers at the Drents Museum in the Netherlands made a shocking discovery when they imaged an ancient Chinese statue and found a nearly 1,000-year-old mummy inside. Sitting in the lotus position, the mummy fits within the statue perfectly.
“On the outside, it looks like a large statue of Buddha,” the museum said in a release. “Scan research has shown that on the inside, it is the mummy of a Buddhist monk who lived around the year 1100.” The human skeleton is believed to belong to Buddhist master Liu Quan, a member of the Chinese Meditation School. The museum speculates Liu Quan may have “self-mummified” in order to become a “living Buddha.”
Practiced mainly in Japan, self-mummification was a grueling process that required a monk to follow a strict 1,000-day diet of nuts and seeds in order to strip the body of fat. A diet of bark and roots would follow for another 1,000 days. At the end of this period, the monk began drinking a poisonous tea made from the sap of the Japanese varnish tree. The tea caused a rapid loss of bodily fluids, possibly making the body too poisonous to be eaten by bacteria and insects.