{"id":14070,"date":"2015-02-24T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-24T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2015\/02\/24\/mummified-monk-found-inside-ancient-buddha-statue\/"},"modified":"2015-02-24T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-24T12:00:00","slug":"mummified-monk-found-inside-ancient-buddha-statue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2015\/02\/24\/mummified-monk-found-inside-ancient-buddha-statue\/","title":{"rendered":"Mummified Monk Found Inside Ancient Buddha Statue"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.discovery.com\/history\/archaeology\/mummified-monk-sits-inside-ancient-buddha-statue-150223.htm\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;On the outside, it looks like a large statue of Buddha,&#8221; the museum said in a release. &#8220;Scan research has shown that on the inside, it is the mummy of a Buddhist monk who lived around the year 1100.&#8221; 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 &#8220;self-mummified&#8221; in order to become a &#8220;living Buddha.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source NETHERLANDS, February 23, 2015 (Discovery): Researchers at the Drents Museum in the Netherlands made a shocking discovery when they,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}