Topic summary
Sarira
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Śarīra.
Terminology
Some Buddhist traditions also treated written scriptures as relics. Manuscripts deposited in stupas were sometimes called dharmasarira, "relics in the form of the teaching". Bronkhorst states that Brahmanical ideas about purity may have contributed to "shifts away from real bodily remains", with stupas, scriptures as dharmasarira, the Buddha's dharmakaya, and later Buddha images becoming more prominent.