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halls, noted how common they were in Central China and continued "they may almost be said to abound in Szechuan". He suggested that the custom sprang from the belief that the benevolent influence exercised by the deceased during his lifetime would still be active if his body was preserved and set up. These mummies were placed in a hall on their own and even in the main hall beside the Buddha's image directly in front of the main altar. The "images" were usually gilded, though several on O Mei Shan were made up in fresh colours and dressed in silken robes which sometimes produced quite a monumental effect. The finest example he saw was in a wayside monastery on Chiu Hua Shan at the Ts'ui Yun An where the features of a monk who had died about the turn of this century had been gilded and “stood out as though carved in oak”.
The Chinese appear to have used two ways of preserving corpses. The usual method consisted first of evisceration; the body was then pickled in salt for a considerable period of time, afterwards being placed in a sealed urn and left for several years. If, when opened up, the urn was found to contain an undecayed body a subscription list was opened for the gilding and enshrining of the relic. The body was thickly gilded or varnished and, if not exposed to the elements or to great extremes in temperature and humidity, it would then last for centuries. The second method was for the dying monk, if he felt divinely inspired, to fast before death and in the process dry himself out, so that after death little was required to finish off drying the body into a leathery, hard mass of skin and bone3.
The following short notes on the better known "fleshy bodies" provide a clearer picture of how widespread the practice was. In May 1975 a preserved body, just emaciated skin and bones, seated in a cross-legged position was returned from Japan to Taiwan. The relic, the body of the monk Shih Tzu-kung (#4) known as the Stone Monk (GI✯✯), had been in Japan since World War II when it had been secretly shipped there by a Japanese military dentist. The body, more than a thousand years old, was of a T'ang Buddhist leader born about 700 AD in Kwangtung into a family named Ch'en (#). His title during life was Wu Chi Ta Shih (AR), which is the title he is still known by. He has now been returned to his original monastery in Taiwan.
An embalmed body exhibited in the eastern part of the Great Hall of the Yueh Lin Temple in Chekiang was claimed to be that