The holy beard, tooth and footprints

Oblivious to the significance of the place, I stumbled upon Prophet Mohammad's beard and footprint in Turkey's Topkapi Palace museum. I needed to squint my eyes in order to see the hair clearly in an ornate, yet unpretentious, glass flask.

In the opposite display case, there was also his marbled footprint which would have been easily overlooked, had it not been labeled as such.

The stream of visitors, Muslim and otherwise, passed by quite leisurely, stopping to gaze at the displays

Here they are -- a proof of a holy man who once walked this earth in flesh and blood not-too-long-ago. A comparison arose in my mind.

I have visited so many sites of the Buddha's relics, but none of them ever instilled in me such a sense of intimacy.

The celebration of the holy tooth relic in Kandy comes with a yearly parade of hundreds of elephants and dancers. Even the holy tooth itself is encased in a heavily decorated solid gold casket -- impenetrable to the eyes.

The Buddha's footprints -- one of which is in my own city -- in many temples are anything but human. Often a size of a giant's foot, they also come imprinted with numerous auspicious signs, meant to invite veneration. This most famous one in Thailand measures 5 foot long, 21 inches across and 11 inches deep.

Even the least pretentious of the Buddha's relics housed in the New Delhi National Museum were meant to be admired from a distance rather than approached.

I suddenly felt envious of Muslims. They have a prophet who existed in a historical time where his life was fully recorded in details. These various artifacts attest to the time and the context he lived in. As a result, his words were not pronounced in a decontextualized vacuum, and can be related directly to the complex world in which he uttered them.

That is not the case of the Buddha. The little relics that are left of him are treated more of a superman, rather than a man. Worse, they were discovered in places long forgotten, devoid of the past circumstances that have led to their being depository of the relics. Instead of history, the void has been filled with myth and hagiography.

As a result, the teachings of the Buddha have lost much of their contexts. Whatever contexts survived must be deduced from the texts themselves. Often the texts are so abstracted from daily life that the teachings have lost their "flesh and blood" -- to be recited to the point of become empty platitude. The cacophony of war and conflict -- as prevalent in the Buddha's time as now -- has become so distant that it only serves as an opening of some rather bland teachings on harmony.

The lack of context has also led to metaphysical superstructure known as the Abhidhamma which has little bearings on the complex life and societies that we now live in, especially when it comes to contentious situations and controversial issues.

Islam is not shy about the context in which it arose. One doesn't need to see the sword of the Prophet to be remind of the climate of tribal warfare of the era. The context can't be separated from the text, although predictably many would try to do exactly that to use the decontextualized text to advance their interest.

The tipitaka, like the Buddha's footprints, is a victim of much Abhidhammic abstraction and hagiographical embellishment that it has lost its resemblance and relatability to life.

Even with context, the texts can be distorted for sure. But without context, the texts cannot be reliably interpreted and become vulnerably used in convenient ways to serve someone's agenda.

And that's one reason a Buddhist scholar will be eternally in envy of Muslim scholar.