And yet the Buddha's body, too, was impermanent, and his relics were a sign of that impermanence. Jack Goody has pointed out that there is an "underlying paradox," a "structural ambiguity" in the veneration of relics, "for the concept of relics is characterized not only by attraction but also by repulsion, by an attachment to the dead as well as by a distancing from death which readily becomes associated with our death." It may well be, then, that relics of the Buddha are ultimately paradoxical and dialectic in nature. As pure symbols of impurity, ongoing representations of impermanence, signs of mortality enduring after death, embodiments of bodilessness, they are, as Levi-Strauss said of myths, "good to think with." They are also, however, "good to worship," "good to possess," "good to rule with," and "good to tell stories about." In all these ways, relics link particular places and peoples to the life and times of the Buddha or to the great world of Buddhism. Possessing sacred power and significance, they act as magnets for pilgrims and devotees, they enhance the prestige of their possessors, affording them magical power and protection, and they have furthered and bolstered the agendas of kings, monastics, and lay people. ...

There is no one Buddhist view of relics. One's understandings of them will depend on one's understanding of the nature of the Buddha. There are some for whom the presence of the Buddha is to be found more in his teachings than his physical body -- more in books than in bones. ... In the final analysis, stories about relics of the Buddha help us think not only about the life but also about the death of the Blessed One, and about the reality that he described and that his life and death reflected.

Almost by nature, relics toy with the opposition between "gone" and "not gone." On the one hand, they are themselves living entities; they can grow, they can emit rays of light, they can fly up into the air and perform miracles, they can take on the shape of the Blessed One, they can respond to the faith of devotees, they can do all the things the Buddha could do and then some. They not only express his life story but also extend it and the scope of his activities. On the other hand, they are reminders of impermanence, of the death of the Buddha, of the end and destruction of his body, of the fact that it was split up into grains the size of mustard seeds and spread throughout the world, or buried beneath huge stupas, sealed into chambers never to be opened again ... until, of course, the end of the Buddha age, when the relics will reemerge and all come alive once more. Only to die and disappear again. Only to make way for the next Buddha and his relics.