Buddha statue hides remains of 1,000-year-old monk

Scientists have recently discovered the remains of a monk hidden inside a Buddha statue currently exhibited in Budapest, Hungary.

The mummified remains are believed to be those of an unidentified monk who lived in present-day China over 1,000 years ago.

"It originates from a private collector from the Netherlands. And, when he purchased the Buddha statue, he didn't even know that there is a monk inside. So, he was also surprised after several years (when) some scientists studied and made an X-ray investigation of the statue, and then they found out that there is a skeleton, a mummy, inside the statue," said Dr. Korsos Zoltan, curator of the National Museum of Natural History in Budapest.

Dr. Zoltan said the statue was purchased by the collector in 1996, but the hidden mummy was not discovered until the statue was sent for repair in 2012. At that time, researchers used a CT scanner to look inside the statue only to reveal the existence of the skeleton.

The statue, from the Drents Museum in the Netherlands, will be exhibited in Budapest until the end of May. After that, it will move to another exhibition in Luxembourg.

(REUTERS)