At the turn of the twentieth century, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto sent out a call for donations of human hair, to be made into ropes and used in the reconstruction of the temple complex; another Buddhist temple in Osaka announced that it would accept responsibility for the deceased indigent people of the city, incorporating their remains into statues of Amida Buddha and installing them on temple grounds. Visitors to the temple in Kyoto can still see one of the hair ropes displayed in its glass museum case; in Osaka, the temple anticipates completing its fourteenth bone statue next year. How do contemporary Buddhist institutions make sense of these inherited objects? This presentation explores the pre-modern religious imaginaries out of which the hair ropes and bone statues emerged and the modern religious world within which they came to be situated as relics belonging to a collective body. It suggests that these objects—sturdy by design, unsettling by nature—assert the persistence of that body in ways their first caretakers did not anticipate and their current caretakers cannot quite digest.
