The Meander Medical Centre in the Dutch town of Amersfoort has plenty of experience treating senior citizens, but none nearly as old as the 1,000-year-old patient who came through its doors in early September 2014 for tests and a checkup.
Researchers brought a millennium-old statue of the Buddha, which had been on loan to the Drents Museum in the Netherlands, to the state-of-the-art hospital in the hopes that modern medical technology could shed light on an ancient mystery. For hidden inside the gold-painted figure was a secret—the mummy of a Buddhist monk in a lotus position. Shown outside of China for the first time last year, the statue had been the centerpiece of a recently completed exhibition at the Drents Museum that featured 60 human and animal mummies from around the world.
To learn more about what the hospital called its “oldest patient ever,” the Chinese statue was delicately placed on a gurney for doctors to perform an examination under the supervision of Buddhist art and culture expert Erik Bruijn, a guest curator at the World Museum in Rotterdam. Radiologist Ben Heggelman slid the ancient artifact slowly into a high-tech imaging machine for a full-body CT scan and sampled bone material for DNA testing. Gastroenterologist Reinoud Vermeijden used a specially designed endoscope to extract samples from the mummy’s chest and abdominal cavities.
Now it is known that the tests have revealed a surprise—the monk’s organs had been removed and replaced with scraps of paper printed with ancient Chinese characters and other rotted material that still has not yet been identified. How the organs had been taken from the mummy remains a mystery.
The body inside the statue is thought to be that of Buddhist master Liuquan, a member of the Chinese Meditation School who died around A.D. 1100. How did Liuquan’s body end up inside an ancient Chinese statue? One possibility explored by the Drents Museum is the gruesome process of self-mummification in which monks hoped to transform themselves into revered “living Buddhas.”
