The little flame of life gracing the altar... For evermore ?
He died in 1927...
Nothing special for a man who was born in 1852 and had reached the honourable age of 75...
According to his wish, he has been exhumed from the grave in 2002.
Since then, the tone of an enigmatic phenomenon has had scientists stand in utter perplexity while the faithful see in him the reincarnation of Buddha.
The mystery of such a miraculous case remains a full closed book: how can one explain that 75 years of inhumation haven't been tainting the body of this holy man? That its appearance seems not to differ from the one a fresh buried person?...
The body of the former spiritual leader of the Russian Buddhists showed once out of the tomb neither signs of mummification nor of dehydration. His skin was still supple, his nails and hair could belong to a living being, his whole body, undecayed, has not been undergoing any chemical decomposition yet...
Two years after his exhumation, the exhibited holy corpse still bewares, with unchallenged success, of his preservation. After an agreement with the Buddhist religious authorities has been reached, some samples have been taken off of his body in November 2004 and submitted for analyses. They will be carried out in the Russian Centre of Forensic Medical Expertise (Moscow) run by Dr. Viktor Zviagin.
Recurrent cases of well-conserved dead bodies are recorded all over the world. Viktor Zviagin indicates for instance the recent discovery of other bodies in the North Caucasus. Their misleading look alleged they had been buried a couple of years before; analyses dated their deceases back to the XVIIIth century. These cadavers, just like those discovered in the Alps, in China or in peat bogs of Denmark, are all stated as mummifications induced by direct environment... So far, no known equivalent stands out for the Dashi Dorzho ITIGILOV case...
The Buryat Buddhists claim the lama has reached nirvana, statement confirmed by the Dalai Lama himself.
This Holy man, XIIth Khamba Lama and religious leader of the Buryat Buddhists, had secluded himself in a Buryat monastery at the turn of the revolution in 1917. Worried about the loom of a terrible religious persecution he foresaw, he asked his fellows before he died to bury him in a wooden coffin in the lotus position and to get him back after a span of 30 years. First unearthed in 1950, then a second a time in 1973, the body of the XIIth Khamba Lama has been carried in 2002 to his final home, a temple, where he will sit for evermore, adorned with his sacerdotal vestments. In the lotus position.
Dead or alive?... All wonders are possible.
A tomography should be performed in the coming months in order to ascertain whether lama Dashi Dorzho Itigilov is still among the living or really dead...
