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·搜一搜.cn/荷兰电视台报道千年肉身坐佛

#肉身坐佛#
#荷兰#
#章公祖师#

Yangchun village temple where the Buddha statue was originally placed Photo: Courtesy of Lin Wenqing
荷兰电视台报道福建千年肉身坐佛章公祖师
荷兰国际新闻电视台节目中穿插的旁白

No festival without fireworks, and this festival is the most important of all in the Fujianese mountain village of Yangchun. Today the villages remembers their holy saint Zhanggong.

没有鞭炮就不是过节，而这个节日是福建省阳春村最重要的节日。今天村民们来敬拜他们最神圣的章公祖师。

 

His body was made into a mummy and he was worshipped because the villagers ancient belief that the he will protect their village. This is quite common in this area in China.

章公坐化成一尊肉身佛保佑着村庄，受到村民的敬拜和尊崇。这种现象在中国的这一地区比较普遍。

The statue of Zhanggong was stolen in 1995. Nowadays Yangchun is praying in front of a bronze replica. They mei you banfa. The real Zhanggong mummie is suppesed to be in the hands of a Dutch collector. The villagers feel e does not belong there.

章公肉身佛像于1995被盗。如今阳春只能在一尊章公的复制品佛像前祈祷。真正的章公祖师肉身佛像目前在一位荷兰收藏家手中。村民们认为章公祖师并不应该在那里。

These kind of images from the west fill them with mixed feelings. On the one hand they are thankfull they know Zhanggong is not lost anymore, but they would prefer him to come home.

西方的这些影像给予村民们非常复杂的感受。一方面，他们感恩章公再现，但是他们希望章公可以回到故里。

The negotiation about the return of the statue to China have gone nowhere. The Dutch collector, who refuses to be interviewed for this story, claims his statue is not the missing mummie from Yangchun. He does not want to give it back.

关于索回肉身佛像的谈判没有任何进展。荷兰收藏家称他手中的肉身佛像并不是来自阳春村，他不想将其归还。本台报道时，他拒绝接受采访。

According to the Dutch lawyer who represents the village, Zhanggong is not a piece of art. He is human remains, and dead bodies cannot be owned by anyone. Only the descendants or people who have always taken care of it, are allowed to keep it.

阳春村的荷兰代理律师称章公不是一件艺术品。他是一具人体遗骸，根据法律，任何人不得拥有尸体。只有后代或者长久以来侍奉其的人才被允许拥有他。

We have been taken care of Zhanggong for more than 1000 years, Yangchun says. The vegetarian feast, truckloads of incense, these huge celebrations: Zhanggong is the centre of the spiritual life of this village.

Now it is up to the Dutch court to  decide the value of the Chinese villagers feelings.

村民们说我们已经侍奉章公祖师1000多年。素食贡品、无数的香、这些隆重的庆典：章公是整个村子精神生活的中心，现在将有荷兰法庭来决定村民们的情感的价值。
p.s.
荷兰国际新闻电视台、荷兰《人民报》记者玛莱雅一行于二0一六年农历十月初四日到大田阳春进行为期两天的实地采访。玛莱雅说，此次采访将在荷兰国的国际新闻电视台和《人民报》进行客观报道，旨在让荷兰民众更加知晓肉身坐佛和肉身坐佛对于福建阳春村民以及四方信众的意义和重要性，希望能为促成肉身坐佛章公祖师早日回归福建阳春普照堂尽一份力。
2016-12-10 微大田 荷兰国际新闻电视台在其国内向荷兰民众报道福建千年肉身坐佛章公祖师

Dutch court reportedly issues notice to collector of mummified statue
By Peng Juan Source:Global Times Published: 2016/11/7 19:53:39

The legal battle between Dutch art collector Oscar van Overeem and Yangchun villagers from East China's Fujian Province has made progress.

The Dutch court has ordered the plaintiffs, Yangchun villagers, to provide a guaranteed court fee of 2,879 euros (about $3,189) and the defendant, Dutch art collector van Overeem, to submit a notice of response no later than November 23, 2016, Chinese media reported.

According to the Dutch law, the statute of limitation for this type of lawsuit is 20 years. The Buddha was said to be stolen at the end of 1995; however van Overeem claimed that he acquired it in 1996 from a Hong Kong art dealer, which left the Fujian villagers with very little time to take legal action, media reports said.

"We are preparing the money right now, it's not a big sum and it's good that there is a deadline for the Dutch art collector to respond to the notice, which he has already postponed twice, the first time he requested a delay of six weeks and the second time four weeks. We know that he is trying to buy time for gathering more legal evidence on his part," Lin Wenqing, a spokesperson for the villagers, told the Global Times Wednesday.


2016-11-8 Dutch court reportedly issues notice to collector of mummified statue
www.globaltimes.cn/content/1016403.shtml

Legal battle

The case was taken to court in Netherlands by a group of volunteer lawyers, including a Dutch lawyer, in June this year, after van Overeem refused to return the Buddha to Yangchun villagers. However it was reported that he would consider to return the Buddha, "if it is proven to have belonged to a Buddhist community that still exists," and then he expressed his willingness to return the Buddha to South Putuo Temple in Xiamen, Fujian Province as it had better facilities instead of the humble village temple.

But his offer was declined by the South Putuo Temple on the grounds of differences in religious beliefs.

Later he changed his mind again by asking a price of $20 million to $30 million for the statue from the Chinese government as compensation, the Xinhua News Agency and Britain's Daily Mail reported.

"His attitude is very ambiguous. We sincerely wish he can return the Buddha to us without going to the court. We know that in the past 20 years he has taken very good care of the Buddha, which our villagers truly appreciate. For us, the Buddha is like a family, we love and worship it so much that no matter how difficult it is going to be, we are determined to get it back. We do not want to take legal action against somebody who is actually our benefactor," Lin Wenqing told the Global Times.

The golden sitting Buddha, which contains the remains of a monk who lived in China's Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), is about four-foot (1.2 meters) tall. According to the villagers, this Buddha had been placed at the Yangchun village temple for more than 1,000 years and local worshippers called him Zhanggong Zushi and treated him like a god over the centuries. Legend had it that when he was still alive, he devoted all his life to helping and treating sick villagers with herbs, and when he died aged 37, he turned himself into a mummy and his body was placed inside the statue about 200 years later.


Contentious treasure

In December 1995, the Buddha was found to have disappeared from its seat.

Lin Wenqing said a man called Lin Guangming, a brick worker who was working close to the temple, witnessed the theft. He told the villagers he saw a minivan around the temple that night, and when the van left, he even helped to move the bricks out of the way. Twenty years ago, cars and vans were very rare to see, so that minivan caught his attention. He peeked inside the window and saw something being covered by a blanket, which looked like a sick person.

In the following 20 years, villagers have been relentlessly looking for the Buddha but nothing was found.  

However in March 2015, an exhibition called "Mummy World" was held in Hungarian Natural History Museum, Budapest and the centerpiece of the exhibition was a golden sitting mummified Buddha which looked exactly the same as the stolen one from Yangchun village.

"There is a Fujian businessman who lives in Budapest, he is actually from our village, and he is very familiar with the Buddha. When he first saw the photo of the exhibited Buddha in media, he immediately recognized it's the stolen one. And from a reporter of the New York Times, we finally got to know the current owner of the Buddha, a Dutch collector called Oscar van Overeem," Lin Wenqing said.

In 1997, van Overeem took the statue to Utrecht University to have it carbon-dated and scanned and the Dutch scientists found remains of a human body dating back to the 11th century inside the statue. In 2014, the Meander Medical Centre in Amsterdam conducted a scan on the statue, and the results showed the abdominal cavity of the body, where there had once been organs, had been taken out and there were paper scraps printed with ancient Chinese characters in it now, Reuters reported.

"To win the case, the Chinese lawyers and villagers need to gather strong and adequate historical recordings including the village genealogical books, previous pictures of the Buddha and hand-written texts. Normally it is very difficult to trace back relics which were brought to the West long time ago, for example before the 20th century, but it is relatively easy to get back the items which were lost in the contemporary period," Huo Zhengxin, an international law expert from China University of Political Science and Law, told the Global Times in a telephone interview.

"The Dutch collector may try to prove he acquired the Buddha with a goodwill and did not know the fact that the item he bought was smuggled out of China at that time. If he could prove it, then it would be very difficult for the villagers to get the Buddha back according to the Dutch law. However, the lawsuit is helpful in clarifying how this Buddha ended up in the West, because van Overeem would be obligated to respond to the lawsuit and provide evidence," Huo noted.