He Did It All
Photo from history.com I recently read an article about a statue that went through a CT scan. They discovered in the scan that the statue is what is referred to as a "living Buddha"; the Buddha statue was formed around a mummified human being. The man whose remains are inside this statue went through a 10-year process of self-mummification. For ten years he slowly starved his body by eating only nuts, berries, tree bark, and pine needles in increasingly smaller and smaller portions. He ate herbs, cycad nuts, and sesame seeds to decrease the amount of bacteria in his body. He drank a poisonous tree sap to embalm himself and repel insects. After a decade of this he was buried alive in an underground chamber where he sat in the lotus position and chanted, breathing through a bamboo pine. Each day he would ring a bell to signal that he was still alive. When the bell stopped ringing, the chamber was sealed for three years. After three years his body was removed and completely m...