DUTCH private collector Oscar van Overeem, who owns the 1,000-year-old Buddha statue with a mummified monk inside, said he is willing to return the relic to China.

    According to The New York Times, van Overeem, an architect, last month publicly acknowledged for the first time on the networking site LinkedIn that he owned the mummified Buddha. He bought the statue for 40,000 Dutch guilders (US$20,544) in 1996 from a collector in Amsterdam who had acquired it in Hong Kong.

    Van Overeem said that he had reached a tentative agreement to donate the mummy to “a major Buddhist temple” near Yangchun Village in the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian, where the statue, likely to be the personification of Patriarch Zhanggong, who practiced self-mummification in the village during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), originated.

    An unidentified foundation will offer him some compensation for what he has invested in the statue and in researching its history, he said.

    Patriarch Zhanggong was a monk named Zhang Qisan who was known as a benevolent healer. He was worshiped as an ancestor by villagers in Yangchun Village.

    In a Beijing News interview via LinkedIn, van Overeem said, “I don’t want to say a lot. There are negotiations on the way.”

    Van Overeem added that he was letting go of the statue because he believed it deserved to return to its homeland “to be incorporated in truly Buddhist surroundings” and worshiped “by those who love and appreciate him.”

    The mummy’s well-being may be the only issue on which van Overeem and the villagers of Yangchun agree.

    Villagers from Yangchun wrote letters in April to the Dutch museum and collector, demanding the return of the Buddhist statue while the State Administration of Cultural Heritage in China paid close attention to the affair.

    On May 6, the head of the Cultural Relics Identification Center and the Fujian Administration of Cultural Heritage said that the State Administration of Cultural Heritage had full authority over the mummified Buddha situation, but the provincial administration wanted to do more research on Yangchun to get more information about the statue.

    According to him, the provincial administration has been collecting evidence ever since March. By comparing photos and specifics on the size, height and weight of the Buddha that is currently owned by the Dutch collector and the one that went missing 19 years ago, it was initially confirmed that the two statues were identical.

    In ancient China, monks who made great achievements usually practiced self-mummification when they felt they were about to die. They stopped eating and drinking to deplete their organs in the period before death.

    After a monk died, he was buried sitting in the lotus position in a clay vessel. The preserved body was decorated with paint and adorned with gold.(SD-Agencies)