The small Buddhist community in Bangladesh has gifted a few strands of a lock of hair said to have come from the Buddha to Sri Lanka as a goodwill gesture, an official said Wednesday.
Bangladesh's interim foreign minister Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury handed over the sacred hair relic to his Sri Lankan counterpart Rohitha Bogollagama at a religious ceremony in the south-eastern port city of Chittagong, said Buddhist Association president Ajit Ranjan Barua.
More than 3,000 Buddhists held a puja at the country's oldest Buddhist monastery in central Chittagong as the hair was taken out of a wooden box and handed to Bogollagama, who is leading a delegation to the country. Police said security has been tightened across the city ahead of the ceremony.
The lock of hair, kept under tight security at the monastery, has been shared with other Buddhist countries such as Thailand and Japan, Barua said. The country's Buddhist community decided to donate the hair to Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka after a request from its government.
"We have agreed to donate some of these sacred hair as a gesture of goodwill to our Sri Lankan brothers," Barua said earlier. A Tibetan monk, Srimat Shaikkya Bhikkhu, brought the hair relic to Bangladesh in the 1930s, Barua said. Buddhism is followed by around one million people in Bangladesh where the majority of the 144 million population is Muslim.
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