Despite 39 C heat last weekend the Yunju Buddhist Temple in the southwest of Beijing received a record number of visitors.

Yun Guirong, director of the administration of cultural relics at Yunju Temple, said there were 10,000 visitors a day, compared with the usual hundreds.

The influx is because of the Buddha sarira (or sheli in Chinese) that were found in the cremation ashes of Shakyamuni. The exhibition opened on June 23 and closes today.

The sarira on display at Yunju Temple consists of two crystal-like reddish beads about the size of rice grains. Unearthed at Yunju Temple in 1981, the sarira was entrusted to the care of the Capital Museum by the Beijing Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage. This is the first time the sarira has been exhibited at the temple.

Although it is impossible for visitors to clearly see the sarira, which is kept in a bulletproof glass box 3 m from a safety barrier, people have flocked to worship the sarira.

"We believe that seeing the sarira equals seeing Buddha himself. I can feel great power here," says Li Dong, a lay Buddhist from Beijing, after praying for a long time before the sarira. "One ought to see through not only the eyes but also the mind."

Another visitor from Tianjin, who declines to give his name, says that he feels "incomparably at ease" after seeing the sarira.

It is a general Buddhist belief that emotions of peace, inspiration, or even spiritual transformation can be felt in the presence of sarira, which is found in the cremation ash of spiritual masters, among whom Shakyamuni, or Buddha, is the greatest.

The sarira is purported to embody the spiritual knowledge, or living essence of masters, and is taken as evidence of the masters' enlightenment and spiritual purity. Some believe masters deliberately left sarira to be venerated.

However, like the Shroud of Turin, in Christianity, there is intense debate over the sarira. Some people hold they are mostly bladder or kidney stones, but Buddhists usually deny such an assumption.