Siddhartha Gautama's burial gems

The government if India demands the handover of ancient jewels excavated from a stupa along with (reportedly) some of the ashes from the cremation of the Buddha.

We know what the Buddha would say about this, if he were alive today.

Such attachment to material objects, such as jewels, or what remains of a person's dead body, will only cause suffering. I advise you to stop venerating me, and focus the wisdom I passed on to you: meditate on the impermanence of human life.

According to my nonreligious ideas of right and wrong, I think that the Government of India made a reasonable and ethical deal with Pappé: to keep the bulk of the jewels, demonstrating the range they span, in a museum as it should be, and letting Pappé have 1/5 that were not special. There are no grounds to reopen that deal.

Stupas, like other ancient sites, are heritage of humanity for the knowledge that can be learned from them, and should only be excavated by skilled archeologists who can learn from them the most possible knowledge about ancient times. But that was not an option in the 1870s.