A CT scan and endoscopy, done by the Netherlands-based Drents Museum and the Meander Medical Centre in Amersfoort and intended to examine the interior of a 1,000 year old buddha statue revealed the mummified remains of a man glowing through the statue’s silhouette on the computed tomography scan.

The discovery is considered to be of great cultural significance because it is the only one of it’s kind and the only Chinese Buddhist mummy available for research in the West.

Samples of another material, which could not be identified by the scans, were removed from the abdominal and thoracic cavities of the mummy. Among the rotten material in the spaces which had once held organs were scraps of paper with Chinese characters on them.

The researchers believe the mummy to be that of a Buddhist meditation master named Liuquan or Liu Quan, a member of the Chinese Meditation School, who died around 1100 AD.

According to the team, the mummy could be an example of self-mummification. The goal of the practice was to become a “living Buddha”.

According to Cnet, “self-mummification would begin a 1,000-day diet of water, seeds and nuts, followed by a 1,000-day diet of roots, pine bark and a special tea made from the sap of the Chinese lacquer tree — a toxic substance usually used to lacquer bowls and plates, used by the monks to repel maggots and bacteria. Then they would be sealed in a stone tomb to await death.”

Following the monks death, the tomb would remain unsealed. Those who achieved mummification, earned an exhausted place in temples while those who did not would remain entombed out of respect for their effort.

Replacing the organs with scrolls of paper is not, however, known to be a part of the self-mummification process.

Mummification was, of course, practiced in Egypt as well as the Aztecs, the Chinchorro people of what is now Chile and at various other locations in Mexico, Central and South America. Typically mummification was part of a religious ceremony focused on immortality.

The 200 year old mummified remains of a monk were unearthed in Songino Khairkhan province Mongolia in January. The monk was seated in the lotus position however it is not immediately clear that it was an example of self mummification. Due to extreme temperatures in the region, examples of ‘accidental mummification’ have been found before and the find is so new that very little testing has been done. Even the age of the mummy has not been verified.

A 2003 paper by Justin Ritzinger and Marcus Bingenheimer lays out a broad overview of Buddhist mummifications or “whole-body relics” that have been found in Nanhua Temple, Guangdong and on Mount Jiuhua in Anhui Province.

The research on the latest find was led by Erik Bruijn, an expert in the field of Buddhist art and culture and guest curator at the World Museum in Rotterdam, along with liver doctor Reinoud Vermeijden and radiologist Ben Heggelman.

Tissue and bone samples from the mummy have been submitted for DNA testing and the team is currently awaiting results. However all of the results will be published in a monograph on Master Liuquan to be published when the research is complete.

The mummy has sense moved on from the Drent Museum in Assen, where it had been on display and is now at the National Museum of Natural History in Budapest, where it will stay till May 2015.