I'll just take the leftovers, thanks

Like most relics, the Buddha's Tooth, preserved carefully in the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, has quite a history. It was smuggled from India into Sri Lanka in a woman's elaborate hairstyle; it travelled up and down the countryside as monks, kings and invaders tried to get their hands on it; the Portuguese claimed to have destroyed the relic, but no, say believers, what they burned was not the real tooth, just a replica.
The tooth itself is only rarely on display, and what most worshippers get to see is not even the casket that contains the tooth, but the container that contains the casket, if you get my drift.
I've never quite understood the fervour that relics inspire, though I respect the devotion of true believers for whom these things--a bit of bone, a bit of shrivelled flesh, a bit of cloth--are actual conduits to the divine. I have a blunt mind, one that forces me to think about the cremation or burial of saints and religious figures, and picture the mad scramble for the mortal remains.
And the old imagination works overtime when someone mentions incorruptible saints: saints who were so much part of divinity that their physical bodies didn't decay in the normal course of things. There's a long and very gruesome tradition with particular regard to incorruptible saints, where some have been decapitated or had their hands or feet cut off after death; those relics are preserved in a separate church while the rest of the body is preserved elsewhere.
There's a part of me that marvels at the strength of faith--in any religion--that will allow believers to make the imaginative leap from the relic itself to the presence of holiness. This is the bit about relics that I find touching: that the sacredness they're supposed to contain overrides our "normal" fear of anything to do with death, our instinctive shrinking from ashes and cremains, from bone and decayed flesh, that we might see past the apparently corrupted object before us to the person whose wisdom, or goodness, or holiness we want to remember. People who shrink from death and graveyards and cremation grounds will find themselves, in the presence of a relic, not seeing the colours of rot and decay, not seeing just the skeleton implied in the bit of bone; they embrace what they would normally have feared.
Part of me, more cynically, thinks that this is just an old human reflex, the same impulse that drove warriors in one age to eat the brains or part of the body of the men they had just killed, so that some of their opponent's strength might enter them. We want what we always want, some of that power to be transferred to us: so the laying on of hands, so the scramble for rock stars' underwear (no one ever thinks that a guy who's been thumping around energetically in black leather under strong lighting isn't going to have lavender-scented lingerie, but that's another issue), so the need to kiss the hem of Caesar's robe, the desire for a writer's or film star's autograph.
And the rest of me is already tired of looking at temples built to commemorate the sites where various bits of Sati's dismembered body fell, and looking at shrivelled bits of what used to be a person, saint or not. There are many reasons why I'm not a saint: add this to the list, that I really don't want people sifting through my ashes for usable bits once I'm gone.