Archaeologists have reportedly uncovered a 1,000-year-old box that could potentially hold the remains of the Buddha in China.

Remains of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha or the “awakened one", who founded Buddhism and is believed to have lived around 566-486 BCE, may have been found in a temple in Nanjing.

According to LiveScience, a skull bone of the Buddha may have been discovered inside a model of a stupa – a Buddhist shrine containing relics that is used for meditation – hidden inside a stone casket in the crypt of a Buddhist temple.

According to inscriptions found on the box - made of sandalwood, silver and gold, - the skull bone found within the remains belonged to the Buddha.

Inscriptions on the ceramic box containing the model claim that two monks named Yunjiang and Zhiming, from the Manjusri Temple in the Longxing Monastery, collected over 2,000 pieces of cremated remains over the space of 20 years and buried them in the temple in 1013.

The findings, published in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics, report the stupa model was discovered in the crypt of the Grand Bao’en Temple, and measured at nearly four feet by 1.5 feet.

Statues over six feet tall were also found in the excavation, though archaeologists are unsure if they were buried at the same time as the remains, Archaeology reported.

Archaeologists, led by Hong Wu, a research fellow at the Gansu Provincial Institute of Cultural relics and Archaeology, have not stated whether they believe the remains to be of the Buddha, who died 2,500 years ago.