# Rebuilding Buddhas has become symbol in rebuilding Afghanistan



## GAP (3 Jan 2007)

Rebuilding Buddhas has become symbol in rebuilding Afghanistan  
2007-01-02 By Peter Schurmann New America Media 
Article Link

For more than a millennium Afghanistan's lush Pamir valley lay beneath the benevolent gaze of two colossal standing Buddhas, monuments to an efflorescent history of pilgrims and merchants, of religion and culture. In 2001, the statues were destroyed by the ruling Taliban, some say out of religious fanaticism, others as a political statement against the West. What's left are fragments of stone and wood strewn across the war-torn land like broken pieces of a once resplendent past.

The statues were built sometime in the 6th century as part of a larger Buddhist monastery, itself the center of a major religious and trading post on the Silk Road connecting Europe to the Tang Dynasty capital in China. Much of the area, as well as present-day Pakistan and parts of North India, belonged then to the rulers of the Kushan Empire, an Indo-European people ancestral to the present-day Pashtuns that inhabit the valley. The Kushan empire thrived from the wealth of culture and trade that flowed across the Silk Road.

Unlike today, Buddhism in the 6th century was also a major proselytizing faith, sending missionaries far and wide to convert rulers and thereby entire peoples to its doctrine. Kings and emperors alike saw in Buddhism a powerful tool to unite, and in many ways subjugate, a people to the royal will. The rulers of Kushan were no doubt of this mind, and the building of the mammoth stone Buddhas would serve as a testament to the spiritual and political power of the state. It was a project born of faith and politics, state and religion.

In 2001, when the Taliban set their rocket launchers on the still, serene faces of the two Buddhas, the world stood up in outrage, aghast at the callous and wanton destruction of such valuable treasures of ancient human history. For many, it was further proof of the inhumanity of Afghanistan's Islamic rulers.

Wanton, yes! Inhuman, maybe. One has to remember that in 2001 Afghanistan was experiencing a severe drought, with thousands suffering from starvation. In March of that year, the New York Times reported that in the midst of famine-like conditions, a foreign delegation had offered money to renovate the Bamyan statues, and had refused to allocate a portion to relieve hunger. Outraged, the Taliban's clerics sealed the fate of the Bamyan Buddhas. Or did they?

Since the U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, a host of countries including Japan and Thailand have offered to rebuild the statues. Today teams of Afghans under the direction of a German architect and Italian engineers work to rebuild the two Buddhas. It strikes me as ironic since a century ago, it was Europeans who led in the looting of Afghanistan's cultural relics, bringing back the heads of stone and marble Buddhas to be put on display, a symbol of Europe's preeminence in all things, past and present. And yet it was exactly these stolen treasures that first introduced Westerners to the beauty and elegance of Afghanistan's Buddhist art. Which brings us back to Bamyan.

Bamyan's Buddhas stood in the midst of war, of oppression and religious fanaticism. Obscured by the dust and smoke of gunfire, they seemed a dim recollection of a more glorious period now far removed. One has to wonder, in light of this, what the symbolic significance of these two Buddhist statues can be for an Islamic country desperate to rebuild itself, and for the larger world which shares in a piece of the country's past and present. The destruction of these statues by the Taliban is certainly not the first time a government has attempted to erase history in order to create a new nation with a new ideology. And yet, as with the shards of the two Buddhas, history remains, broken but powerful.

An interesting feature of the two statues was their Greek influence, a reflection of the highly cosmopolitan world of the Silk Road. The statues were a blending of East and West. Today, as Europeans and Afghans work to reclaim the splendor of Bamyan piece by piece, painstakingly putting back together the fragments of a shattered past, perhaps the statues will symbolize a new Afghanistan, one that embraces a diverse and inspiring past, gazing, like the Buddha, at a more prosperous future. Copyright NAM
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History
Buddhas of Bamiyan
From TheBestLinks.com

One of the Buddhas of Bamiyan before destruction, AfghanistanThe Buddhas of Bamiyan were two monumental statues of standing Buddhas carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamiyan valley of central Afghanistan, situated 230 km northwest of Kabul at an altitude of 2500 meters. Most likely built in the fifth or sixth centuries, the statues represented a classic blending of Greek and Buddhist art. 

The main bodies were hewn directly from the sandstone cliffs, but details were modelled in mud mixed with straw, coated with a lime plaster called stucco. This coating, practically all of which was worn away long ago, was painted to enhance the expressions of the faces, hands and folds of the robes. The lower parts of the statues' arms were constructed from the same mud-straw mix while supported on wooden armatures. It is believed that the upper parts of their faces were made from great wooden masks, or casts. The rows of holes that can be seen in photographs were spaces that held wooden pegs which served to stabilize the outer stucco. 

Lying on the Silk Road linking China and India to the west, Bamiyan developed as a center of religion and philosophy and was the site of several Buddhist monasteries. The area is important for being where eastern and western cultures blended together to create new forms of Greco-Buddhist art. It was one of the major Buddhist centres from the second century up to the time that Islam entered the valley in the ninth century. Monks at the monasteries would reside as hermits in small caves carved into the side of cliffs along the Bamiyan valley. Many of these monks carved statuary in the caves. There were many statues of sitting and standing Buddas of different sizes along the face of the cliff, and many of the caves were decorated by the monks with elaborate and brightly-colored frescoes. The two most prominent statues were the giant, standing Buddhas, measuring 55 and 37 meters high respectively, the largest examples of standing Buddha carvings in the world. They were were cultural landmarks for many years, the site being listed among UNESCO's World Heritage Sites. 

Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hs?ang (Xuanzang) passed through the area around 630 AD and described Bamiyan as a flourishing Buddhist centre "with more than ten monasteries and more than a thousand monks", and he noted that both Buddha figures were "decorated with gold and fine jewels" (Wriggins, 1996). 
For more on history, click the history link above


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## Yrys (3 Jan 2007)

Thanks for sharing, I was one of the westerned that was outraged then.


from the second link :



> During the destruction, Taliban Information Minister Qudratullah Jamal lamented that,
> "this work of destruction is not as easy as people might think. You can't knock down the statues
> by shelling as both are carved into a cliff; they are firmly attached to the mountain."



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