The Bamyan Buddhas and their destruction by Niki2

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The Bamyan Buddhas and their destruction

POSTED BY: NIKI2
UPDATED: Thursday, February 4, 2010 12:37
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Thursday, February 4, 2010 12:37 PM

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Okay, so this got mentioned elsewhere and I can't resist sharing about it; it's a loss that hurt me deeply and they were once something wonderful, destroyed by bigotry of the Taliban.

They existed in the Valley of Bamyan (Bam-i-yan), in the center of Afghanistan. Bamyan Valley is lovely--even back then it was one of the few fertile places I ever saw. It’s high country…9,200 feet. In ancient times it lay directly in the path of the famous “Silk Road” the caravans travelled, so was a thriving center for religion, philosophy, and Indian art. It was a buddhist religious site from the 2nd century up to the time of the Islamic invasion in the 9th century. When we were there, Bamyan was a small town with a bazaar at its center. It had no infrastructure of electricity, gas, or water supplies. From what I hear, amazingly that hasn’t changed!

That’s the Hind Kush mountains in the distance. Bamyan was part of the Buddhist Kushan Empire in the early centuries of the Christian era. Monks at the monasteries lived as hermits in small caves carved into the side of the Bamyan cliffs. At one time, two thousand monks prayed in caves among the sandstone cliffs.

Many of these monks embellished their caves with religious statuary and elaborate, brightly-colored frescoes. Those still existed, tho' none complete or covering an entire cave, when we were there. But all the caves intersected, so you walked from one to another, and all the ceilings were blackened from the monks' fires of years of living there, the "ambience" if you will was really heavy.

The only one of the two bigger ones we visited was Salsal (the male)

Carved directly out of the mountainside, he stood 180 feet high, recessed into the mountain. To give you perspective of how big he actually was:

He was built in 554—think of that!—and was the largest standing statue of Buddha in the world. He was attached to the caves, and from one passageway you could step out onto the top of his head and look out over Bamyan Valley. Just a flat space maybe 15 feet wide and long, it was really dizzying. You can just make out the two people on the little ledge on the top of his head:

but the view was wonderful

His face was sliced off—supposedly by Ghengis Khan, who cut a swath through the area and left his usual bloody mark in the 12th centur, but I don’t think that’s known for a fact. Someone did, centuries ago, anyway.

When Mahmud of Ghazni attacked Afghanistan and part of west India in the 11th century, the destruction of the Buddhas and frescoes were beyond his understanding—not surprisingly, as he was famous for his appreciation of art and culture. Therefore he moved on to looting Buddhist monasteries and other important artifacts. Nader Shah of Iran fired cannons at the statues in the mid-1700s, but it was beyond his capabilities as well. Since then, the statues had remained largely untouched.

The alcove around his head was all decorated with frescoes

Given the time in history, how they did it all is beyond me, but it was sure impressive. His body was hewn directly from the sandstone cliffs, but details were modeled in mud mixed with straw, coated with 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. I wish I could have seen it then. The lower parts of the his arms were constructed from the same mud-straw mix while supported on wooden armatures. It is believed that the upper parts of his face was 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.

Then of course the Taliban blew it all up in 2001.

Until they were run out, Al Qaeda used the caves to store weapons. Since the destruction of the buddhas, the world’s earliest oil paintings have been discovered in caves behind the partially destroyed statues. Scientists from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility have confirmed that the oil paintings, probably of either walnut or poppy seed oil, are present in 12 of the 50 caves dating from the 5th to 9th century. Also, Afghan refugees escaping the persecution of the Taliban regime by hiding in caves in the Bamiyan valley, accidentally found a fantastic collection of Buddhist statues and jars having more than ten thousand fragments of ancient Buddhist manuscripts, a large part of which is now in the famous Schoyen collection. This has created a sensation among the scholars and the find has been compared with the discovery of the Christian Dead Sea Scrolls. I guess that’s the one good thing to come from their destruction, but I’m afraid I can’t see it that way.

There have been plans to rebuild them ever since nine months after their destruction. There is no scarcity of donors. Japan, China and other countries with large Buddhist populations have offered their help. Nobody expects it to be anything more than a representation of what once existed, of course, as history can’t be replaced.

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