Word: buddha
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...theory has it that the reclining statue may be entombed within the actual mountainside, in a long chamber whose entrances were sealed up long ago, when the first Islamic invaders swept into the valley. But most archaeologists believe that the Buddha was out in the open and later buried either by an earthquake or the crumbling sandstone cliff above it. Either way, it has apparently been saved from the Taliban's predations centuries later. Jean-FranCois Jarrige, director of the Guimet Museum of Asiatic Art in Paris, was in Bamiyan recently, walking gingerly along a path cleared in the minefield...
...pilgrim Xuanzang, usually an exacting chronicler, is maddeningly vague about the reclining Buddha's specific location. Reading his account and others of the same period, scholars are certain that the statue lies between the niches of the two destroyed Buddhas, a distance of nearly 800 meters. The last recorded sighting of the reclining Buddha, according to Paiman, was by a 10th century Indian historian. After that, the gigantic Buddha seems to have vanished as if by a magician's conjuring trick...
...should archaeologists let the sleeping Buddha lie? That question is vexing both Afghan and foreign experts who treat the existence of this Buddha with the kind of fretful confidentiality usually associated with state nuclear secrets. Some archaeologists worry that an excavated statue could become a target of a restored Taliban-like regime. Says Paul Bucherer-Dietschi of the Afghan Museum in Exile, near Basel: "There's no way we could possibly protect the site." Bucherer-Dietschi worries about looters as well. At the bidding of Pakistani antiquities smugglers, he says, the Taliban trucked off chunks of the two standing Buddhas...
...Other scholars want the Buddha brought to light. More than anything right now, they say, Afghans need the Buddha unearthed as symbolic proof that the Taliban weren't able to eradicate all of the country's rich, pre-Islamic heritage. The country is a historian's treasure trove. Between the 3rd and 8th centuries, Afghanistan experienced a fusion of Greek, Persian and Indian cultures. The Bamiyan statues, for example, showed traces of Greek influence, as if the sculptors had stolen the robes off Apollo, the Greek sun god, to drape their enormous Buddhas. "There's a cultural void left...
...Digging up the Buddha is a forbidding task. The Russians, followed by the Afghan mujahedin fighters and then the Taliban, all planted land mines on the high cliffs above the colossal Buddhas, and rain and erosion have brought hundreds of these deadly devices tumbling into the valley. Dozens of Afghan de-mining experts are combing the slopes with their metal detectors, trying to avert more casualties. The mines are a particular hazard to the families of Hazara refugees whose villages were razed by the Taliban and who now shelter in the honeycomb of cliff caves once used by meditating Buddhist...