Word: buddha
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...Many archaeologists and scholars agree that a third Buddha exists in Bamiyan?and that it escaped the Taliban's idol-busting spree. It's a whopper; this Buddha is believed to measure up to 200 m long (the upright ones were just 55 m and 38 m high). According to meticulous records kept by Xuanzang, a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim who trekked to Bamiyan in the 7th century, the Buddha is shown reclining?and dying; freed from his body, he achieves nirvana, or enlightenment...
...that wretched day in January 2001, Hussain found some small consolation in his secret. He is convinced that just a few meters away from where the Taliban were war dancing lies a third, giant Buddha hidden beneath the earth, wearing a blissful smile, unperturbed by the terrible destruction that turned his two sturdy companions into shimmering billows of sand. Hussain gestures to a cratered, rocky slope beside an ochre cliff face where the pair of 1,700-year-old Buddhas were blasted away by several hundred kilos of TNT. "Our Hazara ancestors have always known that there's another Buddha...
...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...