Word: buddha
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...mile of soft-stone cliff is honeycombed with caves, many of them bearing ancient Buddhist wall paintings dating back to around the 4th to the 5th century A.D. The core of this already much defaced religious center, as it once was, consists of two gigantic standing figures of Buddha, recessed into the cliffs sometime between the 3rd and 6th centuries. The larger of them is 175 ft. high--purportedly the biggest standing Buddha in the world. On Saturday, a spokesman for Mohammed Omar claimed to the Associated Press that soldiers using explosives had "destroyed 80% of the statues. There...
Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived and wrote 2,500 years ago--around the same time as Confucius, Lao Tzu and the Buddha--is best known as the man who said you cannot put your foot into the same river twice...
Pilgrims, travelers and conquerors from the 3rd century A.D. onwards have marveled at the two towering Buddha statues of Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan. Hewn from sandstone cliffs, these two giants, 53 m and 35 m high, are a fusion of Classical Greek and Indian art that flourished along the ancient Silk Road. Despite their massive size, the standing Buddhas possess an ethereal lightness. It's as if they managed to levitate above a millennium of warfare and calamity that has plagued Afghanistan, at least until the fiercely Islamic Taliban rulers fixed the Buddhas in their gun-sights...
...Kabul Ignoring international protests by governments, religious leaders and archaeologists, Taliban forces fanned out across Afghanistan to begin destroying all statues, including ancient works of art that the hard-line government contends violate the tenets of Islam, which forbids the worship of images. Two huge 5th century depictions of Buddha, carved into a mountainside in Bamiyan, west of Kabul, are among the works being destroyed. Iran, ruled by Islamic clergy, and Pakistan, Afghanistan's closest ally, joined the protests...
...Afghanistan's Taliban destroyed ancient Buddha statues because...