Word: buddha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...There is nothing like these statues anywhere in the world. Bamiyan is located in a beautiful valley around 230 km northwest of Kabul. It was an important stop on the fabled Silk Road, and the two majestic Buddha statues were scooped out of the Hindu Kush mountains in such a way that anyone - merchants, soldiers, pilgrims - moving along the highway could view them from afar and pay homage. The ceilings above the Buddhas had beautiful painted images of the bodhisattvas and the Sun God, representing the Buddha as the source of light. The iconography was a mixture of Greek...
...candle-snuffers of Afghanistan's Taliban have destroyed, with heavy machine guns and mortars and other explosives, the two magnificent statues of Buddha, 125 feet and 175 feet tall, that have stood for centuries in Bamiyan, an oasis town on the Old Silk Road, in a long valley separating the chain of the Hindu Kush from the Koh-i-baba range...
...Here is the author Sally Wriggins' description, in her book "Xuanzang, a Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road," of what's been lost: "The first sight of the valley of the Great Buddha must have made weary travelers gasp - immense cliffs of a soft pastel color, and behind them indigo peaks dusted with snow, rising to a height of 20,000 feet. They saw the reddish cliffs in the cold, clear air; as they came closer, they could make out two gigantic statues of the Buddha standing in niches carved in the mountains. Closer still, they saw that...
...destruction of these Buddha statues, the Taliban leaders claim they are merely honoring the injunctions of sharia (Islamic law) against idolatry. Other Islamic governments protested. They joined most of civilized opinion in regarding the destruction as wanton and, from an Islamic theological point of view, unnecessary. The Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was immovable...
Heraclitus - "the obscure philosopher," the pre-Socratic thinker who was a contemporary 2,500 years ago of Confucius, Lao Tzu and the Buddha - is best known as the man who said that you cannot put your foot into the same river twice...