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Buddhistdoor View: The Case for Rebuilding the Bamiyan Buddhas to Their Original Glory

By Buddhistdoor | | Buddhistdoor Global

After a long and difficult journey across the precipices and through the blizzards of the Tian Shan mountain ranges, Xuanzang (fl. c. 602–64) finally reached the town of Bamiyan in modern-day Afghanistan. His celebrated pilgrimage to India was one of astonishing tenacity, aided by the protection of bodhisattvas from the forces of nature, and on this leg of his journey Xuanzang arrived in a valley separating the Hindu Kush from its western extension, the Koh-i-baba. The residents of Bamiyan, according to the Chinese monk, wore furs and rough woolen clothes, and made a living growing spring wheat, flowers, and fruit, and herding cows, horses, and sheep. The people had coarse, uncultivated manners, but Xuanzang admired their simple and sincere religious faith, which they expressed by carving two colossal Buddha images into the rocky northeastern hill overlooking their settlements (a third reclining Buddha recorded in Xuanzang’s journal has yet to be found). It is not known when the affectionately bestowed nicknames for the larger Buddha, Salsal (“light shines throughout the universe”), and Shamama (“Queen Mother”) for the smaller image, came into use. Historian Mahmud ibn Wali of Balkh (b. c. 1004 or 1095) wrote in his hagiography Bahr al-Asrar: “One cannot believe that there were made by human hands.” Frédéric Bobin of Le Monde put it quite well: “For 15 centuries the two mystic colossi gazed down as the trading caravans and warring armies streamed past. Monks came from China to worship here. Others meditated in nearby caves.” (The Guardian) Until they were desecrated and destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, the Bamiyan Buddhas inspired Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim observers alike, with one mullah (who no doubt represented the tolerant Islamic community in Bamiyan) lamenting, “The statues symbolised Bamiyan.” (The Guardian) The Alliance for the Restoration of Cultural Heritage (ARCH)* supports full restoration of the Bamiyan Buddhas and has carried out a rigorous study of eight options for rebuilding them. This is a proposal that makes many conservators at UNESCO blanch. It was UNESCO that declared in 2011 that the statues would be best remembered by their absence. “The two niches should be left empty, like two pages in Afghan history, so that subsequent generations can see how ignorance once prevailed in our country,” said Zamaryalai Tarzi, a Franco-Afghan archaeologist. (The Guardian) This is the dominant school of conservation at Bamiyan, which has been the victim of continuous political wrangling from different organizations and experts. Official UNESCO policy is based on the 1964 Venice Charter, which demands that “original material” be used for the conservation and restoration of monuments and sites, and if this rule is disregarded, there is the threat of UNESCO striking the site off its World Heritage List.

However, after a long dialogue with ARCH and consulting Professor S. Frederick Starr, a distinguished expert on Eurasian affairs and history, we also believe that there is a sound rationale for full restoration. The hesitation to reconstruct the images betrays a Eurocentric prejudice that has dominated UNESCO for too long, and ARCH’s report argues that a full restoration of the Buddha images would go a long way to restoring the faith of many people in the organization’s professedly unbiased assessment protocol, such as that of Michael Petzet of the German branch of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), who has made multiple statements in support of rebuilding at least Shamama. Lauren Bursey argued in 2014 that the Afghan administration felt that rebuilding the statues would be a symbolic triumph over the Taliban, and that Afghans saw not doing so as depriving future generations of the opportunity to see them. The Eurocentric perspective is also evident in the priorities given to the nine criteria that UNESCO uses to determine a site or monument’s heritage value: design, material, workmanship, setting, traditions, techniques, language, intangible heritage, and spirit and feeling. The first three clearly betray a preference for “objectivity” based on the rationalist values of European art. At the end of the day, rationalism alone cannot reflect the non-material values of a Buddhist site: in Asia (the continent to which these carvings belonged before they were destroyed) building materials are often more transient, such as wood, unbaked clay, or stucco that formed the Buddhas’ robes. The role of a locale for ritual purposes and its ties to antiquity or a meaningful event are much more important than the question of whether a commemorative or ritual structure, or its components, are “original.” While the Buddhas at Bamiyan were made primarily from stone, it is their location, in the heart of old Bactria and at the crossroads of civilizations such as the Hellenic world, old India, and China, that makes even the blasted cavities of the destroyed statues holy.