Making A Difference

Bodhi's Third Avatar

Archaeologists believe they have found the site of a giant reclining Buddha at Bamiyan

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Bodhi's Third Avatar
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Outlook
National Geographic
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Today the empty niches still inspire awe, with the outline of the smaller Buddha clearly visible. Opinion is still divided on whether the Buddhas should be rebuilt. Today, it would be impossible to carve them out of the same cliff face; and to build new images and instal them there would not recreate the aura and magnificence of the originals. "They just would not have the same feeling," says Afghan deputy minister of culture, Omar Sultan. A proposal to recreate the images using laser beams, as has been suggested for the Twin Towers site in New York, is being given serious consideration.

For now, the most urgent task is to consolidate the fragile, crumbling cliffs, further weakened by the dynamiting carried out by the Taliban. The last restoration was done in the '60s and '70s by the Archaeological Survey of India, which had repaired and strengthened the Buddhas, the cliff face, cornices and balconies. Today, Georgios Toubekis, an architect with ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites), has the task of collecting and preserving the fragments of the destroyed Buddhas—some of them as large as boulders—and consolidating the surface of the cliffs, in a major project funded by Japan and Germany.

Bamiyan's cliffs are also honeycombed with caves, many of them with exquisite paintings executed by Indian and Persian artists during the Hepthalite period. Some 80 per cent of these have been destroyed over the centuries through neglect, theft and destruction, but those that remain are now being carefully preserved and protected. The people of Bamiyan are Hazaras, an ethnic and religious minority who are Shias of Mongol-Turkic origin, believed to be descended from the 'hazaar'—the thousand soldiers Genghis Khan left behind here after conquering the region. Among the poorest and most backward communities in Afghanistan, they are counting on the third Buddha to emerge from the sands of time, and usher in a tourism boom that will bring Bamiyan the development and prosperity it so desperately needs.

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