Lets Destroy The Bamiyan Buddhas!

http://atimes.com/ind-pak/CC22Df01.html

According to Kacem Fazelly, an ex-professor of Law at Kabul University, ``the destruction of the statues is also a consequence of a strategic manipulation. The Pakistani military want to get rid of Afghanistan`s cultural, historic, and above all Persian past. They want to get rid of its cultural mix so there is no more national Afghan thinking, nor resistance toward a Pakistani takeover of the country.``



THE ROVING EYE

How a thief saved the Buddhas from Taliban

Story: Pepe Escobar

Pictures: Jason Florio

Picture 1: The shack that houses the Bamiyan collection

Picture 2: Saved sculpture

Picture 3: Saved sculpture

Picture 4: Part of a frieze

``Oh, I have Buddhas from Bamiyan.``

The news - as cool, calm and collected as a Taliban rocket launch - took a while to sink in. The Cousin of the Mine King of Baluchistan was still smiling. I had just crossed Afghanistan overland from east to west, from the Pakistan border at Landi Kotal to the Iranian border at Islam Qillah. With my photographer, we were the first Western journalists to undertake this gruelling marathon in quite a while - as NGO workers in Afghanistan themselves acknowledged.

We had been in Quetta, frontier capital of the Pakistani side of Baluchistan, for only a few hours. In Afghanistan, we had been arrested (twice), menaced with a trial by a military court, accused of being ``UN spies``. We were exhausted, and as far as Bamiyan was concerned, frustrated. Taliban officials in Kabul had denied us a visa to visit Bamiyan, allegedly for ``security reasons``. I live in Buddhist Thailand. Apart from trying to understand what makes a madrassa * worldview tick at the beginning of the third millennium, I had always longed to see the Bamiyan Buddhas.

But we never made it to Bamiyan. Instead, Bamiyan came to us.

At the Quetta Serena Hotel - a plush compound straight from Santa Fe, New Mexico - the Cousin of the Mine King showed up in style: chauffeur-driven in a Toyota Hi-Lux. This could only foment our paranoia: Toyotas Hi-Lux constitute the entire Taliban motorized force, and when we were arrested by the religious police in Kabul stadium in the middle of a soccer match for (not) taking photos, we were taken to interrogation in the back seat of a Toyota Hi-Lux. But the Cousin of the Mine King had other plans.

``Let`s go meet some nomads.``

A few hours later, we are in a tent sipping tea with a family of Baluchistan borderland nomads. Compared to the destitute Ghazni nomads we had seen in Afghanistan, fleeing from the worst drought in the last 30 years, these ones are positively deluxe. The head of the family promptly says he is about to offer 300,000 rupees (US$5,046) as downpayment for a brand new Hi-Lux. He also tries to sell us a falcon: customers from the Arab Emirates are supposed to buy them for as much as 1 million rupees.

The head nomad reveals himself to be an Afghan trader in the Punjab. His take on Afghanistan is extremely self-assured: the Taliban are falling apart, and the country has now split into three factions. All of them are responsible for the widespread destruction.

Back in Quetta, after the nomad warm-up, we are taken through a mud-brick labyrinth to a house in the middle of a desert wasteland. Kids swarm in the dusty ``streets``. One of them disappears inside a shack and emerges with a statue. And another. And then another. We are now contemplating the private collection of the Cousin of the Mine King. It features astonishing Greco-Buddhist boddhisattvas * *, Hellenic arhats * * * with their ribs protruding, and even part of a frieze. Some could be 3rd or 4th Century, some even older. They are all pre-Bamiyan Buddhas.

The Cousin of the Mine King is naturally evasive. He would love to sell his collection to a Western museum - but can`t get it out of the country. The Guimet Museum of Asian Arts in Paris, recently reopened after lavish restoration work worth $50 million, would kill for this ``private collection``. He ``obtained most of the statues from the Bamiyan valley``. Some of them ``came from the Kabul museum``. The methods were effective: ``We just went there and took them.``

With the boddhisattvas still on our minds, the Cousin of the Mine King takes us to meet the Great Man himself. We are ushered into his living room, decorated with a silk qom almost the size of a tennis court and worth the GDP of whole Afghan provinces. The Mine King is a Baluchi from the borderlands - a member of the Sanjirani tribe. He controls coal, onyx, marble and granite mines. And he gets straight to the point.

``Afghanistan is a tribal society. We should leave it like that.`` For him, the only solution for the country would be the return of King Zahir Shah: ``But that was already proposed in the early `90s. Now it`s too late.`` The Mine King regards the Taliban as ``very nice people``. But he worries about the future, considering the vast amount of weapons in the country: ``If there is a total collapse in Afghanistan, the ashes will be coming straight to Pakistan.``

The Mine King waves us goodbye, dreaming of enjoying New York City nightlife. That was a few months ago. Today, somewhere in the wasteland outskirts of Quetta, a few Afghan Buddhas are still sleeping half-buried in the sand. They escaped the fate of the Bamiyan Buddhas, bombed to ashes by the Taliban. But as the Mine King himself remarked, these ashes, brought by the winds, headed straight into Pakistan.

According to Kacem Fazelly, an ex-professor of Law at Kabul University, ``the destruction of the statues is also a consequence of a strategic manipulation. The Pakistani military want to get rid of Afghanistan`s cultural, historic, and above all Persian past. They want to get rid of its cultural mix so there is no more national Afghan thinking, nor resistance toward a Pakistani takeover of the country.``

A new geopolitical Great Game is in play in Central Asia. The Taliban are just some of the minor players. They can obliterate Buddhist art that predates Islam itself. But Buddhism teaches us that everything is impermanent. Impermanence: a few months ago the Cousin of the Mine King would have been accused of being a thief; now, he can be seen as a man who saved a significant part of the world`s heritage from the Taliban`s orgy of destruction. And more impermanence: considering Central Asian volatility, the bombers themselves, sooner or later, could be reduced to ashes in the new Great Game.

*Madrassa: an Islamic religious school.

* *Boddhisattva: One who delays final enlightenment and attainment of Nirvana in order to pass his wisdom on to others. A fully compassionate being.

* * *Arhat: One who has attained Nirvana.

Much has been said against or in favour of Taliban, on the premises of respecting cultural heritage, religion, etc. All this is bullshit. Western countries r as dumb as Talibans r. Many ppl fail to understand the real factors behind this incident.

To me, the psychology of a neglected child seems to be at work: the child wants attention, and nobody gives a damn, so he starts throwing things here and there in the hope that the people, out of concern for ``these things``, would try to take care of the child. Simply speaking, ``Attention deficit disorders``. Nothing to do with Islam and Hindu or Budhist heritage.



Taliban has done its ``best`` to be accepted by the world as a legitimate power in Afghanistan. But for some reasons (not to speak of revival of medieval history), nobody has accepted them except the governments who installed them in Afghanistan thru their monetary and military power: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. It is this frustration that is driving Talinab crazy. But China was also not accepted either by the west, and we did not see chairman Mao play havoc with other civilizations and religions. What they did in the name of cultural revolution was for the perceived sake of their red revolution, and not to draw western attention.



So what can be done: Better ask a child psychologist rather than foreign policy experts, as we are dealing with rationalized abnormal behavour here. But my two cents: Leave Taliban alone in the confines of steep hills of strong rocks, ignorance, and sadistic derive for self-destruction. Maybe it is too late for psychotherapy.

Digging Into a Buddha Rivalry

By Guy Gugliotta

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, April 23, 2001; Page A07

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50432-2001Apr22.html

He was born in a tiny town called Lumbini, in what is now southern Nepal. He could both walk and speak at birth. He told his mother that he had come to relieve the world of all suffering.

He was called Siddhartha -- ``he who has attained his goals`` -- and lived in the city of Kapilavastu until he was 29, when he left home to seek his destiny as the Buddha -- ``the Enlightened One`` -- founder of one of the world`s great religions.

For decades Nepal and India have argued over the location of ancient Kapilavastu, with each nation claiming the city for its own. Now, two archaeologists from England`s University of Bradford have presented new evidence that Kapilavastu is modern Tilaurakot, a Nepalese town about 130 miles west of Kathmandu.

In a 13-foot-deep trench beneath a swatch of gentle woodland, Bradford`s Robin Coningham and Armin Schmidt over the past three years have unearthed artifacts demonstrating that the site was inhabited during the Buddha`s lifetime and perhaps even earlier.

The key, Coningham said, was pieces of ceramic painted greyware, used in South Asia between the 9th and 6th centuries B.C. The Buddha is generally recognized to have lived between the 7th and 5th centuries B.C.

``The site is clearly right at the center of the Buddhist holy land,`` Coningham said in an interview. ``It`s the only fortified site, it`s the only urban site around and there are no rivals in the region.``

In fact, however, there has been a rival for 30 years -- the Indian town of Pipprahawa, about 600 yards south of the Nepal border and four miles from Tilaurakot. There, in 1972, archaeologists digging beneath a Buddhist monument, known as a stupa, found a casket containing human remains and coins bearing the legend: ``Here is the vihara [monastery] of the monk of Kapilavastu.``

At that time, Tilaurakot`s reputation was in eclipse, because Indian archaeologists had failed to find artifacts contemporary with the Buddha there, and therefore deemed the site too modern to be Kapilavastu.

The Bradford discoveries, resulting from deeper and more extensive digging, will bring Tilaurakot firmly back into the competition. But they are not likely to settle an argument in which nationalism and the quest for tourist dollars ultimately play as large a role as science.

For although Nepal has charged that the earlier Indian work was politically motivated, India will likely say the same now, because the Bradford excavation was financed through the Nepalese government by the United Nations` World Heritage preservation program.

Coningham said that his team, led by Nepal`s chief archaeologist, Kosh Acharya, will recommend that Tilaurakot be put on the World Heritage list, but would have done so anyway, because the site ``represents the best preserved provincial urban hinterland in South Asia.``

Pipprahawa, by contrast, is ``clearly a monastic site,`` he added, and suggested that the inscribed coins could have been sent from another monastery, either as a gift or as relics from a ``mother monastery`` to one of several satellites.

Still, although the weight of evidence may have shifted in Tilaurakot`s direction, it has not tipped the balance. ``There are all sorts of problems like this, whenever you start dealing with prehistoric sites,`` said Nancy Wilkie, a Carleton College archaeologist and president of the Archaeological Institute of America. ``Even finding greyware, and even with a radiocarbon date -- all it will prove is that there is another site that is a potential candidate.``

The search for Kapilavastu began in the late 1800s after archaeologists unearthed a stone pillar erected in Lumbini in 249 B.C. by the Indian Emperor Ashoka to commemorate the Buddha`s birthplace.

European scholars subsequently surveyed the region in an attempt to match its contemporary geography with early accounts of the Buddha`s life, and with the journeys of the Chinese monks who traveled to Kapilavastu in the 4th and 7th centuries A.D.

The westerners found little help on site, because Buddhism had all but disappeared from an area that had become ``a buffer zone between the Nepali state and the[British] Raj,`` Coningham said. ``It was very much a wilderness. There were tigers there.``

And although the monks` stories differed, the scholars nevertheless concluded that Tilaurakot was Kapilavastu, in part because it was an urban site in a rural area. The Buddha`s father, Shuddhodana Gautama, was a warrior chieftain wealthy enough to move his son among three luxurious palaces during his upbringing.

Bradford`s Schmidt described Tilaurakot today as a section of ``lovely green`` wooded lowland about 500 yards long and 250 yards wide. ``It is surrounded by a shallow moat and covered with trees, with rice paddies all around,`` Schmidt said.

There is an intact gate on the western side of the site and fired brick walls, he added, but all of this is from a ``later phase`` of occupation. The inhabitants of the Buddha`s time built their structures of wood.

When the Buddha died, perhaps in 483 B.C., no central religious authority was established. Instead, the Buddha`s disciples radiated across South Asia to spread his teachings, said Boston College theologist John J. Makransky, and ``the whole history of Buddhism has been one of diversity.``

Ashoka was instrumental in the early spread of Buddhism, but its prominence in countries ranging from Tibet to China, Indonesia, Vietnam and Japan was cemented by pilgrims and monks traveling to the Far East along the ``Silk Road,`` during the first millennium A.D.

It was also during this period, between 200 A.D. and 400 A.D., when followers in what is now the Afghan city of Bamian sculpted the two giant Buddhas that were destroyed last month by the Muslim fundamentalist Taliban government.

Buddhism in southern Nepal and India was all but wiped out in the 12th century when Muslims sacked the monasteries across the holy land. Although a partial recovery has occurred in India in the past century, the theological tradition -- and its archaeological embodiment -- are largely subject to the interpretation of foreigners.

``In most countries, the mythological importance of [Kapilavastu] has been replaced by that of their own sites,`` said Makransky, who is a Buddhist. But defining Kapilavastu`s location ``will have significance`` for world Buddhists, because ``to the degree that people agree that it is here or there, it confers legitimacy on the mythology.``

Thus far, there is little indication that the dispute is over. India has long conducted tours to Pipprahawa, and last year Coningham said at least 1,500 pilgrims visited the dig at Tilaurakot during the six weeks he was working there, among them several monks who scooped handfuls of clay to take with them.

``It`s very different when you`re dealing with sites that aren`t purely of academic interest,`` Coningham said. ``They are alive: People are interested in them not merely for their ceramic sequences, but for their significance. It made me a lot more aware.``

© 2001 The Washington Post Company