Centuries of Benevolence Fall Victim to the Blind

I read with great sadness the Taliban’s claim that they have already destroyed most of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and their boast that whatever remained would soon be gone. As a young child growing up in Calcutta, Afghanistan loomed large in my imagination. There was a kind of commune in our neighborhood where several itinerant Afghan traders lived. We called them Kabuliwallahs--literally, men from Kabul. One of them, an elderly man with a shapeless cloth bag and a black turban over his bald pate, would stop to watch as we played tag in the street. Sometimes he’d bring sweets wrapped in cellophane.

Young as I was, I knew that my friend the Kabuliwallah came from the land of the Khyber Pass, where everyone was so brave and warlike that the British had never quite managed to subjugate them. My grandmother sometimes bought asafoetida and saffron from him. The best walnuts, the choicest dried fruit, the rarest spices sold in Calcutta came out of the cloth bags that were an integral part of the Kabuliwallah garb, along with loose trousers and long shirts. At least, that’s what we children always believed.

My Kabuliwallah had disappeared from the neighborhood by the time I read of the early history of Buddhism in school. Perhaps he finally saved enough money to retire from the arduous life that brought him across Pakistan and the Gangetic plains of India to Calcutta several months a year. Fickle as I was, I never thought of him as I read of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Our textbook said the taller Bamiyan Buddha topped 175 feet. There couldn’t have been more than a couple of buildings that high in all of Calcutta in the 1970s. My mother pointed out the tallest to me the next time we passed it. So that was how tall the giant statue was!

But how did they carve it out of sandstone cliffs some 1,500 years ago? It must have been a labor of love, my mother had explained, with dozens of artisans working simultaneously. Later, as I read more about them, I realized that sculpting Buddha figures is also an act of piety for the faithful. In fact, the hills around the Bamiyan Buddhas are honeycombed with caves that have frescoes and carvings depicting incidents from the Buddha’s life. Some of the larger caves must have taken decades to carve out and decorate. The Bamiyan Buddhas themselves represent lifetimes worth of human endeavor.

Buddhism spread to Afghanistan under Ashoka, the great Maurya emperor who united most of what is now northern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Having established his empire by war he turned to the teachings of the Buddha to maintain peace and bring prosperity; Ashokan edicts survive to this day, hewn into rocks along the margins of his kingdom.

The Bamiyan Valley lay on the fabled Silk Route. Merchants from China and Greece crossed ways with those from India. No one quite knows when the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan came into being, perhaps as early as the 1st century AD.

They remained a benevolent presence in the valley even after Afghanistan converted to Islam in the 9th century. Over time, the caves around the figures were vandalized by iconoclasts, but the massive statues remained relatively unharmed. Time robbed them of their outer layers, but they were still beautiful.

In 1221, Genghis Khan, the legendary Mongol warrior, tried to destroy the larger statue, apparently as an attempt to avenge the death of his grandson Mutugen during the invasion of the Islamic city of Bamiyan. Centuries later, one of his descendants, Aurangzeb, damaged the statues in his crusade against the Indian sub-continent’s pre-Islamic past.

Now the Taliban seem bent upon destroying the hapless statues. They are armed with grenades, tanks, dynamite. As Mawlawi Qudratullah Jamal, the Taliban’s minister of information and culture, has said with no apparent sense of irony, “It is easier to destroy than to build.”

Travelers to ancient India left accounts of a prosperous land where no one ever starved, where slavery was unknown and where kings had fabulous wealth.

The peaceful teachings of the Buddha brought with them the added bonus of prosperity. As business flourished, grateful traders funded Buddhist monasteries and art. It is not difficult to imagine grateful merchants in Bamiyan giving money to carve images of the Buddha that would be visible from all over the valley. The statues were reminders of the benevolence of the Buddha, to whose message of peace they owed their wealth.

When Genghis Khan tried to destroy them, he was still a nomad at heart, with no idea that power could be enjoyed in any way other than through plunder. Later, the tribes and kingdoms he had vanquished taught him the uses of writing, trade, taxation, agriculture and cities.

Today, the wheel seems to have come full circle for the two Buddhas of Bamiyan. Power over their existence is again in the hands of those blind to the uses of peace, liberty, art, culture, beauty--everything but their own blinkered view of Islam.

The Afghans were once known for their liberal brand of Islam. This makes it doubly tragic that all that is likely to remain of the Buddhas of Bamiyan are bits of broken rock in the midst of the desert. The Buddha, after all, never proclaimed, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Rather, he said, have karuna on all beings, have pity, empathy.

Soon nothing besides that will remain. Round the decay of those colossal wrecks, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands will stretch far away.