Author: Holland Cotter
Publication: The New York Times
Date: March 3, 2001
The archaeological site of Bamiyan,
about 100 miles west of Kabul in Afghanistan, is set in a broad, flat valley
flanked by high stone cliffs. It's a place of open fields and sky, with
a long, rich history that scholars are just beginning to understand.
Some 1,500 years ago, the valley
was a busy node on the trade route between China and India, in a part of
Asia where languages and religions - Buddhism, Hinduism and, later, Islam
- coexisted. It was also home to a great Buddhist monastic centre, one
that nurtured epoch-changing religious concepts and produced a fantastic
new art, including the world's largest rock-carved figures of the standing
Buddha.
Changes of a violent nature may
be under way there now, since the Taliban decree to demolish pre-Islamic
religious images. Bamiyan, with its towering seventh-century Buddhas -
one nearly 175 feet tall, the other 120 feet - is a prime target, as it
has been in the past. (In 1998 a Taliban commander fired grenades at the
smaller figure, destroying its upper half.)
To scholars of Asian art, the destruction
of these Buddhas would be catastrophic. Apart from Bamiyan's rarity as
one of the few examples of monumental Buddhist sculpture, it holds a key
to countless questions about how Buddhism developed internally and shaped
or inflected virtually every culture in Asia.
At this point, basic facts about
its art -when it was made, for what purpose - are matter of debate, though
there is no question that it was an overwhelmingly ambitious undertaking.
The two large Buddhas were cut in
deep relief directly from the rock. The surrounding cliffs were honeycombed
with dozens of small caves, dug out either as monastic residences or for
rituals. Many caves, along with the niches around the Buddhas, were covered
with murals, now largely damaged or missing.
The art is a compendium of ancient
styles, from India, Persia and Gandhara, where Greco-Roman-inspired traditions
survived. For years the Buddhas were dated the fifth century and assumed
to be prototypes for rock-cut sculpture in China, notably in the caves
at Dunhuang.
But in 1989 the art historian Deborah
Klimburg-Salter persuasively argued a seventh-century date, nearly two
centuries later than Dunhuang. In a stroke, a neat, linear view of history
was complicated and refreshed.
Along with its stylistic dynamism,
Bamiyan reflects major shifts in Buddhism itself. For centuries, the Buddha
was revered as a human figure, but with time he came to be seen as a transcendent
being and icon.
The Bamiyan Buddhas catch this transition
in action. According to the art historians Susan and John Huntington, the
carvings represent a form of the Buddha known as Vairocana, in whom the
entire universe in encompassed, and in their stupendous scale, this immensity
is made literal.
The sculptures were originally painted
and gilded, their heads probably fitted with masks. The lack of facial
features on the sculptures is usually attributed to vandalism, but Ms.
Klimburg Salter suggests they were made that way to accommodate masks.
Visible from across the valley,
they must have been a visionary sight.
That sight is now retrievable only
when pieced together from material evidence. And evidence, at Bamiyan and
elsewhere in Afghanistan, may be going fast the fate of thousands of precious
objects in the Kabul Museum, one of the most important collections in Asia,
is unknown. Among its treasures are the priceless Begram ivories, pocket-size
carvings that in art-history terms have a weight as ponderous as the Bamiyan
colossi.
Voices of protest are raining down
on Afghanistan, though what would persuade the leaders to relent is impossible
to say.
History, maybe: Buddhism and Islam
have much in common; both were on-the-move religions, inclined to adapt
and to learn from other cultures.
Or maybe their own faith: "I do
not serve what you worship; nor do you serve what I worship. You have your
own religion, and I have mine." This terse statement of live-and-let-live
religious tolerance is from the Koran.
