The Sleeping Buddha of Bamiyan...

There was a fascinating tv program on Afghanistan by National Geographic the other day. I was just devastated when I saw the annihilation of Buddhas that had been carved into the Bamiyan hills overlooking its beautiful valley by the now ousted Taliban.

The Taliban had established themselves and their extremely fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. Their horrid interpretation of Islam and the subsequent distortion of the Koran's lessons led to the repression of the Afghan people. Westerners became aware of the plight of Afghan women in the 1990s. This started to highlight the Taliban's extremist views which condoned the mutilation or murder of anyone in the name of their god. Among other things, the Taliban also believed it sinful for art to imitate life.

Blindly destroying anything they could find that might serve as a representation of life today or in the past amounted to nothing short of an almost successful erasure of thousands of years of history and culture captured within the art of the Afghans.

I was mesmerized by Zemaryalai Tarzi, an exiled Afghan archaeologist's quest to find the Sleeping Buddha of Bamiyan. It is highly probably that he might already have found the beginnings of a foot to this statue, which could be over 1,000 foot long.

Referenced in the writings of a Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang almost 1400 years ago (630A.D.) Tarzi is convinced he has found the location of an enormous and ancient monastery where Xuanzang claimed to have seen the awe-inspiring sleeping Buddha during his pilgrimage on the Silk Road.

Tarzi will be returning to Bamiyan the summer of 2005 to continue with the excavation. I cannot wait to see what he will unearth!