--from the Peony archives
I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing the moment I learned that the Taliban had blown up the Buddhist statues of Bamyan.
Sitting in the backseat of a car in Los Angeles, we were stopped at a traffic light. The radio news mentioned it, but conversation in the car continued on-- I don't think anyone noticed or was even really listening.
Even though they had been firing rockets at the statues for months, still it was a shock to hear that the statues had been completely destroyed-- that the statues no longer existed.
How could they actually have gone through with it? I thought.
Although their destruction came as a shock, in fact the two statues had been practically tortured to death after months of rocket fire, canon fire, machine gun volleys and weeks of dynamiting.
The Japanese had been working furiously behind the scenes when the Taliban first made their intentions known to the world. Working with UNESCO and several Muslim governments, even their concentrated effort could not stop what was to be. Years later, my Japanese friends still bring it up.
You see, the Japanese are the world's great antiquarians, and they above most people find it impossible to grasp why anyone would want to destroy those priceless statues which towered up against the sandstone cliffs for 1300 years in what is called one of the world's most beautiful high-altitude valleys.
So important were these statues that rather than taking the direct route straight to India, the venerable Xuanzang himself walked an extra thousand miles or so just to see them.
Sally Hovey Wriggins in her book, The Silk Road with Xuanzang, describes the monk's first sight of the famed statues:
Xuanzang's caravan prevailed against blizzards, mountain gods, and robbers and finally approached Bamiyan, an oasis town in the center of a long valley separating the chain of the Hindu Kush from that of the Koh-i-baba range...The first sight of the Great Buddha must have made the weary travelers gasp.-- immense cliffs of a soft pastel color and behind them indigo peaks dusted with snow, rising to a height of 22,000 feet. They saw reddish cliffs in the cold, clear air; as they came closer, they could make out two gigantic statues of the Buddha standing in niches carved in the mountain. Closer still, they saw the two colossal figures were colored and glistening with ornaments; the smaller wore blue, the larger one red, and their faces and hands were gilded.
Once painted blue and carmine, they were as famous for their extravagant colors as they were for their size.
Carmine and ultramarine.
My friend Makiko writes of the aquamarine pigment of Kizil.
The color was so splendidly used in the Buddhist cave murals at Kizil that the leader of the German team, Albert von Le Coq, who was to discover and haul back much from the site to Germany, was stunned. Stumbling upon the cave temples in what was by that time the middle of nowhere, imagine his surprise to discover murals of such beauty that he described them to be "the finest in all of Turkestan." And, his first impression was of the astounding beauty of the blue pigment used in the paintings decorating the cave walls. He wrote,
“…the extravagant use of a brilliant blue – the well-known ultramarine which, in the time of Benvenuto Cellini was frequently employed by the Italian painters, and was bought at double its weight in gold."
As Le Coq explains, this ultramarine pigment was the same blue so beloved of the Renaissance painters, which was actually made from ground up lapis lazuli, mined not all that far from Bamyan itself.
Victoria Finlay, in her breathtaking book, Color: A Natural History of the Palette, begins her chapter on blue with these words:
One Day many years ago somebody told me that all the true ultramarine paint in the world came from one mine in the heart of Asia.
It's true, it seems that all the ultramarine paint in the world was painstakingly derived from the lapis lazuli rocks mined from one place in northeast Afghanistan. Located not far from Bamyan, from there, donkeys transported the expensive pigment in rough sacks over mountain ranges East to Central Asia and beyond, and West to Venice and beyond.
In Europe, the precious pigment was so expensive that it was worth more than gold, and the legendary painters of the Renaissance were forced to wait till their patrons provided them the pigment before they could apply the heavenly blue to Mary's robes (for by this time the color was symbolic of Mary). Finlay says in today's money, a pound would cost about $3000. The color is truly heavenly-- just look at the Wilton Diptych-- shown left. That is all lapis lazuli from the Sar-e-sang mine in Afghanistan.
Le Coq was with good reason stunned to see the precise same shade being used in the cave paintings of Kizil-- the famed ultramarine of the Renaissance. Le Coq was surprised not only by it being present this far East, but also by the abundant use of the extremely costly pigment
Lying in the dead center of the Silk Road, Bamyan was long famous for being a conduit between East and West. And in addition to the mineral pigment themselves, it was recently discovered that nestled around the great statues in the caves were mural paintings which are the oldest example of oil-based pigment in the world.
Part of the ancient kingdom of Gandhara, the art of the region has had a tremendous influence on the artistic traditions to both the East and the West-- and as Makiko pointed out to me the other day, Gandhara (like Dunhuang) was only discovered in approximately the last hundred years.
また、ガンダーラや敦煌は、いずれも19世紀末～２０世紀初頭に発見された、いわば目新しい美術作品であるということも、人気を博した理由の一つではないでしょうか。敦煌は、小説家の井上靖氏が『敦煌』という名の小説を書いています。また、ガンダーラは、1970～80年代にダイゴという音楽グループが「ガンダーラ」というタイトルの印象的な歌を歌って、大ヒットしました。
"The discoveries of Dunhuang and Gandhara were after all only first uncovered at the end of the 19th century-early 20th century, and so were therefore relatively new artistic discoveries-- which could account for part of their popularity in Japan. There was the novel by Inoue and also in the 70s and 80s the band Godiego came out with song, Gandhara, which was a huge hit."
As I have written before, Japan has been in its "silk road boom" the entire time I have lived here, and Gandharan art is without a doubt one important part of the package.
An astonishing amalgamation of Hellenistic culture with Indian Buddhism, woven in with elements from Persia and many of the other artistic traditions of the silk road, the art of Gandhara is one of the glorious by-products of the silk road.
(See this you-tube video "Gandhara Art" )
Known broadly as Greco-Buddhist art, the style originated in what were the Greek colonies of Alexander the Great-- isn't that amazing?
And because prior to Gandharan art, Buddhism-- like Islam-- was iconoclastic, it was forbidden to create images of the Buddha-- so there existed no Buddhist figurative sculpture prior to Greco-Buddhist art. In Gandhara, what with that Greek tradition (it was probably in their blood), the first Buddhist statues were created-- and surprise, surprise, the Buddha incredibly resembled Apollo, Adonis and Hercules. As the first real Buddhist sculpture, it was to define the canon of Buddhist art for centuries to come. Indeed, this sculptural tradition would have tremendous impact as faraway as Japan (by way of the oasis kingdoms in the desert).
***
We are reminded by the experts not to forget that along with these Buddhas, 2000 sculptures in what was left of the Kabul Museum were also smashed. So much has been lost. And now what?
A Japanese artist, Hiro Yamagata, has set in motion a plan to "re-store" the statues through laser technology(beaming images of the statues onto a cliff) using $9 million solar and wind enerated technology.
The plan is awaiting UNESCO approval.
J, who is also interested in such things, says she is not hot on the idea. She doesn't really like lasers.
The thing that is compelling about his plan, though, is that perhaps light (in the form of the laser)-- being immediately experienced as something ephemeral-- would drive home the reality that there are some things which you just can't take back.
NPR has several programs on the German team that is trying to piece together the countless bits of rubble so the statues can be re-made. Some think that if at least one of the statues can be pieced-back together again, they should be. It would cost $30 million to piece together the smaller one.
And, there is one more idea concerning how to replace what is lost.
Paris-based Afghani archaeologist, Dr. Zemaryalai Tarzi (whose daughter lives in California) has another plan altogether. Instead of re-building what is lost or creating their illusion in light, Dr. Tarzi would like to unearth a third statue (1000 feet long), which if it exists at all, has never been seen by anyone other than Xuanzang 1300 years ago!
Is there really any chance that a 1000 foot long statue has remained unseen by anyone for 1300 years? Well, Xuanzang it will be remembered instills trust. If nothing else, the monk was very detail-oriented and if he wrote of a 1000 feet long sleeping Buddha statue in Bamiyan-- well, it must have been there at one time!
(You will recall that NHK went into the desert of death armed with Stein's maps, which Stein undertook based on Xuanzang's written records!)
The only problem is that no one has seen it in over a 1000 years. And, the monk wrote his distances in Chinese li which remain ambiguous so the sleeping statues could be buried just about anywhere under the valley floor. Dr. Tarzi, however, remains undaunted. "Let's raise this new masterpiece from the earth and waive it in the face of the terrorists who destroyed our statues!" he says.
I was happy to hear in early fall of last year that Dr. Tarzi is one step closer to his great ambition: Giant Buddha Statue Unearthed in Afghanistan.
Finally, I leave you with this: "historical footage" of Bamyan from 1973.
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