THE BAMIYAN BUDDHAS

The second time I wrote about the 1,500 year-old Bamiyan Buddhas was in 2007, here in The Buddha Dairies. The first time I wrote about them was in March, 2001, when the statues were wantonly destroyed by repeated attacks from the Taliban. I have no idea where to find that first piece, but the second refers to it. I noted that the destruction of these "twin towers" foreshadowed the 9/11 destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York--and that it was surely provoked by the same fundamentalist Muslim fanaticism.

I was reminded of this monumental act of vandalism by an article in today's New York Times about more recent, apparently rather futile discussions on the subject of restoration. A Japanese couple apparently funded a ghostly, 3-D holographic "reconstruction" of the larger Buddha in the space he once occupied, but it seemed to me more an act of nostalgia than restoration--or even reverence. Those magnificent acts of devotion--remote in both time and geographical location--are now lost to the history of prodigious human achievements. There is no way to restore them, or replace them. The giant niches in the cliff face where they once stood remain as monuments to the destructive fervor of religious intolerance.

Their absence is a monument, too, to one of the great teachings of the Buddha--that everything is in constant flux; that nothing, not even the seemingly solid presence of a giant figure carved in rock, can survive the changes wrought by time. Better, perhaps, to leave them standing there, unoccupied, until the time comes when they, too, will have surrendered to that one ineluctable law, that everything must change.