Sitting on Buddha's Head
By Mike Chambers
I rode the Afghan pony out of the village in Bamiyan province and followed the small river upstream towards the canyon. The villagers had planted crops on the flat riverbed that formed a green ribbon, with the rows and plots giving it a textured well-tended appearance. The wider landscape was quite different. The verdant green stood out in sharp contrast to the mammoth sandstone walls. It might not be quite the scale of the Grand Canyon, which is one hundred percent mother nature. In Bamiyan, it is the hand of man, across history, which reaches out and catches the breath.
It was 1976 and I was on my way to see the standing Buddha that had been carved out of the walls of the canyon some fourteen hundred years ago. In the centuries before Islam swept across central Asia, this area of Afghanistan had been Buddhist. But that culture, which had endured for centuries, seemed to have been whipped clean from the landscape but for the stone Buddha megaliths.
It was only a few miles away, and I rode the pony at a sedate pace up the canyon floor. As we moved, the Buddha came into clearer and clearer view. Its presence slowly became more dominant. Usually, we think of buildings fitting, well or badly, into their surrounding landscape, When you arrived close to the standing Buddha of Bamiyan it was the other way around and God’s creation seemed the subservient one.
We dismounted at Buddha's foot and looked up at the 180-foot statue which had been carved out of the cliff a millennium and a half ago. It was 30 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty but stood in a huge niche. In the distance, he had seemed perfect but up close I could see the cracks and worn areas of its long vigil. A small handful of would-be guides offered to water my horse and take me through the site. I avoided them all except for one who tagged along anyway, pitching the quality of the hashish he had on offer.
At Buddha's left foot there was a man-sized hole, a doorway, into the stone that led to a circular stairway cut into the bedrock. Each time the spiral came close to the wall of the niche, there was a cut to let in the light. Opposite the Buddha, there were corridors leading away to the living quarters of the monks who had served the community so many centuries ago. The stairs themselves, cut true and clean, had been worn down in the center part by centuries of dutiful attendants and awestruck visitors.
After climbing up multiple spirals rising through the rock, my upward voyage came to an end and another corridor appeared that didn’t go to the right, towards the monks’ old residences, but to the left, toward the Buddha himself. After only a few meters that tunnel opened up to the outside. I stepped out into the light and I found myself standing on Buddha’s head looking out over the valley. I didn’t have a eureka moment, or some kind of revelation, but a new, somewhat subtle, understanding did come over me.
I guess it is fair to say that by that time in my life I was already well-traveled. I had seen New York, London, Paris, and Rome. But also Sydney and Singapore. My stop in Bamiyan was on a trip where I was basically hitching around the world. And that's what made this experience so particular. The standing Buddha of Bamiyan should be an iconic masterpiece of human belief and achievement. Not the surprise discovery of a vagabond looking for the edge. Writing about it now, that masterpiece seems to me to be more emblematic of our condition than the Vatican or the Acropolis. While I looked across the valley, my "guide" rolled a spliff and stared out as well. He pointed towards the far wall of the canyon and repeated the name Bamiyan. I came to realize he wasn't talking about the present landscape but the ancient city which had been part of a crushing moment in history that played out right there in Central Asia and changed the direction of the word. Genghis Khan had led his horde across that stretch of land and destroyed the old city of Bamiyan down to its foundations. The great Khan had a bloody reputation but Bamiyan was particularly punished as his favorite grandson had been killed there. There was a lot of wild gesturing on the part of my guide, so I referred to my guidebook and the story filled itself out.
The opposite hillside where the city had stood had been whipped clean by history. After the town fell Genghis gave in to his famous temper and ordered the city to be leveled. Across the landscape there irrigation channels, tracks, and multiple villages but not the meeting point of nations it had once been. But maybe that's a good thing. Alexander, the great European conquerer, came through in 330BC, and Tamerlane the great Islamic conquerer did the same in 1383AD. They left the Buddha for future generations.
So this Buddha had stood in its imposing magnificence watching over the countryside for a millennium and a half. Sitting high up in the niche and looking out across the valley I had just traversed, I was struck by the surreal twist. I was sitting, on top of a statue bigger than the Statue of Liberty whose presence represented a core element of the history of a continent. And I was alone! Not one other tourist. No academics measuring and taking pictures. No minibusses getting ready to go to the village to mingle with the local crowds. Just a few raggedy would-be guides competing to watch my horse. That was all! How could something of such artistic power and historical pertinence be left forgotten in the mountains?
Not long afterward Afghanistan slipped back into the chaos it was to suffer for the next decades. It came and went on the news, as it still does, with hopeful and distressing variants continuingly alternating. After twenty-five years I saw something I recognized. I sat in front of my TV and remembered. I was reminded of the mysterious hidden magnificence of the site. My memories were rekindled by the television and the international news when Bamiyan's Buddha suddenly appeared on screens across the world as they were blown up by the Taliban.
It seemed an opportunity missed. The standing Buddha of Bamian had the symbolic potential of the acropolis or the pyramids. Let's not destroy a site with the power to inspire everyone. The power to bridge the very divides that were the cause of the turmoil. If only the West ..... or the East ......or anybody..... had stood up in the previous decades and described the wonders of this site and used them to show Afghanistan as a land of history and cultural wealth. Perhaps the war has continued so long because the Afghans and their national tale did not reach or resonate with other cultures in the wider world. But you wouldn't feel that; you couldn't feel that; if you had had a chance to sit on Buddha's head.
Mike Chambers recently returned to Canada after 30 years in East and Central Africa. He is now writing full time and fundraising for the Elephant Survival Organization UAV anti poaching surveillance service in Tanzanian parks and reserves. To learn more, visit http://michaelmargravechambers.blogspot.com/
