Bidding The Buddha Goodbye I came face to face with the several-stories tall, several centuries old…

[Hijo]

Bidding The Buddha Goodbye
I came face to face with the several-stories tall, several centuries old standing Buddha carved into the bluff in Bahmian, Afghanistan, when I was thirteen. I was with my brother; my mother and my father, all of us having hiked the rocky, Utah-like terrain several miles from where we met our guide.
My parents, both anthropologists since their twenties, knew the standing Buddha existed in the area. They just needed a guide, like Masood, to show them exactly where to see it.
We were on top of it before we saw it. Masood showed us how to walk down the path from the top to the bottom of the bluff of sandstone and lime and iron ore to face the statue. Masood carried a single-shot shotgun for bandits, he said. Being thirteen, I got to carry the weapon, breach open and unarmed, for a while.
It was not quite a year after the Bangladesh war. We had lived in India at the time. The experience of air raids, dog fights over my neighborhood, anti-aircraft batteries ringing the city and sandbags around the classroom buildings at my school led me to believe if you’re wanted to participate in a war, there will be plenty out there and you don’t have to go looking for them – they’ll come looking for you.
It was with the same attitude toward bandits that I carried the shotgun for Masood.
We came to what was then the Kingdom of Afghanistan from India. We were taking the scenic route back to Wisconsin, where both my parents taught at the university. My brother was facing his last two years in high school. I was facing a year in the new institution of middle school while my sister had left to start work in Minnesota.
My parents chose to fly to Afghanistan from India instead of driving up the Khyber Pass from Pakistan. I tossed it off as not trusting the Pakistanis yet. But it gave us an aerial view of the rocky desert of Afghanistan. From Kabul to Bahmian, we flew in a Piper Cub – just the family. There was a lot of turbulence. At one point, the door to the cockpit was open, and I could see the pilot trying to catch a fly that was bothering him as the small plane dipped and swayed around outcroppings and cliffs.
My father, dressed in his tailor-made olive drab whipcord bush jacket, ubiquitous pipe in hand, explained that the Greeks were the first group to depict a Buddha with a face, and that Greek Buddhist monks had carved the standing statue, which wore a toga with pleats, and lived in cells in caves that marked the perimeter and carving stations of the Buddha. I never forgot standing there all together, facing the work of monks devout enough and inspired enough centuries ago to carve so well. I had tried my hand at clay sculpture in art class and felt I had an idea of how difficult it would be.
While the Greeks had carved a Buddha with a face, the statue’s visage was flat down to the lips. Previous Moslem raiders had done away with the forehead, eyes and nose of the statue, just as they had with most of the ancient Hindu statues in India during Mughal rule. But somehow the statue’s flat front down to its lips cast a sort of serenity.
We left Bahmian and Afghanistan for Uzbekistan, where my father knew of an encampment of yurts where we lived for a time as guests. I liked the yurt for its wool blanketed walls and dome tent top. We were quite comfortable there.
I followed Afghanistan as I grew older. A friend of my parents, Luis Dupree, wrote much in articles for the American Universities Field Service. He wrote about the Soviet puppet regime that took power by tanks in the streets, and later, he lectured to universities trying to drum up support for attempts to arm and train the Mujahadeen to defeat the Soviets with Stinger missiles.
A friend of mine years later got into Afghanistan and joined one of the groups to write about it. The Afghan hat became popular wear in university towns much like the Palestinian scarves. Another friend entered as a television reporter and returned with stories of the Taliban’s attempts to gain control of the country after the Russians withdrew. The Uzbekis to the north, he said, were giving the Taliban trouble.
My parents are now both dead, as is my brother. But I remember that slightly chilly afternoon when we saw what men with devotion to a teacher could do with a cliff in Afghanistan.
Before the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bahmian, the Hindus in India destroyed a centuries old mosque at Ayodhya, planning to build a temple there. And the Palestinians and Jews had been fighting over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
The Greek statue of the compassionate Buddha never sought a war, but one came to it anyway. And a truth that had stood for centuries came crashing down in a pile of rubble at the actions of a few fearful men.
Every child knows it is easier to destroy than to create. Man destroys. God creates. Let no one blame or claim what comes next has anything to do with God.