What Lies Beneath

When the Taliban were done dynamiting the two colossal stone Buddhas of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, they partied hard. They danced, hooted and slaughtered a cow. But Syed Mirza Hussain wasn’t celebrating. A Hazara Afghan with Mongolian features and a rusty beard, Hussain had been forced by the Taliban to pack explosives around the statues. The Taliban warned that if he refused, he would be shot. It was a threat that Hussain, a Shi’ite Muslim hated by the Sunni Taliban, took seriously. Earlier, a Taliban fighter had gunned down Hussain’s two boys like stray dogs crossing a field, and gloated, “Anyone who kills a Hazara goes straight to paradise.”

But on that wretched day in January 2001, Hussain found some small consolation in his secret. He is convinced that just a few meters away from where the Taliban were war dancing lies a third, giant Buddha hidden beneath the earth, wearing a blissful smile, unperturbed by the terrible destruction that turned his two sturdy companions into shimmering billows of sand. Hussain gestures to a cratered, rocky slope beside an ochre cliff face where the pair of 1,700-year-old Buddhas were blasted away by several hundred kilos of TNT. “Our Hazara ancestors have always known that there’s another Buddha,” he says. “It’s sleeping there, in the ground.”

Many archaeologists and scholars agree that a third Buddha exists in Bamiyanand that it escaped the Taliban’s idol-busting spree. It’s a whopper; this Buddha is believed to measure up to 200 m long (the upright ones were just 55 m and 38 m high). According to meticulous records kept by Xuanzang, a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim who trekked to Bamiyan in the 7th century, the Buddha is shown recliningand dying; freed from his body, he achieves nirvana, or enlightenment.

But should archaeologists let the sleeping Buddha lie? That question is vexing both Afghan and foreign experts who treat the existence of this Buddha with the kind of fretful confidentiality usually associated with state nuclear secrets. Some archaeologists worry that an excavated statue could become a target of a restored Taliban-like regime. Says Paul Bucherer-Dietschi of the Afghan Museum in Exile, near Basel: “There’s no way we could possibly protect the site.” Bucherer-Dietschi worries about looters as well. At the bidding of Pakistani antiquities smugglers, he says, the Taliban trucked off chunks of the two standing Buddhas and sold them “like pieces of the Berlin Wall.”

Other scholars want the Buddha brought to light. More than anything right now, they say, Afghans need the Buddha unearthed as symbolic proof that the Taliban weren’t able to eradicate all of the country’s rich, pre-Islamic heritage. The country is a historian’s treasure trove. Between the 3rd and 8th centuries, Afghanistan experienced a fusion of Greek, Persian and Indian cultures. The Bamiyan statues, for example, showed traces of Greek influence, as if the sculptors had stolen the robes off Apollo, the Greek sun god, to drape their enormous Buddhas. “There’s a cultural void left by the destruction of the two Buddhas,” says Afghan archaeologist Zafar Paiman. “I’m sure that, if the reclining Buddha is found, the people of Bamiyan are ready to protect it.”

Digging up the Buddha is a forbidding task. The Russians, followed by the Afghan mujahedin fighters and then the Taliban, all planted land mines on the high cliffs above the colossal Buddhas, and rain and erosion have brought hundreds of these deadly devices tumbling into the valley. Dozens of Afghan de-mining experts are combing the slopes with their metal detectors, trying to avert more casualties. The mines are a particular hazard to the families of Hazara refugees whose villages were razed by the Taliban and who now shelter in the honeycomb of cliff caves once used by meditating Buddhist hermits.

The pilgrim Xuanzang, usually an exacting chronicler, is maddeningly vague about the reclining Buddha’s specific location. Reading his account and others of the same period, scholars are certain that the statue lies between the niches of the two destroyed Buddhas, a distance of nearly 800 meters. The last recorded sighting of the reclining Buddha, according to Paiman, was by a 10th century Indian historian. After that, the gigantic Buddha seems to have vanished as if by a magician’s conjuring trick.

One theory has it that the reclining statue may be entombed within the actual mountainside, in a long chamber whose entrances were sealed up long ago, when the first Islamic invaders swept into the valley. But most archaeologists believe that the Buddha was out in the open and later buried either by an earthquake or the crumbling sandstone cliff above it. Either way, it has apparently been saved from the Taliban’s predations centuries later. Jean-FranCois Jarrige, director of the Guimet Museum of Asiatic Art in Paris, was in Bamiyan recently, walking gingerly along a path cleared in the minefield above the supposed resting place of the reclining Buddha. “We have mine detectors, but so far no Buddha detector has been invented yet,” he mused. “We’ll just have to dig for it once we’ve completely studied the site.”

Given that Afghanistan is grappling with rebuilding a devastated country, excavating an old statue isn’t high on the Kabul government’s list of priorities. But this week, the U.N. is sponsoring a meeting in Kabul of archaeologists, scholars and possible donor nations to repair the country’s war-shattered culture, starting in Bamiyan. Experts say that to restore one of the standing Buddhas could amount to $50 million. A dig for the reclining Buddha would cost a fraction of that.

Hussain would like to see all three Buddhas reunited. As a kid, he scampered around the hermit caves, and lazed with his friends on top of the biggest Buddha, admiring the lapis and gold rimmed frescoes of the ancient monksand seeing his own Asiatic features mirrored in their faces. “The people who made these Buddhas looked like Hazaras,” says Hussain. “That’s why the Taliban hated them so much.” Forced to help destroy the two standing statues, Hussain says he’s ready to find their sleeping companion. If he succeeds, Bamiyan’s Buddhas can perhaps finally rest in peace.