BY TIM MCGIRK/BAMIYAN

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
Bamiyan—and 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 reclining—and 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 monks—and 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.

http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501020527-238674,00.html