By W.L. Rathje

Several months ago in Afghanistan, supreme Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar issued an edict against un-Islamic graven images, which means all idolatrous images of humans and animals. As a result, the Taliban are destroying all ancient sculptures. Explosives, tanks, and anti-aircraft weapons blew apart two colossal images of the Buddha in Bamiyan Province, 230 kilometers (150 miles) from the capital of Kabul.

Since, unlike the Buddha, most of us are caught up in endless “selfness” today, news media worldwide now trumpet a rising animus toward the Taliban from foes and their few allies alike.

Ancient archaeological remains have been thrust into the cruel world of today’s seemingly endless conflicts — the ever-changing aims and alliances of international politics, religions dueling on the world stage, and the ironic trade-off of providing aid to conserve the material heritage of the past but not to preserve the lives of modern inheritors of that past. Arrayed against the tolerant and measured messages of Buddhism, the quagmire of the “Bamiyan Massacre” seems perplexing at best.

First, it is important to recognize that the massacre has little to do with religion. The Buddha is not God or even one among many gods. During his lifetime of 80 years, Buddha Sakyamuni only allowed his image to be recorded as a reflection in rippling water. Images of the Buddha himself did not appear for at least 400 years after his death and even then were created only to remind followers of their own innate “Buddha Nature.” This kind of early aversion to “idolatry” is typical of Christianity and other religions — many devotees of Christ railed against material images of Jesus for centuries, especially during two waves of “iconoclasts” (idol smashers) in the Byzantine Empire.

The colossal Buddhas were cut at immeasurable cost (probably in the third and fifth centuries A.D.) into the tall, sandstone cliffs surrounding Bamiyan, an oasis town in the center of a long valley that separates the mountain chains of Hindu Kush and Koh-i-Baba. The taller of the two statues (about 53 meters or 175 feet) is thought to represent Vairocana, the "Light Shining throughout the Universe Buddha" The shorter one (36 meters or 120 feet) probably represents Buddha Sakyamuni, although the local Hazara people believe it depicts a woman.

The two colossi must once have been a truly awesome sight, visible for miles, with copper masks for faces and copper-covered hands. Vairocana’s robes were painted red and Sakyamuni’s blue. These towering, transcendental images were key symbols in the rise of Mahayana Buddhist teachings, which emphasized the ability of everyone, not just monks, to achieve enlightenment.

While the dates of the statues are somewhat equivocal, the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who traveled to India to bring back to China copies of the original sutras of the Buddha’s teachings, bore witness to the statues in A.D. 630-31.

For centuries, Bamiyan lay at the heart of the fabled Silk Road, offering respite to caravans carrying goods across the vast reaches between China and the Roman Empire. And for 500 years, it was a center of Buddhist cultivation. The myriad caves that pockmark Bamiyan’s cliffs were also home to thousands of Buddhist monks and served as a kind of Holiday Inn for traveling merchants, monks, and pilgrims.

Today those open, cold caves are used primarily by refugees from Afghanistan’s brutal, internal war.

As shocking as it was to the world community, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas is no real surprise. Attempts to eradicate them began immediately after Taliban forces retook Bamiyan for the third time.

The world community — from Russia to Malaysia, Germany to Sri Lanka, and, of course, UNESCO — has expressed horror at the Buddhas’ destruction. Many Mullahs in Islamic countries condemned Mullah Omar’s interpretation as wrong-headed and damaging to the image of Islam.

But from the Buddhist side, no blood has been shed. What would happen if any country decided to destroy all statues or religious symbols of Christianity or Judaism or Islam? The recent months of violence in and around Israel were largely sparked by Ariel Sharon simply visiting the Temple Mount, which is sacred to both Muslims and Jews. Countries whose populations are primarily Buddhist have expressed dismay and consternation, but no one is going to war. It’s not that Buddhists won’t fight, but they don’t go to war over images.

The great statues remained community-identity symbols even though the Bamiyan community is now Muslim rather than Buddhist, and vandalism aimed at foci of community identity is easy to find in the past. Remember the Byzantine “iconoclasts” (who gave their name to that kind of vandalism and desecration), later Christians, the Communists, and then the non-Communists. Every one of them tore down key symbols of community identity.

But why are the Bamiyan Buddhas targets now, after surviving more than a thousand years at a crucial node on the Silk Road?

Simple. First, Buddhism is an easy target for fundamentalist Muslims. As Richard Foltz documents in his book, Religions on the Silk Road, “Although Islamic law offered protection to ‘peoples of the Book,’ namely Christians, Jews, and by some interpretations Zoroastrians, the early Muslims were generally hostile towards Buddhists. They referred to Buddhists as ‘idol-worshipers,’ which had unfortunate associations with the portrayal of the Prophet’s Meccan enemies in the Qur’an. This probably, at least in part, accounts for the unabatingly harsh treatment Muslims reserved for the Buddhists they encountered in the course of their conquest.” So, even though the Buddha stood against idolatry, the Taliban have a tradition to uphold on the Silk Road.

Second, Bamiyan was a base of the Taliban’s opposition — Northern Alliance’s “rebel” forces led by ousted Afghani President Borhanuddin Rabbani. How could the Taliban better humiliate the locals than to destroy their heritage? An earlier attempt to destroy the Buddhas came when the Taliban took control of Bamiyan in 1998. Then, the local Taliban governor talked the military commander out of the atrocity.

Third, and probably most important, the Taliban government for more than a year has been requesting international humanitarian aid for a country ravaged by drought, earthquakes, and war. No aid is forthcoming as long as the Taliban harbor international terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, an anathema to key voting members of the UN Security Council, including the United States, Russia (where the Taliban are working with the Chechnyan rebels), and China (where the Taliban are active among Muslim separatists).

As the Taliban see it, the UN and others (such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, and even such Taliban friends as Iran, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) will give millions of dollars to save un-Islamic stone statues but not one cent to save the lives of Afghani men, women, and children.

It doesn’t help when a Japanese parliamentary delegation offers humanitarian aid in exchange for moving the statues out of the country. As journalist Hebah Abdalla wrote on March 2: “There was no ‘worldwide horror’ or ‘international outrage’ when UN officials announced Friday that more than 260 people have died in displacement camps in northern Afghanistan, where an additional 117,000 people are living in miserable conditions. … Perhaps the only consolation in all of this is that these refugees may never know how much the world cared for two statues and how little it cared for them.”

Lest I seem partial to the Taliban, let me make my position clear:

Any destruction of archaeological remains is an indefensible crime against humanity.

I fear archaeological terrorism — this ultimatum of “give us what we want or we will destroy our enemies’ (and the world’s) heritage.”

Perhaps this is the beginning of an understanding of the Buddhist concept of “impermanence.” Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only the Great Pyramids of Egypt still survive. Would even they still survive if they weren’t so hard to destroy? As an archaeologist, I am dismayed that a crucial component of the world’s heritage can be held hostage to temper tantrums.

There should have been a way out of this mess, and there are historical precedents for such a solution. During the Islamic Mughal Empire of India (A.D. 1526-1761), thousands of miniature paintings of rulers and other living beings were produced in exquisite books. At times of fundamentalist resurgence, the depictions were considered un-Islamic, just as the Taliban edict states today. However, rather than destroy this precious art, Islamic authorities simply required that a black line be painted across the throat of each “living” being to signal that it was “dead.” Archaeologists could have lived with a slit in the throat of each Bamiyan Buddha.

Today, a new focus on Afghanistan’s  starving people has led to lifting the Taliban “food blockade” to rebel territory. It is fitting that in his previous lives, as recorded in Jakata Tales, the Buddha often sacrificed himself, becoming food for a tiger and her cubs, for instance, and for a hungry hawk chasing a pigeon. But while the Buddha  learned to accept impermanence, most archaeologists have not.

W.J. Rathje is a Visiting Professor at the Stanford University Archaeology Center, and a Senior Editor of Discover Archaeology. Thanks to: E E Ho, Amitabha Buddhist Society, USA; Z. Yang, C. Witmore, and G. Schopen, Stanford;  L-L. Chen, University of Kansas; May Gu, Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation; and M. Mahar, University of Arizona, and S. Zafar.