Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Afghan Buddha marvels created, massacred

Azaranica (Hazaras) edited by Wisdom Quarterly
Bamiyan was the site of an early Buddhist monastery, from which Bamyan takes its name (Sanskrit, varmayana, "colored." Many Buddha statues are carved into the sides of cliffs facing Bamiyan City, the two most prominent of these are now known as the Buddhas of Bamyan.

How the marvels were created and massacred
2011 - It has almost been a decade since the world’s tallest standing Buddha statues were destroyed in Bamiyan. The incident can not be justified on any count -- except as a pretext to justify war on a small, out of the way country that empires have sought to conquer for millenia.

The CIA/MIC is succeeding under an the imperial American flag. Of course, it could just be our inherent human nature to create and destroy.

Ancient Buddhist archaeology was thrust into a cruel geopolitical game in our world of seemingly endless conflicts born of greed, hate/fear, and delusion. The ever-changing alliances and antipathies in international politics often calls in old religious duels.

The ironic trade off is providing aid to conserve world heritage while destroying the lives of modern inheritors of that past. Arrayed against the tolerant message of Buddhism is the quagmire of the CIA-created Taliban's "Bamiyan Massacre."

Hazaras boys walk in Bamiyan with Buddhist cave complex heritage behind them

Bamiyan, central Afghanistan, is considered an oasis in the center of a long valley that separates the big mountain chains of the Hindu Kush, extensions of the Himalayas all the way to the Caucuses. Bamiyan functioned as one of the greatest Buddhist centers for nearly five centuries.

It is a place of open fields and sky, with a long, rich history, evidence of which was being destroyed before scholars could start understanding it.

The valley -- 140 miles northwest of the Afghan capital of Kabul, at an altitude of 8,202 feet (2,500 m) -- follows the Bamiyan river. Some 1,500 years ago, it was a busy node on the trade route between China and greater India.

Bamiyan Buddhas rise again: not only are they being reconstructed in stone, a Chinese artist recently recreated them in light.

Due to Sanskrit and spoken regional languages such as Pali, Prakrit, and Magadhi, Buddhism, Hinduism and, later, Islam coexisted in this part of Asia. It was inhabited and partly urbanized from the 3rd century BC. Russian psychic Madame Blavatsky takes it much further back to the time of giants (asuras, "titans"), the Indus River Valley Civilization, and ancient "Aryans" from Middle Earth.
It was also home to a great Buddhist monastic complex, much of which occupied natural cliff caves, one that nurtured epoch-changing religious concepts and produced a fantastic new art, including the world's largest rock-carved figures of the standing Buddha. More

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