I break down the real story behind the destruction, separating myth from truth, and explaining how political motives — not religious extremism — led to the tragic demolition of these ancient marvels [which Madame Blavatsky claimed were far older than two millennia].
🕳️ Then, I venture deep into the surrounding Buddhist monastic caves carved into the Bamiyan cliffs — ancient Buddhist monasteries (viharas) — guided by a group of curious local Afghan kids.
The history etched into these walls is as haunting as it is beautiful. [This is the site of the world's oldest oil paintings.] 📜 I then reveal a lesser-known truth: The Taliban is actually considering rebuilding the Bamiyan Buddhas. Is it be a shift in ideology or a strategic political move?
🍽️ From there, I head into the town of Bamiyan to explore local Afghan cuisine — sampling some must-try dishes that reflect the heart of the Hazara culture.
American guy pulls up in American muscle car like Billie Eilish's on his way to go camping.
Where Siddhartha swam? Bamiyan Province
💦 The journey continues to [the Himalayan lakes of the Hindu Kush near Bamiyan called] Band-e Amir, Afghanistan’s first national park — a surreal set of turquoise lakes surrounded by towering cliffs.
Around the world in a purple muscle car?
Here, I meet Keith, an adventurous soul driving a purple American muscle car around the world. We join forces and go camping together in the Afghan wilderness.
⚔️ In a twist few would expect, we encounter the legendary Taliban — not in conflict, but in conversation. They show us their weapons, speak openly about Islam, and offer insight into their worldview. It’s a raw, complex moment that challenges many stereotypes and headlines.
The two colossal Bamiyan Buddhas stood as arguably the most important archeological site in Afghanistan for well over 1,000 years. They were the largest standing Buddha figures in the world.
Then, in a matter of days in the spring of 2001, members of the Taliban [urged on by the CIA and Pakistan's ISI] destroyed the images carved into a cliff face in the Bamiyan Valley. What comes next for Bamiyan?
The smaller Buddha stood about 125 feet (38 meters) tall. It is thought to have been carved from the mountainside around 550 CE, according to radiocarbon dating [of organic matter, which seems very unreliable and based on the assumption that any portion of it is when it was all built].
To the east, the larger Buddha stood some 180 feet (55 meters) high, and was [thought to have been] carved a bit later, likely around 615 CE.
Each Buddha stood in a niche, attached to the back wall along their robes, but with free-standing feet and legs so pilgrims could circumambulate them.
The stone cores of the statues were originally covered with clay then with a brightly covered clay slip. When the region was actively Buddhist [by the Hazara tribe and earlier the Scythians/Indo-Sakas/Shakyians], visitors' reports suggest that at least the smaller Buddha was decorated with gemstones and enough bronze plating to make it seem as if it were made entirely of bronze or gold, rather than stone and clay.
Both faces were likely rendered in clay attached to wooden scaffolding; the blank, featureless stone core underneath was all that remained by the 19th century, giving the Bamiyan Buddhas an unsettling appearance to foreign travelers who encountered them.
The Buddhas appear to have been the work of the Gandhara civilization, showing some Greco-Roman artistic influence in the clinging drape of the [toga like] monastic robes.
Small cave niches around the statues hosted pilgrims and monastics; many of them feature brightly-painted wall and ceiling oil painted art, illustrating scenes from the life and teachings of the historical Buddha.
In addition to the two tall standing figures, numerous smaller seated Buddhas are carved into the cliff.
In 2008, archeologists rediscovered a buried reclining Buddha figure, 62 feet (19 meters) long, at the foot of the mountainside.
The Bamiyan region remained predominantly Buddhist up until the 9th century. Islam gradually displaced Buddhism in the area because it offered easier trading relations with surrounding Muslim states.
In 1221, Genghis Khan invaded the Bamiyan Valley, wiping out the population, but leaving the Buddhas undamaged. Genetic testing confirms that the Hazara people who now live in Bamiyan are descended from the Mongols.
Most Muslim rulers and travelers in the area either expressed wonder at the statues or paid them little heed. For example, Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, passed through the Bamiyan Valley in 1506-7 but did not even mention the Buddhas in his journal.
The later Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) reportedly tried to destroy the Buddhas using artillery; he was famously conservative, and even banned music during his reign, in a foreshadowing of Taliban rule. Aurangzeb's reaction was the exception, however, not the rule among Muslim observers of the Bamiyan Buddhas. More
Zawia: Zaman Buddhas of Bamiyan Shamama | زمان بت شمامه بامیان
(ZAWIA) Renegade Indian historian Dr. Ranajit Pal, Ph.D., has determined that Bamiyan town is one of the three seasonal capitals that comprise "Kapilavastu," the hometown of the historical Buddha Gautama, formerly Prince Siddhartha the Sage of the Scythians/Shakyians (Shakyamuni). He grew up here in the foothills of the Himalayas, in a part of the Himalayan range known as the Hindu Kush, far from Nepal and India but linked geographically. The prince renounced his life of luxury, here in wealthy but far off place along the Silk Road. He traveled East on a spiritual quest and arrived in the Kingdom of Magadha. (There was no "India" yet, which would come centuries later under the rule of Buddhist Emperor Ashoka, who united many kingdoms and republics to form or re-form Great "Bharat," India, as a nation that included Pakistan and part of Afghanistan (ancient Gandhara), which may have been a country previously at the time of the Indus Valley Civilization, 5-10,000 years before the present, when Brahmin priests treasured the Vedas, the ancient Knowledge Books, and shaped a society to their advantage. The Buddha, Mahavira (founder of Jainism) and other separatists were part of the "wandering ascetic" or shramana (shaman) movement, seeking direct experience of the Truth and teaching a Doctrine and Discipline (Dhamma-Vinaya) open to all regardless of caste or sex. So Mahavira accepted female wandering ascetics (sadhvis, sramaneris, and bhikkhunis) and then the Buddha did, and there were other dharmas that did not survive to the present, like the teachings of Makkhali Gosala. But the Old Vedic Religion was eventually claimed by Hinduism, which came centuries later as it was organized and systematized by Sri Shankara and others trying to make a fully "Indian" religion apart from outsiders and foreigners like the Buddha, who was a Scythian (as the Greeks called them) or Saka, as they are still known from the Northwestern frontier, which includes the strange and rare out of the way land now known as Afghanistan.
Evidence of Afghanistan's ancient Buddhist past (not some later territory conquered by the Silk Road spread of Buddhism) rests on such strange facts that Afghanistan is home to the largest unexcavated Buddhist temple complex (Mes Aynak), larger than Borobudur, Java, Indonesia and its pyramid temple topped by bell stupas (possible mimics of time machine technology rediscovered by the Germans and their WWII Die GlockeET technology), the most ancient Buddhist writings (Gandhāran Buddhist texts), stupa (Buddhist burial mound) treasures found in Tillya Tepe and in neighboring Tajikistan's Ajina Tepe, and the most extensive rock hewn structures and art (like the world's oldest oil painting in Bamiyan), which spread throughout the Stans and into what is now India at its famous cave monastery complexes like Barabar and others, which seem to be miracles of advanced technology built by celestial devas ("shining ones") or works of magical feats (siddhis) wielded by powerful adepts and meditators. The Buddhist marvels at Sanchi are hard to explain as ordinary architecture planned by humans alone.
It can also boast the largest Buddha statues in the world, with the largest still untouched, a reclining Buddha buried somewhere in Bamiyan not too far from the massive standing Buddhas that were destroyed by the CIA and ISI and their creation the "Taliban," whose ranks were filled in by released Islamist prisoners from neighboring countries fomented into a war against the West and Western imperialism, taught an extreme brand of Islam known as Wahhabism, which seems like the creation of CIA cubicle workers in Virginia or elsewhere rather than any kind of grassroots movement. The Buddhas of Bamiyan were detonated in public to create outrage and raise support for an American invasion of "Russia's Vietnam." Afghanistan was and remains "a land where empires go to die," England, Russia (USSR), and China's next. The CIA, Pentagon, and American forces (NSA, NSC, and other alphabet agencies we never hear about in the mainstream press) wanted to invade -- to create an oil pipeline, to secure the DNA of redhaired Nephilim cannibal giants for transhuman super soldiers, to recover time well vimana technology, to control a geopolitical Middle East from the best vantage point, to frustrate the Russian Empire's ambitions, to slow China down (with the CIA recruiting Tibet in its fight, compromising the Dalai Lama to become an asset, training and arming his close relatives in Colorado in exchange for favors and publicity), to help India and intervene by playing up both sides of a long-simmering conflict between archrivals Pakistan and India (a single country that was only divided at Partition in 1947, when the British ensured the ruination of the world as they exited by their "divide and conquer" tactics, much as they ruined and ensured misery for Palestine/Israel); in fact, so much of the world's troubles today can be laid squarely at the feet of the British and their Anglo-Afghan wars and the "Great Game" intrigue against other superpowers, with the USA just being the latest, greatest spear tip for those old United Kingdom/British ambitions to rule the world, which seem rooted in their Germanic and ancient Roman mentality to conduct endless war and banking and imperial religion to rule the world one way or another.
Zawia - Zaman Buddhas of Bamiyan Shamama | زمان بت شمامه بامیان
Welcome, everyone, to Zawia’s channel. Hope everyone enjoys these videos. Please make sure to like, subscribe, and share this channel with others. Much love, and thank you, all. #Bamiyan #Buddha #ZAWIA
The Buddhas of Bamiyan (Persian بت های باميان – Bothā-ye Bāmiyān) are or were monumental statues of the Buddha standing.
They were carved into the side of a cliff in ancient Gandhara, in Bamiyan Valley in the Hazaras'Hazaristan region of central Afghanistan, 140 miles (230 kms) northwest of Kabul [another seasonal capital of ancient Kapilavastu(Kapil, Kapila, Kapila-pura, Kapila-vatthu), where Prince Siddhartha Gautama, the future Buddha, grew up] at an elevation of 8,200 feet (2,500 meters).
Modern archeologists believe they were built around 550 CE, although Madame H. P. Blavatsky claims they are remnants of "the Initiates of the Fourth Race" [1].
They were dynamited and destroyed in March 2001 by the Taliban [which was created and inspired by the CIA and ISI, intelligence agencies for the USA and Pakistan, respectively] after they declared that they were idols, carrying out an extreme Islamic religious iconoclasm.
According to Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, these statues are witnesses to earlier civilizations. She rejected the fact that the statues [previously] represented the Buddha, claiming they come from the ancestors of the Miao people, and were "the work of the Cyclopes, the true and actual Giants of old" [2].
[This would make sense. There are still redheaded, six-fingered giants in the area, Nephilim, Asuras, Nagas, Yakkhas, dwelling in caves and reported by US servicemen at war in the area for 20 years. They were likely repurposed to represent the historical Buddha, the scion of the region who became a great religious figure in neighboring proto-India then returned to the region to save everyone with his teachings on bringing about the end of all suffering. The Indo-Scythians or Shakyas/Sakas of the area then expanded and took over what is now Bihar/Vihar, India, the site of the Buddha's Great Awakening or Mahabodhi. This was before India came into being, 200 years after the life of the Buddha, what the Buddhist Emperor Ashoka conquered and unified many independent states or mahajanapadas into one empire, leaving behind many Ashokan pillars.]
Psychic Madame Blavatsky
Being built long before the birth of Prince Siddhartha Gautama (2,600 years before the present), they were made to look like him in modern times, in other words repurposed.
As archeologists discovered, the main bodies were hewn directly into the sandstone cliffs, but details were modeled in mud mixed with straw, coated with stucco. They are the site of the world's oldest oil paintings, as the entire cliffside is riddled with caves used by Buddhist monastics in the past and modern Hazari and/or Pashtun people today.
Madame Blavatsky explains:
The Buddhist Arhats [enlightened ones] and Ascetics [monastics] found the five statues, and many more, now crumbled down to dust, and as the three were found by them in colossal niches at the entrance of their future abode, they covered the figures with plaster, and, over the old, modelled new statues made to represent Lord Tathagata [the Buddha]. The interior walls of the niches are covered to this day with bright paintings of human figures, and the sacred image of Buddha is repeated in every group. These frescoes and ornaments—which remind one of the Byzantine style of painting—are all due to the piety of the monk-ascetics, like some other minor figures and rock-cut ornamentations. But the five statues belong to the handiwork of the Initiates of the Fourth Race, who sought refuge, after the submersion of their continent [Atlantis], in the fastnesses and on the summits of the Central Asian mountain chains [3].
Trifecta: Mes Aynak, Kabul, Bamiyan
Blavatsky states that the sizes of the statues had an esoteric meaning:
Moreover, the five statues are an imperishable record of the esoteric teaching about the gradual evolution of the races.
What is left of Kabul after the US War?
The largest is made to represent the First Race of mankind, its ethereal body being commemorated in hard, everlasting stone, for the instruction of future generations, as its remembrance would otherwise never have survived the Atlantean Deluge.
The second—120 feet high—represents the sweat-born; and the third—measuring 60 feet—immortalizes the race that fell, and thereby inaugurated the first physical race, born of father and mother, the last descendants of which are represented in the Statues found on Easter Isle; but they were only from 20 to 25 feet in stature at the epoch when Lemuria was submerged, after it had been nearly destroyed by volcanic fires.
The Fourth Race was still smaller, though gigantic in comparison with our present Fifth Race, and the series culminated finally in the latter [4].
On Dec. 24, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and Kabul [Kapil] was heavily occupied by Soviet Armed Forces.
In Pakistan, Director-General of the ISI [Pakistan's CIA] Akhtar Abdur Rahman advocated for the idea of a covert operation in Afghanistan by arming Islamic extremists who formed the Mujahideen [85]. Gen. Rahman was heard loudly saying, "Kabul must burn! Kabul must burn!" [86] and masterminded the idea of a proxy war in Afghanistan [85].
Pakistani Pres. Zia-ul-Haq authorized this operation under Gen. Rahman, which was later merged with Operation Cyclone, a program funded by the United States and carried out by the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). More
Theosophy Wiki edited and expanded by Amber Larson, Dhr. Seven, Pat Macpherson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Earthquake rocks Taiwan; sets off Tsunami warnings for nearby Japanese islands
(FOX 11 Los Angeles) April 2, 2024: A 7.5-magnitude earthquake rocks Taiwan and is setting off tsunami warnings across parts of East Asia. Subscribe to FOX 11 on YouTube: youtube.com/channel...UPDATE: There has already been an aftershock measuring 6.5. Japan is on alert for tsunami, but the US West Coast has not yet been put on alert.
(Bloomberg Television) April 2, 2024: A tsunami warning has been issued after an earthquake shook buildings in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan [a quasi-independent Buddhist island off the coast of China claimed by China and protected by the USA because it is the world's computer microchip manufacturing center upon which the world's technology runs along the southern end of the chain of islands that is the country of Japan], at about 7:58 am local Taiwan time Wednesday morning [4:58 pm Tuesday California time]. The temblor measured 7.4 (some reports say 7.5, which would make it ten times stronger) in magnitude, according to the US Geological Survey. Paul Allen reports. For more on this story, see: bloomberg.com/news/article...
LIVE coverage via Reuters and AP
LIVE: View from Japan's Miyakojima after Taiwan earthquake, tsunami alerts
(Associated Press) Started streaming 6:27 pm (Los Angles time) Watch live view from Miyako Island in Japan after a strong quake hit Taiwan earlier Wednesday, prompting tsunami alerts. Read more details here: bit.ly/4cE2Rs3#earthquake #japan #live
What is a baby boy Buddha? It should not be confused with the Buddha Boy (Ram Bahadur Bomjon) now steeped in the quagmire of controversy. It is a figurine, usually ceramic and golden, of Prince Siddhartha Gautama just after he was born, raising his finger, speaking a declaration of his impending great enlightenment and final rebirth, and taking seven steps as the earth quakes, surrounded by devas and his mother's female attendants. It is used in a popular bathing ceremony usually performed during Mahayana Buddha Day and Theravada Vesak celebrations.
Buddha from the beach, two friends find $100K Ming Dynasty artifact in Australia
[Buy a metal detector, and hit the beach. There's no telling what treasures abound.] In 2018, Leon Dechamps and Shayne Thomson visited Shark Bay's coast in Australia.
Equipped with a metal detector, they serendipitously discovered a small Buddha figure, oblivious to the fact that they had unearthed a genuine treasure.
[WHAT IS IT? The figurine represents the baby Bodhisattva, Prince Siddhartha before he became the Buddha Gautama, celebrating his birth in Lumbini garden as his mother, Maya Devi (iconically represented as a salabhanjika), gave birth standing up holding the branch of a sal tree, and it was twin sal trees the Buddha chose to lie down between when he passed into final nirvana, a statue commonly used in bathing ceremonies, commemorating how when he was born, the sky devas rained down to rinse him off, a ritual that is performed every Vesak, the thrice blessed day of his birth, great awakening, and reclining into final nirvana. Although it might be tempting to think Theravada Buddhism is just trying to be efficient by lumping all three events into one celebration day, the ancient texts say these three occurrences took place on the same month (Vaisakha) under the full moon.]
Mahayana Buddhism does not recognize Buddhism, instead dividing the three events of the Buddha's life into three events (birth, awakening, passing): Buddha Day, Bodhi Day, and Parinirvana Day.
Following five years and numerous expert analyses, it was determined that the Buddha figure hailing from the beach of the Indian Ocean has its origins in China from the Ming Dynasty period.
The petite Buddha statue made from bronze dates most likely back to the 15th century. A specialist in Asian art validated that the item could fetch a price of up to $100,000.
"I was astounded when I discovered it was from the Ming Dynasty. This makes it the oldest Chinese artifact in Australian history," Dechamps stated on the Antiques Roadshow program.
Around the Buddhist world (such as Maui, Hawaii, USA) the community celebrates Vesak Day. Vesak celebrates the birthday, enlightenment day, and final nirvana day of the Buddha (Shakyamuni), all three events having happened on the full moon of the ancient Indian month of Vaisakha. In addition to guided sitting meditation and Dharma talks, there is usually a bathing ceremony of the baby Buddha and a joyful vegetarian meal. In the Chinese Mahayana Buddhist tradition, April 8 of each year is "Buddha Day," which celebrates the birth of Gautama Buddha.
Western Australia Marine Park is full of sharks
Upon discovering the figure, the friends endeavored to uncover how it ended up on the beach. Various services and institutions were consulted, including the Maritime Museum of Western Australia, the ambassador in China, antique dealers, art historians, various Chinese associations, and independent archaeologists.
The statue likely arrived in Australia in the 15th century during Admiral Zheng He's global voyages, which included the Indian Ocean basin.
Another theory posits that it was brought to Australia by Chinese traders in the 19th century. Similar statues were fairly popular and were crafted to commemorate the Buddha's birthdays [Vesak].
Great white sharks of Australia love the Bay
According to Australian law, the statue belongs to the finders. The figure is flawed, missing several elements, which were possibly deliberately removed and replaced with a more prestigious material such as ivory.
No other Chinese or Ming Dynasty-related items were discovered on the beach. However, Dechamps and Thompson are hopeful that they will find the missing portions of the Buddha statue in the future [and will likely spend $100,001 or die doing so because something else must be on that beach after six centuries]. More
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