View of Bamiyan valley and the Small Buddha © UNESCO
Reimaging Bamiyan’s Lost Buddhas The Art of Xie Chengshui Sajid Rizvi The Chinese artist most widely celebrated for reproducing murals from the caves of Dunhuang has employed his skills to reinvoke Afghanistan’s rock figures of the deity, almost as they existed before their destruction by the doomed Taliban regime
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ny talk of preserving what is left of the Bamiyan Buddhas, dynamited on orders of Afghanistan’s former Taliban government in March 2001, rings hollow when soldiers from the West’s own armies in Iraq face charges of wanton destruction in Babylon, and passive or active connivance in the looting and arson at museums, galleries and archives in Baghdad. Yet preservation of Bamiyan’s remains is actually happening, under the aegis of a UNESCO/Japan project. Unlike Babylon, which is precious in the context of the world’s heritage but not a point of pilgrimage, Bamiyan is a religious site, a spiritual home for millions of practising Buddhists worldwide, and now a lost gem of human endeavour. Bamiyan’s destruction is mourned by secular, culture-conscious people, too. Only a mixture of diplomatic restraint, Realpolitik and Afghanistan’s relative inaccessibility as a war zone have prevented stronger reactions to the ruination visited upon the Buddhas. Deep Wounds But emotions run deep, and the hurt felt by people of different ideological and religious persuasions does get expressed both publicly and in private. The Taliban’s single most dramatic act of state vandalism, amidst their many shocking (and some darkly hilarious) transgressions, that helped legitimise the West’s military intervention shortly afterwards, has gone a significant way towards contributing to a generic demonisation of all things Islamic/Islamist/Muslim that gained momentum after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. The Taliban’s action has created fissures in Buddhist-Muslim relations, though Eastern Art Report • No 49 [2005 / 1]
both sides have maintained a discreet silence, so far. And for every rock fragment of the Bamiyan Buddhas spirited away from the ruined site or preserved by scientists there is a theory in currency about what happens next. Would / should the Buddhas be rebuilt? Would / should there be enough money made available for such a task? With the extent of likely restoration far from determined, there is in evidence an odd blend of religious devotion, diplomacy and international cooperation, amidst the culmination of the many months of work undertaken by individuals and institutions under UNESCO’s umbrella. From Dunhuang to Bamiyan Not long after the various debates over the future of Bamiyan ensued, London was a temporary home for Chinese artist Xie Chengshui, perhaps best recognised for his painstakingly accurate rendering of mural paintings from the caves of Dunhuang. The cave-temples in China, arguably the world’s most extraordinary gallery of Buddhist art,1 have been home to Xie Chengshui’s toils over many years. (See inset: Life and Art: Xie Chengshui). As a guest for many months of Professor Roderick Whitfield,2 Chengshui became almost a habitué of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. It was after these encounters that we asked him if he had been to Bamiyan. He hadn’t. Then we asked him how he felt about the destruction of Bamiyan, taking care not to enquire after his faith, a somewhat more intrusive question, given the ambivalence of attitudes to religion and faith in a fast modernising but still officially communist China.
We asked Xie Chengshui if he would apply his considerable gift, as demonstrated in his exemplary reproduction of the Dunhuang murals, to bring Bamiyan back to life on paper. Our idea was that reimaging Bamiyan would be an apt tribute to the work of the unknown multitudes who, in the fourth century or thereabouts,3 carved the two giant Buddhas and clusters of caves around them in the sandstone rockface of Bamiyan’s mountains. True, the sculptures were far from perfect before their destruction due to the vagaries of time, having been stripped of the original stucco coating that would have given them a splendid appearance in years past, in the heyday of Buddhism in present-day Afghanistan. But their magnificence was all too apparent from the images and photographs that Xie Chengshui used to prepare for his paintings. The colouring he chose for the rock restored to the images a grandeur long lost. Xuanzang, the Buddhist monk who visited Bamiyan around 630, when it was still a flourishing centre of Buddhism, witnessed the figures “decorated with gold and fine jewels.”4 Despite the looting and plunder of the various Buddhist artefacts and stones over time, the Buddhas escaped attention from the more bigoted and obscurantist of Islamist militants, such as those who had systematically destroyed minority Muslim sect shrines on the Arabian Peninsula when Saudi Arabia came into being. By 2001, however, like-minded militants were in ascendancy in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and, while the story of the destruction is riddled with conjecture and hearsay, there is no doubting the determination of those who gave themselves the wrecking brief. Only the outlines and some battered 17