Place · Buddhist cliff sanctuary · Afghanistan
Bāmiyān
The valley 230 kilometres northwest of Kabul holding the colossal cliff Buddhas carved from the sandstone cliff face in the 6th-7th centuries — the 55-metre Vairocana and the 38-metre Sakyamuni — and 1,000 painted caves with Hellenistic-Gandharan iconography. Bamiyan was the far northwestern reach of the subcontinent's Buddhist world and a Silk Road hub between the Gandhara-Taxila cultural zone and Central Asia. The Taliban demolished both Buddhas with explosives in March 2001 after a decree declaring them idolatrous, and much of the painted cave art was destroyed with them. UNESCO World Heritage Site in Danger since 2003. The empty niches remain.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Chinese pilgrim accounts; Gandharan-Bactrian tradition
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.831, 67.826
Connections (5)
- Architectural modelGandhāra
Gandhara and Bamiyan were connected through the Buddhist networks linking the northwestern Indian subcontinent with Central Asia and Afghanistan. Gandhara developed distinctive Buddhist art and monastic traditions, while Bamiyan became famous for its monumental Buddha statues and monasteries. Both formed important nodes in the transmission of Buddhism, artistic styles and ideas across Asia.
- Site adjacencyTakht-i-bahi
Takht-i-Bahi and Bamiyan are about six hundred kilometres apart along the road through the Khyber and over the Hindu Kush, and they are two stages of one Buddhist landscape running from the Indus into Central Asia — the Gandharan monastery and the cliff sanctuary with its colossal Buddhas. What was carved in Gandharan stone in the second century was painted and cut in Afghan cliff in the sixth, and the Bamiyan figures were dynamited in 2001.
- Trade routePurushapura / Peshawar
The road from Purushapura over the Hindu Kush to Bamiyan and Balkh is the one the Chinese pilgrims took, and each of them describes Kanishka's relic tower at Peshawar and then the colossal Buddhas in the cliff. Faxian, Songyun and Xuanzang measured the tower and disagreed about its height; all three found it the most impressive structure in India. It burned repeatedly and was rebuilt, and nothing of it survives above ground.
- Mythic displacement toHazara Town, Quetta
Quetta's Hazaras came from the Hazarajat, the central Afghan highlands whose best-known place is Bāmiyān, and they came because of a war. Amīr Abdur Rahmān Khān's campaigns against the Hazaras between 1891 and 1893 involved mass killing, enslavement and the seizure of grazing land, and the survivors' flight south-east into British Balochistan established the Quetta community. Later waves followed in the 1980s and under the Taliban. The Buddhas at Bāmiyān and the Hazara quarters in Quetta are two chapters of the same valley's history.
- AnalogueGhālegay & the Shingardar stupa
The two Buddhas that militants blew up, and the difference in what followed. The Bāmiyān colossi, fifty-five and thirty-eight metres in cliff niches, were destroyed with artillery and explosives in March 2001 and have not been rebuilt; the niches are empty and the argument about whether to fill them is unresolved. The seventh-century rock Buddha at Ghālegay in Swat was dynamited in 2007, and an Italian team spent nearly a decade reassembling and reattaching the fragments, returning the figure to view in 2016 with the joins deliberately left visible.
On these journeys
Sources
Bamiyan Valley — UNESCO
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