Place · cliff-carved Buddha · Pakistan
Kargah Buddha, Gilgit
A standing Buddha some fifteen metres up a cliff in the Kargah nala west of Gilgit, cut in about the seventh century in a Kashmiri idiom, with the rock left rough around the figure. It is the most visible trace of the Buddhist Gilgit that produced the Gilgit manuscripts, found in a stupa nearby in 1931 — the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts in the subcontinent. The monastery that the relief presumably belonged to has never been located.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 35.911, 74.263
Worth knowing
Local story says the figure is a man-eating ogress pinned to the cliff by a holy man, who warned that she would come down if the rock were ever cut away — which is probably part of why it is still there.
Connections (3)
- Site adjacencyGilgit
The Kargah Buddha and the Gilgit manuscripts were found within a few kilometres of each other and are the two halves of the same evidence. The relief, cut about the seventh century high on a cliff in the Kargah nala, is what Buddhist Gilgit left standing; the birch-bark manuscripts recovered from a stupa in 1931 are what it left written, and they are the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts in the subcontinent. The monastery that both presumably belonged to has never been located.
- In the same set asManthal Buddha Rock, Skardu
The Manthal rock at Skardu and the Kargah relief at Gilgit are the two substantial Buddhist carvings of the upper Indus, and both are Kashmiri in idiom rather than Gandharan — eighth and seventh century respectively, cut when Kashmir's influence ran north over the passes. They mark a Buddhist Baltistan and Gilgit that the fourteenth-century conversion ended. Baltistan kept the Tibetan language it had then and lost the religion, so the carving is now read by people whose speech is closer to the carver's than their faith is.
- Site withinGilgit
The Kargah Buddha rock relief sits within Gilgit in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, 10 kilometres from the Gilgit city centre on the Kargah Nala stream. The 3-metre standing Buddha carved into a cliff face in the 7-century documents the Buddhist cultural layer of pre-Islamic Gilgit. The adjacent Kargah Buddhist monastery ruins and the 1931 Gilgit manuscripts find (6-7 century Sanskrit Buddhist texts) tie this Gilgit outcrop to the Central Asian Silk Road Buddhist corridor.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kargah Buddha”. Gilgit-Baltistan department of archaeology records; Oskar von Hinüber on the Gilgit manuscripts and their find-spot.
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