Taliban’s Destructiveness Foolish, Futile

I am deeply distressed by the Taliban religious militia’s destruction of the Buddhist statues in Bamiyan because the statues and the Buddhist monastic sites are an exceptionally important cultural heritage of humanity.

I was in Bamiyan in 1975. I recall the evening when the governor of the district accompanied me up to the gallery behind the great statue so that I could appreciate at different levels the artistic perfection of this colossal statue, which rose to the height of an 18-story skyscraper.

On that Vesak night--sacred to Buddhists as it marks the birth, enlightenment and death of the Buddha--I gazed on it from 3 in the morning to sunrise from my hotel room on the opposite side of the valley.

It was an unforgettable emotion. The statue was of the Buddha. But the technology and artistic perfection of the great monuments of Bamiyan were a reminder of and tribute to the greatness of the people of the land of Afghanistan as far back as the early centuries of the current era.

To destroy this site is to wipe out the country’s past glory. It is Afghanistan that loses in the process. The perpetrators of this damage need to be told that neither the Buddha nor Buddhism will suffer in any way. One may recall a line from a poem of Pablo Neruda:

“One may destroy all the roses in the world but cannot prevent the coming of spring.�

If they think that Islam is going to be protected or glorified by their dastardly action, they should listen to the international Muslim leadership who have called this action most un-Islamic and denounced it in no uncertain terms.

It is encouraging that the Islamic leadership of the world has come to the forefront of the international effort to stop the destruction. As a Buddhist and a believer in the sanctity of all religious monuments that constitute the human heritage, I am grateful to them as well as to all others who engaged in trying to convince the Taliban regime its actions were wrong.

Ananda W.P. Guruge, who lives in Huntington Beach, is the director of the International Academy of Buddhism at Hsi Lai University in Rosemead.