- Taliban are only the latest in the
line
- Aswani Talwar
(March 4, 2001): Bamiyan has been
there before. Changiz Khan devastated the place, though he couldn't get around to damaging
the two Buddhas. Around 870 AD, Yakub-bin-Laith destroyed idols in the Bamiyan and
possibly plucked the precious stones of the two statues. And rather like the Taliban,
Aurangzeb ordered canon-shots to be fired at the huge images.
The Buddhist relics have continued to come
under attack by an assortment of conquerors. The Talibans are only the latest in the line.
The story of Bamiyan's survival forms part
of C S Upasak's History of Buddhism in Afghanistan, written a decade ago, with the
help of grants from the Indian Council of Historic Research.
It is not clear when the place came up,
but it was certainly before the third century AD, says Upasak. The followers of the
Lokuttaravadin school of Buddhism probably founded Bamiyan and made it their stronghold.
Upasak says the Lokuttaravadins carved out the smaller of the two Buddhas by early second
century AD and the bigger Buddha in the fifth.
When Chinese scholar Hiuen-Tsang visited
Bamiyan in the early seventh century, Bamiyan flourished as a Buddhist centre. ``There are
some tens of Buddhist monasteries with several thousand brethren,'' he wrote. Bamiyan was
a rather cosmopolitan place then: a meeting ground of different schools of Buddhism and a
retreat for monks from different parts of the world. The Chinese traveller was taken
around the place by two monks with Indian-sounding names, Aryadasa and Aryasena.
As a Buddhist centre, Bamiyan has been
compared to Nalanda for its size. A honeycomb of caves still exist where monks went into
retreat for part of the year. Apart from the semi-permanent population of monks, others
travelled with the caravans that did the Silk Route.
Buddhism had probably reached Bamiyan by
320 BC, when Chandragupta Maurya took the throne, says Upasak, who has been the director
of the Nava Nalanda Mahavihara in Nalanda. Afghanistan was under Mauryan dominance, and
this helped Buddhism to flourish there.
When the Empire disintegrated, parts of
Afghanistan were re-occupied by Indo-Bactrians. Buddhism was also patronised by the
Kushanas: a Kanishka coin has been found in Bamiyan and Upasak says this supports the view
that he ruled over the region. It is possible that the cave-monasteries started coming up
during Kanishka's reign.
By the middle of the third century AD,
Iran's fire-worshipping Sassanian dynasty took control over the Bamiyan region. But they
let the Buddhist fraternity in Bamiyan be. The local king regained his semi-independent
status.
In the fifth century AD, the invading Huns
came. And before their advance was halted by the Guptas in the east and Sassanians and
Turks in the west, they had a brief run in Afghanistan. Upasak says they tried to
exterminate Buddhism from Kabul, Peshawar and Gandhara, but Bamiyan probably lay off their
route.
In the late seventh century, the Arabs
defeated the Sassanians, and in time took over both Kabul and Kandahar. But the small
Buddhist kingdom of Bamiyan remained intact for another century. The princes of Bamiyan
were converted to Islam probably during the reign of the Abbasid dynasty, a century later.
Says Upasak, community of Bamiyan probably converted to Islam under pressure during that
time.