Headless Buddhas

Here is some information on the Giant Buddhas:

The Destruction of the Statues in Bamiyan
The Buddhas of Bamiyan - Destruction - IGP - ETH Zurich

The two colossal statues of Buddha carved into the sandstone cliffs of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, were demolished by the Taleban on March 2001. The Taleban people is a fundamentalist Islamic militia that has governed most of Aghanistan from 1996 to December 2001.

Against international protests and appeals, the supreme Taleban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar ordered their destruction as part of a campaign to rid the land of all un-Islamic graven images. The leader issued an edict declaring the statues (and therefore the ancient Buddhas) as insulting to Islam. This means that all idolatrous images of humans and animals and all those idols considered by them to be an insult to Islam had to be destroyed.

By March 12, 2001, these giant Buddhas had been destroyed by the use of mortars, dynamite, tanks, anti-aircraft weapons and rockets. Now they are nothing but piles of sandstone rubble and clay plaster

( and as the website points out )

...The Buddha is not God or even one among many gods. During his lifetime of 80 years, Buddha Sakyamuni only allowed his image to be recorded as a reflection in rippling water. Images of the Buddha himself did not appear for at least 400 years after his death and even then were created only to remind followers of their own innate "Buddha Nature."

Headless Buddhas
( written in response to the Taleban cutting off the heads
of the Giant Buddhas in Afghanistan & later in 2001 obliterating them with explosives)
by gordon coombes


Headless Buddhas watching over us
sharing pearls of wisdom
all is as it is
pray for patience
all these Empires
all these fanatics
come & go
change is never what we desire
your freedom is my loss
your loss is my freedom
our desires are lost in a waterfall
emptying out a vast lake
given enough time-

our time slows down to a crawl
speeds up
we madly dance about
whirling Dirvishes
never catching our breath
each moment twisted out of shape
by our dissecting
leading to suffering
deconstructing each hard-edged
moment -

once we called out demanded
truth revealed in a few words
with no ambiguity-

it is not so simple
truth is sometimes hidden
beneath strange symbols
under rocks & old logs
left on the ground to rot-
sometimes we are led into strange places
left wondering about Ahab's White Whale
& what lies deep in the caverns
of Thoreau's Walden Pond
against our will led into the dark depths
under the thick solid ice
somewhere deep inside the Jumble Jar-

see you later,
gord.