Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud

by Sun Shuyun

  What these artists achieved was to come as close as humanly possible to an image of an enlightened being. Whether standing with their hands raised in the symbolic gesture of protection or seated on a lotus throne in deep meditation, the best statues of the Buddha in the Peshawar Museum have an air of calm, tranquillity and spirituality. Their eyes open or half-closed, they seem detached, faraway, withdrawn into the realm of emptiness by deep meditation. Buddhists immediately took to them. From the Buddhist images of Afghanistan to the Buddhist caves in the oases of Chinese Central Asia, from the murals and statues in the heartland of China to the temples of Korea and Japan, the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of Gandhara might have been startling at first, as they were to me when I saw them in Kucha, but they soon took over the Buddhist imagination. Now it is hard to think of Buddhism without them: carved out of giant rocks on main trade routes, as the focal point of temples, on altar tables in private homes, and hanging from pendants worn by men and women, they have become the universal emblem of Buddhism.

  I stayed in the museum until closing-time, almost in a trance, moved both by the sculptures and the thought that Xuanzang may have looked on them himself. But eventually I had to come down to earth, or almost: the evening that lay ahead was slightly unreal too. Peter and his wife took me to the club near their house. It was a bungalow with a huge and beautifully kept garden. The air was cool, there were women wearing beautiful pashmina shawls and men in smart jackets. The tablecloths were beautifully starched, the wine glasses sparkled under the chandeliers, the napkins were folded into impeccable peacock’s-tails, as were the ends of the waiters’ turbans. The food was quintessentially English, lamb and mint sauce, custard tart. You could not believe you were in one of the world’s most strife-torn regions.

  The day was one of the strangest of my life – the morning full of guns, drugs and tales of violence, the afternoon a meditation surrounded by ethereal Buddhist presences, the evening a piece of post-colonial theatre. I could not fit these together, except by thinking that Xuanzang went through something comparable: he witnessed the destruction of the White Huns, but saw the greatest Gandharan Buddhas, and met strange foreigners who populated the land, descendants of the Greeks, Kushans, Persians and Turks. It is a volatile place, forever being trampled on. The Pashtuns had learned to survive, and perhaps need a faith as forceful as Islam. The miracle was that Buddhism once flowered so finely here, and that so many beautiful monuments to it were still here to be seen.

  Over dinner Peter confirmed what I had expected: it really was impossible for me to go into Afghanistan. The Taliban were not only being uncooperative, they were harassing UN staff on the ground. He had heard that a Taliban general had physically beaten up a UN official who would not agree to his terms. Nobody was sure what they were going to do next; they seemed to be a law unto themselves. The UN was thinking of pulling all its people out. The Taliban were mad, Peter said, they would not listen to anyone. He tried to cheer me up – the everyday life depicted on the Gandharan reliefs, the feel of a Silk Road city as Xuanzang would have known it, could still be found in the old Peshawar.

  The next day Keewar and I took a taxi to the old town. Keewar decided not to take his gun. ‘You’re a beautiful woman, no threat to anyone. Just put the scarf of your shalwar-kameez over your head. That’s enough protection.’ He laughed. As we drove along, one thing struck me forcibly – there were hardly any women to be seen, and the few who walked by the roadside were swathed in blue from head to foot, invisible. I had just come through Xinjiang and Kyrgyzstan, where women mingled freely with men everywhere I went, and I never felt out of place. I had intended to ask Keewar about this the day before.

  ‘It must be awful having to wear the burkha,’ I said, thinking also of his wife in Afghanistan.

  ‘Every woman has to under the Taliban if she doesn’t want trouble.’ After a long pause, he added: ‘Given how things are, perhaps it is better for her to hide behind a burkha, or to be a prisoner inside the house.’

  I asked him what he meant by that.

  ‘You don’t know the Taliban,’ said Keewar. ‘They’ve been fighting non-stop for many years. Most of the time they’re stuck in the mountains and never see a woman. They’re all charged up, but have no relief. So when they take a place the soldiers go on a rampage of raping, from young girls to old women, anything that has breasts. I think the urge is still there. It is best for women to keep out of their sight.

  ‘Is it true the Chinese women used to have their feet bound?’ he came back at me. ‘Why? That sounds worse than wearing the burkha, don’t you think?’

  Keewar was right in a way. Foot-binding was the worst kind of male domination. Men thought it made women look sexier. But it also crippled them and stopped them running away, although they still had to do all the hard work. But at least we put a stop to it ages ago. That was one of the best things Communism did for us: making sure women could all go to school, get jobs and choose their own husbands.

  ‘You’ve done pretty well, haven’t you?’ He looked me in the eyes. ‘I mean, travelling around on your own like this. Is your husband happy?’

  ‘He isn’t happy,’ I said, ‘but he wouldn’t stop me doing what I want to do.’ Keewar stared at me, perplexed by the freedom I enjoyed, which would be unthinkable for an Afghan wife.

  We passed several mosques and I told Keewar that it was a real pity that women were not allowed in. ‘I think you’d be too distracting for the men. So we’d better keep you away,’ he said jokingly, and then became serious. ‘I don’t know why women are considered to be unclean.’

  I told Keewar Buddhism has restrictions on women too – a nun, however senior she is, has to walk behind the youngest monk in Buddhist ceremonies, but at least in Buddhism women have the same potential for enlightenment as men. Women like my grandmother are the backbone of the faith. They look after the family altar in the house; they go to the temples; they say prayers and make offerings – I cannot imagine Buddhism without women. The favourite Bodhisattva in China is Guanyin, a woman.

  ‘That was also what our people believed over a thousand years ago. Very interesting,’ Keewar said with a thoughtful look. ‘But here we are – time to find what you are looking for.’

  We had reached the centre of old Peshawar. Fittingly for a Silk Road town, it is called the Storytellers’ Bazaar. Here the caravans that Xuanzang travelled with would have camped and exchanged information about their commodities and journeys ahead, and then been entertained by storytellers. Xuanzang would have stayed in a monastery, although he must have wandered in the bazaar and collected the history and legends of the Kingdom of Gandhara, some of which found their way into his Record. More than a thousand years later, after all the wars and destruction that have taken place in this region, there is nothing to be found that he could have seen. But the bazaar is still, as in the old days, the centre of the town’s life.

  A wide avenue, it was thronged with cars, carts, men and children. Instead of storytellers, loudspeakers were playing Qawali music. Narrow lanes spiralled away from the bazaar, up steep steps and around corners into a maze of stalls specializing in vegetables, fruits, spices, clothes, hardware, grains, money-lending, jewellery, anything you can think of. Some alleys were so constricted you could not even walk two abreast. I would have been scared to go down them alone: there were so many hidden doorways into which someone could snatch you and you would never be seen again. But with Keewar there I felt safe. I could not help noticing that the sandals on people’s feet and the jewellery displayed in the windows of the silversmiths were almost the same as those worn by the Bodhisattvas in the museum. The bright blue eyes of men and children that met my gaze reminded me of the former Greek settlers. I really did feel I had gone back in time to the old days of the Silk Road, when Xuanzang came here.

  The bazaars at that time were probably even busier, for the Romans had an insatiable appetite for Indian spices and the Indians were as fascinated by Chinese silk as the Romans, not only to
make beautiful garments but also to adorn their stupas and shrines. And there were other treasures. In the third century BC the great Indian ruler Asoka built a road linking the heart of the Gangetic plain with the northwest of his empire. This made Peshawar one of the richest cities along the highways of the Silk Road. Wealth flowed into the pockets of the merchants of Gandhara, and their coffers paid for the innumerable monasteries that Xuanzang records.

  One place in the bazaar that I was particularly interested in was the grain market, where the guidebook says a pipal tree had once been. Xuanzang tells us this was an important pilgrimage site in Peshawar at the time – where the Buddha sat, and where he told Ananda, his favourite disciple, that four hundred years after his death, there would be a king by the name of Kanishka who would worship the Dharma, and build a stupa near the pipal tree to hold his relics. It did not seem to matter that the Buddha never came to Peshawar, nor that this forecast of Kanishka’s conversion to Buddhism was perhaps added to the sutras much later. Xuanzang believed, as all Buddhists do, that the Buddha had gone through numerous previous lives, many of which he spent in the Kingdom of Gandhara, for his final enlightenment. Kanishka would have been a very familiar figure to Xuanzang. His people, the Kushans, were descended from the Yuechi, a nomadic tribe, who originally lived beyond the Great Wall, and were driven out of their homes by the Chinese; they migrated westward, and finally set up an empire of their own, stretching from the oases in the Taklamakan Desert to the northern Gangetic plains of India, with its winter capital in Peshawar. Although worshipping Persian deities, the Kushans also embraced Buddhism, in particular under King Kanishka, the greatest of the Kushan rulers, and his successor, in the second century AD. The many richly endowed stupas and monasteries that Xuanzang saw in Peshawar and nearby came from this time, as did the sublime images of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas first created in the Kushan empire. There were even coins bearing the image of the Buddha on one side and Kanishka himself on the reverse.

  At the time of Xuanzang’s visit, the stupa that legend says Kanishka built to hold the Buddha’s relics was destroyed by a fire. The locals told him it was the third time that this giant stupa of almost 150 feet had caught fire, and that ‘after the seventh time, Buddhism would disappear’. Buddhism did indeed disappear from Gandhara, and the stupa was destroyed in the tenth century and its remains were buried under a mound of earth until Xuanzang’s record led the British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham to identify it in the nineteenth century.

  The pipal tree lasted much longer – till the nineteenth century; it was referred to by the great Mughal emperors Babur and Akbar. A friendly-looking shopkeeper invited us to sit with him among his sacks of corn, maize, flour and two dozen different kinds of lentils, green, yellow, brown and black, and we joined him for a cup of khawa. I asked him if he knew about the tree.

  ‘Many Japanese visitors come to look for the tree,’ he said. ‘What is so special about it?’

  I told him that the Buddha once sat under it.

  ‘So?’ He looked at me, expectantly.

  ‘So they want to come and pay homage.’

  ‘Are you a Buddhist?’ he asked.

  I said I was very interested in Buddhism.

  ‘Are you interested in Buddhist statues?’ he said in a quieter voice.

  ‘I saw some beautiful ones in Peshawar Museum yesterday.’

  ‘Sometimes you people try to buy one.’ He seemed to think I was a rich Japanese.

  ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘It can be arranged. There are people dealing in this sort of thing. Are you interested?’ he asked as casually as he could.

  I had heard antique-smuggling was rife in Peshawar. The Kabul Museum was hit so many times: the roof had fallen in and the façade had been demolished by rockets. Its collection, one of the most precious in the world, over 100,000 pieces, had been plundered since the withdrawal of the Soviet armies in 1992. Among the best were the magnificent Begram treasures, which included exquisitely carved ivory panels from India, Roman bronzes, and the finest of all, a glass vase representing one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – the famous lighthouse at Alexandria. People said it was easy to acquire valuable antiques here, and I decided to try for myself. I asked the shopkeeper what he had.

  ‘Anything you want,’ he said confidently. ‘Statues, stucco heads, coins, jewellery.’

  ‘Could I take them out of the country?’ I asked.

  ‘No problem. We will help you.’

  ‘Can I have a look at a small Gandhara head and some coins?’

  ‘Just wait.’

  He disappeared. I asked Keewar what he knew about antique-smuggling. ‘It’s a big business here. Everyone is involved – farmers, tribesmen, politicians, parliament members, customs officials. It is as well organized as drug trafficking, and perhaps even more profitable.’

  The man reappeared half an hour later, with a little sack. We retreated into the back of his shop. Slowly from his sack emerged handfuls of copper coins, whose dates or authenticity I could not determine. But of the beautiful stucco head of a Bodhisattva, there was no denying the antiquity. The expression on the face was so otherworldly. I doubted whether anyone who did not truly understand the message of the Buddha could copy it so perfectly. It was like some of the best pieces in the Peshawar Museum. Its price was thirty thousand pounds. I could not afford it, but he said there were plenty of eager buyers. From the maze-like bazaars of Peshawar, the treasures of Afghanistan and Pakistan, piece by piece, will wriggle their way to private owners, dealers and museums in the Far East and the West, until there will be nothing left inside the country. Thank God, I remember thinking, they could not smuggle the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan.

  As everyone now knows, the worst was yet to come. On 26 February 2001, a year after I had tried in vain to enter Afghanistan, Mullah Mohammed Omar issued this decree:

  In view of the Fatwa of prominent Afghan scholars and the verdict of the Afghan Supreme Court, it has been decided to break down all statues/idols present in different parts of the country. This is because these idols have been gods of the infidels, who worshipped them, and these are respected even now and perhaps may be turned into gods again. The real god is only Allah, and all other false gods should be removed.

  The destruction started with the Buddhas of Bamiyan. ‘The statues had been left over from our ancestors as a wrong heritage,’ the international community was told and its pleas, protests and requests to purchase them were completely ignored. As the world watched helplessly, tanks and anti-aircraft rocket-launchers fired round after round at the Buddhas, knocking off the heads, the legs and the heavy folds of their robes. But the statues which had been standing there for over a millennium, and had withstood the onslaught of Genghis Khan’s army, would not surrender.

  I thought of Xuanzang often during those fateful weeks of destruction. He had stood right there, just after they were built. He received a warm reception on reaching the Kingdom of Bamiyan. The king came out to meet him in person and invited him to the palace. He was, Xuanzang says, so devout that he frequently assembled his people and the monks in the country to give away all his possessions, only to have them bartered back by his ministers and officers. On meeting Xuanzang, the monks were surprised, Hui Li tells us, ‘that there should be such a great master in a country as distant as China. With great courtesy they accompanied him to all the holy places.’ This is how Xuanzang describes the bigger of the statues: ‘To the northeast of the royal city there is a mountain, on whose slope there stands a stone figure of the Buddha, erect, 145 or 150 feet in height. Its golden hues sparkle on every side, and its precious ornaments dazzle the eyes by their brightness.’

  Disturbed by how long it had taken to destroy them, Mohammed Omar instructed that a hundred cows be slaughtered around the country ‘to atone for the delay in the demolition of the statues’. To speed up their action, soldiers climbed up and down the tunnels behind the giant statues and filled them with dynamite. Then the final
moment came. The Taliban filmed the whole act of destruction, and put it on video, showing it around the world, as yet another gesture of their defiance. I watched it on the Internet at home in disbelief, as a huge explosion shook the ground amid cheers and cries of delight, ‘God is great,’ and ‘Whatever God wills’. Then a cloud of dust and smoke filled the air and the valley, shrouding the entire mountain. When the dust settled and the smoke cleared, where the two Buddhas had stood was nothing but two gaping holes. On the ground lay two huge piles of rubble that were once the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Then the Taliban soldiers scrambled up into the empty spaces, waving and shouting in triumph. They looked as small as scorpions but just as deadly. Their commander who oversaw the destruction later announced to the world: ‘First, we destroyed the small statue. It was a woman. Then we blew up her husband.’

  The two colossal Buddhas were gone. So too were most of the sculptures that had survived in the Kabul Museum. The Taliban soldiers burst in there and for three days smashed with hammers and axes what was left of the thousands of statues. The last one to go was the finest piece in the museum’s collection, the second-century limestone statue of King Kanishka, the great patron of Buddhism. They laughed while they hacked it to pieces, until it was reduced to yet another pile of rubble. Every trace of Buddhism, every image was to be erased from Afghanistan. Their ancestors had built the biggest statues of the Buddha that the world has ever seen to prove the strength of their faith; now they proved themselves to Allah by destroying them.

  In the end, the Taliban achieved something they never intended. The weeks of shelling and the final destruction of the statues focused the whole world’s attention on Afghanistan’s rich Buddhist past, the history of these stone sculptures, and, as Xuanzang described, the fervour of the local people’s devotion which led them to create them. Afghanistan was known for war, strife, starvation and fanaticism. Now its hidden history was revealed. When the statues were standing there, they were ignored, their existence unknown to most people. Now they are gone, they have perhaps acquired a lasting place, more beautiful and more revered, in people’s hearts. From this brutal act something invaluable was born: an understanding of Buddhism has spread where it had not reached before. Out of death comes rebirth – this was a Buddhist message after all.