Another Buddha Desecrated by Islamists
November 5, 2007, 8:41 pm |
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By Andrew L. Jaffee
Buddha was The Prince of Peace (for good reason if you’ve read, for example, the Dhammapada). Islamists feel threatened by Buddha? Here we go again:
… In northwest Pakistan’s Swat valley, armed Islamist militants recently attacked one of the oldest and most important sculptures of Buddhist art. Dating from around the beginning of the Christian era, and carved into a 130-foot-high rock, the seated image of the Buddha was second in importance in South Asia only to the Bamiyan Buddhas.
This, moreover, was the second attack in less than a month. Murtaza Razvi has pointed out that the image that was attacked was not in a remote area. In fact, it was next to the central road that runs through the valley.
Despite repeated requests by Pakistani archeologists to the local authorities to protect the seated Buddha and other sites, especially after the first attack, no action was taken. In fact, militants were able to carry out their work — drilling holes in the rock, filling them with explosives, and detonating them — in broad daylight. …
I thought Pakistani President Musharraf was getting tough on extremism…
Related: Islam, Pakistan, Racism
November 10th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
I am a Buddhist and yes I was offended for a short time. I then realized that they are just humans taken down an illusionary path and we must forgive them. It is ignorance and they experienced a bad upbringing of some sort. The buddha will still live in our hearts, a statue of the buddha will not be permanent anyways. We must stand strong and not give in to the ‘pain’ of a statue of Buddha being desecrated, for this world is only an illusion and anger brings us further away from enlightenment.
November 11th, 2007 at 9:40 am
Sure, Buddha’s message was that life was transient (and life is suffering). It is fine for Buddhists, and others of similar belief systems to practice this belief. But the Buddha never advocated destroying other people’s cultural traditions. His was perhaps one of the most tolerant of belief systems.
With all due respect, this “Buddha wouldn’t have minded” stuff is just a cop-out — a way of submitting to Islamist terror; a way of sweeping terrorism under the rug; and a way of tolerating intolerance.
There is simply no justification for the Islamist campaign of religious cleansing, or anyone else’s campaigns of ethnic cleansing. I would think that we could all agree that people shouldn’t go around blowing up people’s religious monuments. It is called “civilization.”