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Babasaheb Ambedkar Bactrian Alphabet Bamiyan B Babasaheb Ambedkar subcontinent with the Silk Road in Central Asia. Apparently, it was this function as a channel for ▶ Ambedkar long-distance trade which brought the necessary means for establishing a Buddhist center and ensured its ongoing support. With two exceptions, literary sources on the history of the valley are Bactrian Alphabet absent and there are only archaeological remains which help to infer a possible scenario. The place ▶ Kharoṣṭhī Script is famous for its monumental Buddha statues, and to have these statues carved out of the rock would have required considerable sponsorship. Such sponsorship could hardly have been available Bamiyan from local people alone, but since merchants played a decisive role in the spread of Buddhism Jens-Uwe Hartmann all along the Silk Road, it must have been wealthy Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie, University traders who, most probably in combination with of Munich, Munich, Germany royal patronage, donated the funds indispensable for creating such images [5]. The two standing Buddha statues were indeed Definition gigantic. The larger of the two measured about 53 m, and the smaller one stilled about 35 m. For The valley of the Bamiyan river in western more than a 1,000 years, they overlooked the Afghanistan. valley, slightly damaged by earlier invaders and largely forgotten after Afghanistan had become a thoroughly Islamic country. Within the last Location decade, however, they attracted worldwide atten- tion and it is a specific irony in history that this Bamiyan is the name of a river, a valley, and sudden awareness of their existence came as a small town. It lies to the west of Kabul in the a result of their total demolition by the Taliban western continuation of the Hindu Kush moun- forces in the beginning of March 2004. There are tains. In the first millennium C.E., the valley was plans, surely debatable, to reconstruct them; as one of the routes which connected the Indian a first step toward this goal, the debris in the # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 K.T.S. Sarao, J.D. Long (eds.), Buddhism and Jainism, Encyclopedia of Indian Religions, DOI 10.1007/978-94-024-0852-2 208 Bamiyan niches of the statues has been cleared and ana- pilgrimage, passed through the valley on his way lyzed and this has led to several important discov- back to China and he still draws a very positive eries. It was found that the statues were fully picture of Buddhism in the area. In his travel painted; the robe of the western, larger Buddha account, he mentions support for the religion must have been red and this even raises the ques- not only by the king, but by all classes of society, tion whether the image may have represented and he speaks of plenty of monasteries and Amitābha. For the origin of the images, scholars monks who practice both the Hīnayāna and the had proposed widely differing dates ranging from Mahāyāna [3]. the second to the eighth centuries. However, sam- There are artificial caves in the immediate ples taken from organic remains and subjected to vicinity of the Buddhas, some of them decorated radiocarbon analysis have resulted in a dating of with paintings, and there are more caves in other the eastern Buddha to the period 544–595 and of cliffs in the area, but they were probably not used the western Buddha to 591–644 [8]. as monasteries [4]. In the 1930s, they were However, both statues must have been in place inspected by members of a French team of archae- before 632 when Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang), ologists and this search yielded a few manuscript a Chinese monk and pilgrim on his way to visit fragments of Buddhist texts in Indian languages the holy places of Buddhism in India, passed [6]. Scholars were extremely surprised, therefore, through the valley and reported on the visit in when all of a sudden in the middle of the nineties his travel record [1, 7]. The record is preserved, thousands of manuscript fragments surfaced on and this makes him one of the only two eyewit- the rare book market in the West, allegedly from nesses of a time when Buddhism was still a major the Bamiyan area. All of them belonged to Bud- factor in the area. On his way from Central Asia to dhist works, many of which had been unknown so Bamiyan, Xuanzang had seen many signs of the far, and all of them were written in Indian lan- decline of Buddhism, but in Bamiyan, he encoun- guages. The study of these fragments revealed tered a flourishing Buddhist community. At more surprises: according to paleographical a certain distance from the standing Buddhas, criteria, the manuscripts cover a period from the the Chinese pilgrim describes a third and consid- second or third centuries to the eighth or ninth, erably larger statue, an image of the well-known with the majority stemming from the later centu- type of the reclining Buddha representing the ries. There are texts which scholars ascribe to scene of the Parinirvāṇa. Since Xuanzang is con- the canonical scriptures of the Mahāsāṃghika- sidered a fairly reliable witness, archaeologists Lokottaravādins, as attested already by have searched for this third image and recently Xuanzang, but there are also texts of other schools discovered the remains of such a statue which, and, notably, a fair number of manuscripts however, measures only 19 m. Whether this is containing Mahāyāna sūtras [2]. They reveal an yet another image or an indication that astonishing variety, suggesting a Buddhist com- Xuanzang’s measurements are the result of textual munity consisting of rather diverse currents, and corruption cannot be decided. they make it very clear that at least its literary Apart from the statues, Xuanzang mentions ten forms were exclusively Indian. Rumors have it monasteries in the area with about a 1,000 monks. that all these fragments were found in one cave He classifies them as belonging to the small near a place called Zargaran about 1 km east of the vehicle and to the school of the Mahāsāṃghika- smaller Buddha [2], but this information is not Lokottaravādins, a well-known school of earlier easy to verify. If true, it is difficult to explain Buddhism.Inhisrecord,healsoconfirms royal how this amazing collection came together; one patronage, alluding to a specific ritual regularly possible explanation would be that the fragments carried out by the local king for the benefit come from a gathering place for damaged manu- of the monks. A 100 years later, in 727, scripts which had fallen out of use or been Hyecho (Chinese Huichao), a Korean monk on replaced by new copies. Bauddha Gyāh 209 Cross-References Bārānāsī (Buddhism) ˙ ▶ Gandhara ▶ Mahāsāṅghika ▶ Vārāṇasī (Buddhism) ▶ Xuanzang (Hieun-Tsang) B References Basic Tenets of Buddhism 1. Beal S (1884) Si-Yu-Ki. Buddhist records of the west- ▶ Philosophy (Buddhism) ern world translated from the Chinese of Hiuen Tsang (A.D. 629). Trübner, London 2. Braarvig J (2006) Buddhist manuscripts, vol III. Her- mes Publishing, Oslo 3. Fuchs W (1938) Huei-ch’ao’s Pilgerreise durch Basis Consciousness Nordwest-Indien und Zentral-Asien um 726. Sitzungs- berichte der Preussischen Akademie der ▶ Ā ā Wissenschaften 426–469 laya-vijñ na 4. Higuchi T (1983–1984) Bāmiyān. Art and archaeolog- ical researches on the Buddhist cave temples in Afghan- istan 1970–1978, 4 vols. Dohosha, Kyoto 5. Klimburg-Salter D (1989) The kingdom of Bāmiyān. Buddhist art and culture of the Hindu Kush. Istituto Basket of Conduct Universitario Orientale, Naples 6. Lévi S (1932) Notes sur des manuscripts sanscrits ▶ Cariyāpiṭaka provenant de Bamiyan (Afghanistan), et de Gilgit (Cachemire). J Asiatique 220:1–45 7. Li R (1996) The great T’ang dynasty record of the western regions. University of Hawai’i Press, Berkeley 8. Petzet M/International Council on Monuments and Basket of Higher Expositions Sites (Hrsg.) (2009) The giant Buddhas of Bamiyan. Safeguarding the remains. Monuments and Sites 29. ▶ ṭ Hendrik Bäbler, Berlin Abhidhamma Pi aka Banaras (Buddhism) Basket of Transcendental Doctrine ▶ ṭ ▶ Vārāṇasī (Buddhism) Abhidhamma Pi aka Banārasa Battles ▶ Vārāṇasī (Buddhism) ▶ Warfare (Buddhism) Bārānasī Bauddha Gyāh ˙ ▶ Vārāṇasī (Buddhism) ▶ Bodhagayā 210 Bedsa Bedsa Claudine Bautze-Picron Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), UMR 7528 ‘Mondes Iranien et Indien’, Paris, France Synonyms Bedse Definition Buddhist excavated site in Maharashtra. Bedsa is a fairly small site, with only four caves (but altogether 15 excavations including cisterns), all facing east ([2], pp. 153–154; [3], pp. 107–113) (lat. 18430 N., long. 73320 E.; Maharashtra). Like most similar sites of the region, it has a large sanctuary surrounded by monastic dwell- ings. The caityagṛha (“house of the caitya”)of Bedsa, Fig. 1 Façade of the sanctuary (Photo # Joachim Bedsa (monument 7) has been excavated very K. Bautze) deep in the mountain, like the same monument at Kārlī but unlike the one of Bhājā: a passage has been cut here through the rocks to reach elephants, two animals of primordial importance a courtyard created in front of the monument as in Buddhist mythology, wearing elaborate dress such; together courtyard and monument measure and jewelry, these characters are most probably ca. 20 m in depth and ca. 8 m in width ([1], pp. images of the divine world, hence also their posi- 86–87) (Fig. 1). tion in the structure of the monuments – they are This courtyard practically coincides with a indeed depicted much above eye level (Fig. 2). veranda supported by octagonal pillars and pilas- Monastic cells have been excavated in both ters which are richly adorned: they stand within sidewalls of the veranda, and the caityagṛha as a base shaped as a pūrṇaghaṭa (“jar of abundance”) such is entered at the middle of the rear wall.
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