Giant Buddhas

Perhaps the greatest example of Buddhism in art was the giant Buddha sculptures of Bamyan in Afghanistan. The two sculptures, each standing over one hundred feet tall, were carved into sandstone cliff walls in the sixth century ce. Details were added using mud plaster, and the statues were originally brightly painted. Being carved from soft sandstone, the statues lost a great deal of their original detail and form due to centuries of erosion by wind and rain. In 2001, the Taliban, an extremist Islamic political party that controlled Afghanistan, destroyed much of what remained of the giant Buddha statues. The giant statues were blasted with dynamite and tank mortars for nearly a month to ensure their destruction.

The Giant Buddhas (2005), a documentary by Christian Frei, details the history of the Bamyan Buddhas and their destruction at the hands of the Taliban. The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.

Free-thinkers in the nineteenth century, including the American Transcendentalists, who sought alternatives to the dominant Western worldview. The writings of American poet Walt Whitman and social maverick Henry David Thoreau (author of Walden, 1854) both show the influence of Buddhism.

German author Herman Hesse introduced many Westerners to Buddhism with his 1922 novel Siddhartha, which was based on the spiritual journey of Siddhartha Gautama. The branch of Buddhism known as Zen Buddhism attracted the attention of the Beat generation writers of the 1950s, and featured prominently in Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. Novelist J. D. Salinger’s work, including The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters (1963), also reveals the author’s interest in Zen Buddhism.

The novel Siddhartha and Buddhist teachings in general became particularly popular in the United States during the countercultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when, again, Buddhism was seen as an alternative to what many perceived as a violent, consumerist Western culture. Robert M. Pirsig’s 1974 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values became one of the bestselling books of philosophy of all time.