Threatened, besieged Buddha refuses to leave Gandhara

Peshawar Museum is the book that contains Buddha’s life story: a dog-eared book, no doubt, but one that is a treasure trove.

BRIGHT ideas rarely travel as far as the boundary lines of the North-western Frontier Province. Nevertheless, whenever an idea did venture into this land, it left indelible imprints on the few places of note that it came into contact with. One such place in the otherwise dreary landscape of Peshawar is the tall redbrick building of the Peshawar Museum.

A few years back someone wisely thought to light up the Gothic-styled building with yellow fluorescent bulbs. The old building, suddenly aglow in yellow floodlights, presented such a wonderful spectacle that it was appreciated even by the 99.99 per cent of the local folks who had never cared to step inside the building, even if merely out of their otherwise pervert sense of curiosity.

Before the conception of the idea and its seeing the light of the day, the darkness of the night would only add to the abject neglect of the building. Dark cloudy evenings would further amplify the gloom written large on the tall walls when it would look as if the building was mourning the loss of its priceless artifacts to the vicissitudes of times.

The lights have once again been put out and the doors of the museum now mostly remain closed even to that extremely thin line of visitors.

The closure of the museum’s doors is owing to the dramatic change for the worst in the law and order situation. ‘History, heritage and culture are now taboos’, iconoclastic decrees say so. But long before that happened, the scene in the Peshawar museum had never been all that promising, if not utterly dismal.

Whereas such wickedness shown to places of lesser importance could have been tolerated to some extent, it looks totally unacceptable in the case of the erstwhile centre of Gandhara civilisation. What is so inexcusably wrong with the decayed set-up of the museum was witnessed during a chance visit when the grade three students of an English medium school were on a visit.

‘Ma’am where is the curator,’ a visibly shaken precocious boy asked his teacher when he saw a shabbily dressed guard following them in various sections of the museum. ‘Ma’am why is it so dark here, I can’t quite figure out who that man is,’ another pupil remarked while pointing out at the dust-covered statue of Buddha. When yet another poorly dressed man went over to distribute brochures among the children, they all excitedly asked if that fellow indeed was the curator. The young students looked quite disappointed when they sauntered into the sections exhibiting the so-called ethnology of the land as they probably expected a lively ambience with at least a projector for the guidance of the young ones.

Peshawar museum should not have been just another run of the mill government factory. Frontier is the custodian of some of the rare relics of the Gandhara art displayed in the Peshawar Museum apart from those which are believed to have been illegally transported or outrightly stolen by some of the invaders and other unscrupulous elements.

Siddharth Gautama, famously called Buddha (the enlightened or awakened one), was born a prince in the fifth or sixth century BC (circa) at Lumbini, formerly in India and now a border town in Nepal. He could not be expected to have visited Gandhara (the present day Frontier) but his followers made Gandhara their cherished place of meditation somewhere from the second century AD onward.

The archaeological relics showing the devotees’ love of Buddha and found over a wide area in Mardan, Takht Bhai, Swabi, Swat, Charsadda and Peshawar date back to the same period.

Peshawar Museum is the book that contains Buddha’s life story: a dog-eared book, no doubt, but one that is a treasure trove. Buddha in his mother’s womb, his mother undergoing birth pangs, Buddha born and growing up as a prince, Buddha’s encounter with sickness, old age and death, his flight from home, his begging bowl and meditation under the bhodi tree (pipal or ficus religiosa), Buddha’s struggle to attain ‘Nirvana’ and his death and cremation, there is nothing amiss in the magnum opus as it is available in the Peshawar Museum.

And yet the unabated tragedy is such that the epic of the enlightened one goes largely ignored, as it lies hidden in the dungeon-like darkness of the museum.

But the level of apathy is not so widespread. Just before the recent spate of violence, one would see Japanese and Koreans cycling all the way from Islamabad in the scorching heat of May and June to the site of Buddhist monastery perched on a mound in Takht Bhai. Such devotion and peace of mind and body by the Buddha’s disciples is indeed awesome.

Thankfully, there are quite a few admirers of the glorious Buddhist period in our near about as well. One recently barged into a photographer’s shop in the Peshawar cantonment where two fellows were found discussing how breathtaking the monastery looked on a full-moon-night.

A senior civil servant, Yousaf Afridi, was recently heard saying,’ Thank God Bamiyan did not happen to us or we wouldn’t have been able to hide the shame.’ That was a sad allusion to and a reminder of the destruction of 53-meter tall Buddha’s statue in Bamiyan by the Taliban government in May 2001.Since then many Bamiyans on little scales have already happened on our own land. Swat is the most affected area, though the Swat Museum is said to be relatively safe. Buddha’s foes, howsoever strong they might be, do not however, see that Buddha’s resilience and message of peace is far stronger than their armoury and violence. Buddha simply cannot be evicted from Frontier, as new sites and archaeological discoveries keep popping up here, there and everywhere in this area.

The present NWFP government is undertaking many projects in Mardan. A university is said to be included in the list. The government must model the university in Mardan on the pattern of the grand monastery in Takht Bhai. That would make the august institution a splendid piece of architecture thus adding grandeur to the lackluster architecture of the province. But more than anything else, the monastery-shaped university would be the best message of peace to convey to the world.