Regrets are not good things to have in one’s life: as Edith Piaf sang ‘je ne regrette rien’. However, we all have still have regrets to some degree or other. I’ll leave out silly regrets such as not having reached the summit of Mount Everest or visiting the South Pole but there are two places I could have visited and which are no more.
One is Palmyra, when I hitched across Syria as a very young kid when the world seemed a safer place.
The other is Bamiyan with its giant Buddhas, again when I hitched across a friendlier Afghanistan. Both places are now, sadly, irreparably damaged by Islamist fanatics.
It was, therefore, a wonderful discovery that I would still be able to see the world’s largest Buddha (clearly, once the second-largest) and that this Buddha would be the nearest I would get to the destroyed ones at Bamiyan, as it was carved in rock and was of similar antiquity.
We headed on a hundred mile bus journey from Chengdu to Leshan’s giant Buddha. From the town we took a boat across the river, followed its course round a meander and there it was, the world’s largest Buddha!
Depicting the Buddha as Maitreya, the one that is to come and replace the present Buddha, a sort of second coming in fact, the statue is 233 feet high and was built in the eighth century AD by a monk called Hai Tong in the hope that the presence of the statue would have a calming effect on the rushing waters of the river it overlooks. Indeed, the stone deposited into the river from the cliff to make the monolith did manage to slow down the current and make the passage for boats safer.
I found the statue’s presence awesomely inscrutable. Was I questioning this supernal apparition or was it questioning me?
The Maitreya, edged by his acolytes, was both calming and disturbing. What was he thinking? What was I to think?
Meanwhile, the river flowed gently, protected by the watchful gaze of a past presence of the future, a statue fading into the cliffside from which it was formed until the Buddha became a cliff and the cliff a Buddha.
Impassive you look
upon a suffering world:
in your mind green thoughts