Bamiyan Comes to Bangkok: Situating the Buddha of the Cave Museum at Wat Saket

Abstract

This paper traces the making of Bamiyan Buddhas beyond the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan since 2002. Recounting the building and rebuilding of a monastic complex in Bangkok, the study focuses on one of these new Buddhas, more complete than the “original” Bamiyan Buddha of the dually inscribed grotto, “Bamiyanguha-Bamiyan Museum”, at Wat Saket. In their global manifestations, the Bamiyan Buddhas have emerged as mobile sites, as place holders with direct and indirect citations to the destroyed Buddhas of the valley. The building of Wat Saket’s Bamiyan Buddha is situated within larger transnational histories of planned, projected, rejected, and reproduced Bamiyan Buddhas, within stylistic decisions related to questions of shifting material media, scale, and iconography involved in copying and reproductions, in the context of Thailand’s changing engagements with itinerance, multiplication, and copying strategies around Buddha images, and in national and global circuits of collecting, exhibitions, gift, and piety. The museum, specifically the cave-museum of Wat Saket, as a site of retinal and haptic vision which continues to challenge and blur the distinctions between curatorial visions, specialist pedagogy, visual instructions, aesthetic contemplation, and rapidly shifting and evolving complex of ritual practices and leisure, remains at the heart of this study.