{"book":"adl0957","page":244,"text":"193\n\nisolated rock in the middle of the Valley. Enormous figures\nof Buddha (53 and 35 metres high) are carved out of the\nsedimentary rock on the sides of the Bamian Gorge. Once\ncoated with cement and possibly coloured and gilded, these\nimages must have appealed strongly to the imagination of the\nweary pilgrims, who prostrated themselves at their feet. \"The\ngolden lines sparkle on every side\", says Huien Tsang, who saw\nthem in the year 630 A.D., when he counted more than ten\nmonasteries and a thousand monks of the \"Little Vehicle\" in\nthe Valley of Bamian.\n\nOf the images, the smaller, over 100 feet in height, is the\nolder. It seems that it was begun in the second century A.D.,\nprobably under the influence of patronage of Buddhism by\nKanishka the Great. The bigger one of about 160 feet is of\na later date, probably the fourth or fifth century A.D. The\nniches of the Buddha contain marred but still beautiful frescoes,\ndating from about the same periods. They are very interesting\nfrom the archæological point of view, as they show an\nimportant stage in the long process which brought the Buddhist\nart of India to Afghanistan and blended it with Greek and\nSassanian elements before it ultimately found its way through\nSikiang to China and Japan. \"It is funny how things travel—\nan unknown Greek artist, here in Afghanistan, created the first\nimage of the Buddha by adapting to the needs of the new creed\nthe image of Apollo. India gave to this hybridization the stamp\nof its deeper spirituality. Then it travelled back through\nAfghanistan and Central Asia to inspire the Buddhist master-\npieces of China and Japan\".\n\nAesthetically there is nothing really beautiful about these\ntwo Buddhas. They are out of all proportion. Yet ugly and","chars":1741,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00244.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/244","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/244","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}