China: Excavating the 1500-year-old Bodhisattva Buddha statue

During the excavation of nearly 3,000 Buddha statues in the city of Handan, Hebei Province (China), archaeologists discovered the first part of a Bodhisattva statue dating back 1,500 years.

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An archaeologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said that this discovery by scientists is considered the biggest discovery since the 1949 excavation.

Buddha statues are made from white marble and limestone but most of them have been broken. Experts believe that 3,000 statues including the first part of the Bodhisattva Buddha statue were built from the Dong Wei and Bac Qi dynasties between 534 and 577 AD.

The first part of the Bodhisattva statue is about 1,500 years old

According to Katherine Tsiang - director of the Asian Art Center at the University of Chicago (USA), the likelihood of statues being destroyed and buried collectively after the collapse of the Northern Qi dynasty.

On March 20, Chinese archaeologists began studying thousands of statues taken out of the ground in January this year. These statues are from 20cm high to about the height of ordinary people.

This discovery was astonishing to the scientific world because no research paper ever recorded the burial site of the Buddha statue in Ham Dan.

In the 1950s, archaeologists also discovered more than 2000 fragments from marble Buddha statues in a temple in Dingzhou, Hebei Province of China.

Many statues at Ham Dan citadel are similar in style to Dinh Chau temple. However, most of the newly discovered statues are larger in size than those in Dinh Chau.

The 5th and 6th centuries are considered important milestones in the propaganda, dissemination and development of Buddhism throughout the vast Chinese nation.

Buddhism was originally from India, then spread into China during the Han Dynasty for several hundred years. After the Han Dynasty collapsed, Buddhism became more and more popular, especially in the 5th and 6th centuries, thanks to the trade along the Silk Road into China from Central Asia.

Red cloak statue
lack of head part is taken off the ground

Especially, archaeologists also discovered individual casted Buddha statues, wearing a red cloak - an image often seen in northern China during the middle of the 5th century AD. . Before this period, people often saw monks being cast together.

The fact that unqualified castings and the lack of emotional expressions on the face implicitly hint to scholars about the changes in Buddhist awareness of Chinese people, far from divine and immortality in the original statues before.

In China during the 5th century, Buddhists often hired artisans to sculpt Buddha's merit in the temples. They displayed their generosity by using rare materials such as marble, copper, expensive pigments and even gold to cast statues to the temple.