by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times
In the beginning, they were the Bamiyan Buddhas: the Western Buddha statue, 55 meters high, and the Eastern, 38 meters high, carved for decades since 550 A.D. from porous sandstone cliffs, the intricate details modeled in clay mixed with straw and coated with stucco.
Xuanzang, the legendary traveling monk of the early Tang dynasty who journeyed to India in search of Buddhist manuscripts, saw them in all their – colored – glory in the 7th century.
Then, with Islam taking over these high central lands of Afghanistan, local Hazara folklore slowly turned them into the Romeo and Juliet of the Hindu Kush.
They became “Solsol” (“year after year”, or, more colloquially, the prince of Bamiyan) and “Shahmana” (“the king’s Mother”, or colloquially a princess from a remote kingdom). As lovers, they could not be united as a couple in this world; so they chose to turn into statues and stand close to each other forever.
And then, twenty years ago, after a millennium and a half of living history, the Taliban blew them up.
Killing Romeo and Juliet
Solsol and Shahmana lived since their inception among the Hazaras, who speak Dari, a Persian dialect with numerous words of Mongol and Turk origin. The Hazaras are partly descendants of Genghis Khan’s troops who infiltrated these mountains in the 13th century. Hazaras – who I had the pleasure to meet mostly in Kabul in the early 2000s – remain essentially Mongols, but linguistically Persianized, having adopted the old agricultural tradition of the Iranian mountains.
The Hazaras are diametrically opposed by the Pashtuns – who had an extremely complex ethno-genesis before the early 18th century, when they coalesced into great federations of nomad tribes. Their code of conduct – the Pashtunwali – is straightforward, regulating most of all a mechanism of sanctions.
The number one sanction is death: this is a poor society, where sanctions are physical, not material. Islam added moral elements to pashtunwali. And then there are juridical norms imposed by hereditary noblemen – which function like the carpet tying the room together: these come from the Turk-Mongols.
The modern Afghan state was created in the late 19th century by Abd-ur-Rahman, the “Iron Emir”. He pulled that off via a “Pashtunization” of the region that was locally known as the north of Turkestan. Then he integrated the Hazaras in the central mountains via bloody military campaigns.
Hazara lands were opened to Pashtun nomad tribes – who featured not only shepherds but also merchants and caravan entrepreneurs. Increasingly plunged into debt, the Hazaras ended up becoming economic hostages of the Pashtuns. Their way out was to emigrate to Kabul – where they hold mostly menial jobs.
And that brings us to the heart of the problem. Hazaras are Shi’ites. Pashtuns are Sunni. Pashtuns consider themselves the owners of Afghanistan – even as there’s persistent, major infighting among Pashtun groups. Pashtuns simply detest the Westphalian concept of the nation-state: most of all they see themselves as an empire within an empire.
This implies that ethnic minorities are marginalized – if they can’t find some sort of accommodation. Hazaras, because they are Shi’ites, were extremely marginalized during Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001.
The Taliban rolled out en masse from Pakistani madrassas in 1994: the overwhelming majority were Pashtuns from rural areas between Kandahar and Paktiya. They had spent many years in camps scattered along the Pakistani tribal areas and Balochistan.
The Taliban became instantly successful for three reasons:
1 – Implementation of Sharia law.
2 – Their fight against the lack of security after the 1980s jihad instrumentalized by the Americans to give the USSR its “own Vietnam” (Brzezinski’s definition), and the subsequent warlord anarchy.
3 – Because they incarnated the return of the Pashtuns as the leading Afghan force.
No reincarnation?
All of the above supplies the context for the inevitable destruction of Solsol and Shahmana in March 2001. They were the symbols of an “infidel” religion. And they were situated in Shi’ite Hazara land.
Months later, after 9/11, I would learn from Taliban officials close to ambassador Abdul Salam Zaeef in Islamabad that first they blew up “the little one, which was a woman” then “her husband”; that implies the Taliban were very much aware of local folklore.
The destruction process started with the legs of the Great Buddha: one of them was already cut at the knee and the other at the femur. It took them four days – using mines, explosives and even artillery. The Taliban forced local Hazara youth to drill holes in the statues: those who refused were shot dead.
Yet that was not enough to kill oral tradition. Even the young Hazara generation, born after the smashing of the Buddhas, still delights in the tale of Solsol and Shahmana.
But will they ever reincarnate as living statues? Enter the usually messy “international community”. In 2003, Unesco declared the site of the Bamiyan Buddhas and the surrounding caves a “World Heritage Site in Danger.”
Still, Kabul and Unesco can’t seem to agree on a final decision. As it stands, Solsol will not be rebuilt; Shahmana, maybe. On and off, they resurrect as 3-D holograms.
What happened so far is “consolidation work at the Eastern Buddha niche”, finished in 2015. Work at the Western Buddha niche started in 2016. A Bamiyan Expert Working Group gets together every year, featuring the administration in Kabul, Unesco experts and donors, mostly German and Japanese.
Ishaq Mawhidi, the head of the Culture and Information Department of Bamiyan, is sure that “90 percent of the statues can be rebuilt with the debris”, plus fragments of smaller statues currently preserved in two large warehouses on site.
The Afghan Ministry of Culture correctly argues that reconstruction work will require a formidable team, including Buddhism scholars, archeologists specialized in Gandhara art, historians, ethnographers, historiographers specialized in the first centuries of the first millennium in Afghanistan.
It will have to be eventually up to wealthy donors such as Berlin and Tokyo to willingly finance all this – and justify the costs, considering Hazara lands barely have been granted with working roads and electricity by the Kabul central government.
It’s always crucial to remember that the Bamiyan Buddhas blow up is a crucial case of deliberate destruction of world cultural heritage – alongside appalling instances in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Libya and Mali. They all connect, directly and indirectly, to the causes and consequences of imperial Forever Wars and their spin-offs (never forget that the Taliban initially were fully courted by the Clinton administration).
The Buddha of Dushanbe
In the end, I never managed to see Solsol and Shahmana. The Taliban would not issue a travel permit for foreigners under any circumstances. After 9/11 and the expulsion of the Taliban from Kabul, I was negotiating a safe passage with Hazara fighters, but then something bigger came up: bribing a Pashtun commander to take a small group of us to Tora Bora to see the Empire B-52 Show against Osama bin Laden.
Instead of Solsol and Shahmana – either standing up in their niches, or blown up to smithereens – I finally managed to see the next best option: the reclining Buddha of Dushanbe.
Afghanistan may be the “graveyard of empires” – the last act being enacted as we speak. And, to a certain extent, a graveyard of Buddhas. But not neighboring Tajikistan.
The original Buddha of Dushanbe saga was published by Asia Times in those heady 9/11 days. It happened as my photographer Jason Florio and myself were waiting for days for a helicopter to take us to the Panjshir valley in Afghanistan.
Eighteen years later, like a Jorge Luis Borges short story, it all came down full circle before I traveled the Pamir highway in late 2019. I went to the same museum in Dushanbe and there he was: the 13 meter-long “sleeping lion”, found in the Buddhist monastery of Ajinateppa, resting on pillows, in glorious parinirvana, and fully restored, with help from an expert from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
Somewhere in unknown spheres beyond space and time, Solsol and Shahmana will be benevolently smiling.
Recommended to open this Wikipedia page for existent photography of Pepe’s tale.
Cult Religion like any other ideological cult is nihilistic at its core.
They must destroy others to achieve their dogmatic goals.
Taliban are one of the worst of the Islamic cults.
Like most US proxy allies, the Taliban serve as nihilistic assets.
Afghanistan is doomed for generations more.
But, so too, the US has a fate awaiting its own nihilism.
Whatever the real reason the US invaded Afghanistan is, it was certainly not the phony pretext that Osama bin Laden was holed up in a cave in Tora Bora directing the attacks of 9/11. The real perps of those attacks wanted to first of all kill as many Moslems as possible in the so-called War on Terror and secondly to slowly destroy the USA as it bankrupts itself financially and morally fighting these forever wars which they have no chance whatsoever of winning.
If you remember, the Taliban had almost destroyed opium cultivation by 2001 and it wasn’t until the CIA got it going again a few years later that Afghanistan became the source of 90% of the world’s heroin. If deliberately bringing the cost of heroin down to $5 a dose in the USA isn’t nihilism, I don’t know what is.
Tommy Apeiron
The US had three reasons to invade Afghanistan: (1) It’s geopolitical position, to be used as a base to disrupt the creation of the Euro-Asian Economic Union and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, (2) Its mineral wealth, some 3 trillion dollars of mineral deposits and (3) Heroin exports; the CIA makes 50 billion dollars a year from smuggling heroin, which it uses for it’s covert activities, answering to no one except the neocons.
Afghanistan is known as the “grave of empires”, due to it’s geographic characteristics, which give guerilla warfare predominance over classic military tactics and strategy. The neocons who control the US know this, but don’t care. They are using the US as a hammer for their globalist plans, regardless of the cost. This means they are quite willing to sacrifice the country, as to them the US is a place where they just live, but to which they have no real loyalty. For more than ten years there have been articles on the Internet on the neocons and their safety retreats; they have been buying real estate throughout the world, with New Zealand and Tasmania being the two top favorites.
Everything you say about Afghanistan is true. It’s important to remember, though, that the so-called War On Terror was always a con job. the false-flag attacks on 9/11 were blamed on the Arabs. That was the pretext for the invasion of Afghanistan. It was also the pretext for all the wars of this century, all for Israel. Uncle Shmuel, as the Saker likes to call him, has always been a dual-citizen. They don’t call us the AngloZionist Empire for nothing.
The most conservative estimate is that Europe has one million heroin addicts. Each of them uses on average a gram per day, which adds up to one thousand kilos of heroin per day.
The most conservative average wholesale price of heroin in Europe is $30,000 USD per kilo. This amounts to a daily total of $30,000,000 USD, and about 11 billion dollars annually.
Afghan labor is so cheap that it can be considered practically free for the sake of these statistics, and the process of refining and converting raw opium to heroin is also negligible in terms of cost. And if opium poppies are not the easiest plant in the world to grow, then I don’t know what is.
In Iran the retail price of a gram of street heroin, originating in Afghanistan, is between $1-2 USD, from which one can draw the conclusion that the wholesale value in Europe is almost entirely profit.
Afghanistan produces nearly all of the world’s illicit opium, morphine and heroin. Conservative estimates for the number of the world’s heroin addicts is 10 million people, while Iran alone boasts over 3 million opium addicts. The street value of a gram of Afghan opium in Iran is 30-40 cents USD, averaging about 10% morphine, while the wholesale price is around 12 cents USD. The conversion rate of morphine to heroin is 1:1.
What all this adds up to is:
1. A kilo of opium, at the source, is worth $100 USD, give or take.
2. A kilo of opium yields one hundred grams of morphine base, which converts to a hundred grams of heroin base.
3. The wholesale price of a kilo of Afghan heroin in the USA is around $50,000 USD.
4. The most conservative estimate for the average global wholesale price of a kilo of Afghan heroin is $30,000 USD, while in Afghanistan the price is closer to $2000 USD per kilo.
5. My assumption is that the US military ships Afghan heroin across the world. They are never “caught” and they practically never lose product to police enforcement.
6. According to the most conservative estimate, the world’s heroin market is worth $110 billion USD per year.
By comparison, Iran’s total annual oil revenue in 2011 (pre-sanctions) was $110 billion USD, as one of the most oil-rich countries in the world.
Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a GDP of just under 20 billion USD.
Anonymous,
Where did you get these numbers from?
(Or shouldn’t I ask haha) and from which year?
You are right that this massive trade is organised by the US government which serves as the CIA’s cash cow. They use the heroin money to fund their subversive proxy wars. It is a known fact that this is how the KLA – Kosovo Liberation Army- was financed.
The KLA/ Albanian mafia now control the retail distribution network in Europe, with the CIA managing the wholesale part.
They are none too happy with the appearance of synthetic Fentanyl in the market which is strongly undercutting the price of heroin. Fentanyl can be easily synthesized in a lab, whereas heroin is a crop. So even if labour is “practically free” in Afghanistan you still need land, time to grow the crop, harvest it and extract etc.
This is why I believe your numbers are too high. The heroin trade has taken a huge price hit in recent years.
Correct, there is very little demand for heroine or crack/ cocaine now as the poor increasingly opt for extremely potent meth and fentanyl. These two newer drugs are a fraction of the price of those older drugs. They’ve taken over the US like a plague of death because they are so cheap and dangerously and unpredictably potent.
My numbers are a few years old. They give you a ballpark of how much the US has been making since they invaded Afghanistan, which was my intention.
Fentanyl has a higher profit margin than heroin for the street dealer, and it has invaded the market in the West these past years, where it is a major cause of overdose deaths among heroin addicts, if not the leading cause. The fentanyl high does not last as long as heroin, its withdrawals come on quicker and are more intense, and the average heroin addict does not choose fentanyl as a matter of preference.
Most of the illicit fentanyl on the market is not sold as fentanyl, rather it is being cut into everything from heroin to cocaine, and even Xanax, by low-level dealers who presumably want to give some extra kick to their product.
Fentanyl is lethal at a very small dose, which has made its presence on the market quite problematic, and a bit of a mystery, as no serious drug dealer wants to see their customers die.
It seems most of the illicit fentanyl on the market, and the precursors, originate from China.
Opium wars 2.0, perhaps.
“Like most US proxy allies, the Taliban serve as nihilistic assets”.
How did you manage to come to that conclusion? They have been fighting the US pretty much since their inception. The birth of the Taliban was a result of the anarchy, killing and the civil strife contested by the many warlords after the Soviet retreat. Women’s honour was defiled and civilian’s killed in the thousands. Mullah Omar (who was to become leader) who was not involved in the civil war is reported to have dismantled a checkpoint in the area used for collecting unlawful taxes. This spurned him on with a group of like minded individuals and went on to take control of Kandahar and Kabul and eventually 90% of Afghanistan. They were seen as liberators and welcomed by most of the population. Hence, their swift success. The US were (perhaps insincerely) initially supportive seeking an end to the civil war and hoping for stability in the region. However, they must have realised rather quickly the Taliban were not going to do their bidding or be their clients. What ensued was a full on disinformation campaign and in the words of Norm Chormsky, ‘one of the most immoral wars in recent history’. Hence, to infer them as US proxies (or who do they serve and to whom they are an asset) is a great folly and as ‘Serbian girl’ stated ‘they stopped short of building a statue of Bill Clinton’ is another error, when the Taliban almost completely cut opium production and have been fighting NATO for twenty years. One can only imagine how many deaths worldwide they would have saved banning the world’s largest opium production. Not to mention the vast burden, demoralisation and expenditire of a crumbling Zionist US war machine, particularly, for sapping it’s tentacles towards China and Central Asia.
I don’t believe the Taliban are a nihilistic force, their adversaries probably fit this description much more aptly. I would agree they have their errors and were judged before they could establish themselves concretely and by a massive media campaign of vilificaton. The smoke of which has afflicted even the sane. Perhaps their is more mystique than the myth.
We shouldn’t forget that a western journalist (Yonne Ridley) was probably duped going into Afghanistan hoping she would be murdered for being a spy when tensions were high just before the invasion. They had probably got their worldwide editors ready to plaster all over the globe the dastardly murder they were hoping for. They had already made their minds up with war. She ended up coming back, embracing Islam, leading a moral life and becoming a peace activist. I’m sure she would disagree with much of your sentiment and she is a first hand witness.
I felt some clarification was necessary and in no way direspectful to the above mentioned commentators who I genuinely believe make a positive contribution to this blog.
Why waste money on creating ugly idols and statues, when that money can be used to improve lives of local human beings (i.e. build roads, schools, hospitals etc)? The obsession for fine arts of resource thieving westerners is beyond troublesome. Europeans are ex idol worshippers masquerading as closet idol worshippers always eager to show their true colors. No wonder those chosenites from middle east love to take them for a ride.
As regrettable as that destructive act was, it’s minor compared to the wholesale slaughter of whole monastic communities such as Nalanda University in India during the expansion of Islam.
Or the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. It would be fair to say that Humanity never has recovered from those acts of barbarism.
Closely followed by the destruction of Greek and Roman traditional polytheistic and Irish druidic culture.
If memory serves, at the time, there was a famine in Afghanistan. The Taliban approched the UN for food aide but were told to get lost. What angered the Taliban was the UNESCO had set aside something like six million dollars for a heritage restoration of the statues and were about to procede with the work. Money for rocks and sand, no money for food…………..the statues are only missed by the saited.
Cheers, M
You are right and I’m very surprised that Pepe chose not to mention this.
Yes, important to remember this.
The Taliban didn’t act out of hate.
“Never forget that the Taliban initially were fully courted by the Clinton administration.”
At least the Taliban stopped short of building a statue of Bill Clinton in the place of the destroyed Buddhas.
The Albanians in Kosovo, not content with destroying ancient Christian Orthodox Churches and UNESCO world heritage sites, have erected such statues.
Here he is: the statue of Bill Clinton.. 3m/ 10 feet tall in Pristina their “capital” city..
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37761383
As described in the link, right next to the “Bill” statue is a shop called “Hillary” where they sell copies of her dreadful monochrome trouser/ pantsuits.
I like the way Pepe has ended his article:
“Somewhere in unknown spheres beyond space and time, Solsol and Shahmana will be benevolently smiling.”
At the end of the day, culture is what you carry in your heart & mind. It consists of rituals, songs, stories..it is something intangible that noone can ever take away from you.
An excellent article, thank you.
Nearly all Japanese charitable funding for Afghanistan was cancelled after the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Bagram, the location of the US airbase, is derived from the Sanskrit ‘Viharam’ as it was once the site of Afghanistan’s largest Buddhist monastery.
“Baghram” is derived from “Bagh-e-Ram” meaning garden of Ram as told tome by a local.
Missing anywhere in this article: the very open explanation by the Taliban of exactly why they blew the statues up. They did not blow them up in 1996 when they took control of the region. They did not blow them up during the next four years when they controlled the region. Some Taliban had demanded their demolition, but Mullah Omar had declared that since there was no Buddhism in modern Afghanistan they were not idols and should be preserved. So why did the Taliban blow them up in 2001?
The Taliban themselves said why and warned at great length that they would do it before they did it. And they did it because in 2001 Afghanistan was suffering severe drought and food shortage, yet the UN did not send money or food aid. Yet the same UN was more than willing to allocate funds for the preservation of the two statues. That is why.
By the way, James Ferguson in his myth busting history of the movement, “Taliban “, argues persuasively that the demolition was not ordered by Omar but surreptitoiusly someone in the upper Taliban ranks. But once the order had been made in Omar’s name, he of course could not let it go.
The Bamiyan Buddha demolition was big news in Vajpayee regime India in 2001. Ironically, because it was the same BJP of Vajpayee that had demolished the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya less than a decade before. The seevik media went to the extent of interviewing Indian Muslim seminary students demanding to know what they had y say about it, as though they were Afghan Taliban. The craven yellow rag India Today – which went on to call the 11/9 attacks a “war against the world” (Amerikastan = the world, apparently) and then to demand that India join the invasion of Iraq – ran a cover story headlined TALIBAN BARBARIANS with a photo of the Bamiyan statues with what India Today imagined to be Taliban members superimposed in the foreground.
It was Ahmed Shah Masood and his men, all in Afghan pakol caps.
So much for the knowledge of the Indian gutter media about the Taliban.
I think readers’ comments are even more knowledgeable than the article by Pepe — which is saying something! Indicative of the standards in Saker Vineyard. Special thanks to the following readers for increasing my scanty knowledge and understanding of Afghanistan today: Tommy, Leo, Sean, Biswapriya, Serbian Girl and Anonymous (the one who gave prices — follow the money).
Atal Bihari Vajpayee was an Indian statesman who served three terms as the Prime Minister of India, and served as the PM from 1999 to 2004. There is nothing connecting him to the rabble rousers of the said period.
That you are connecting him to unseemly activities shows the true strength of your dissimulation, as well as your dislike for all things connected to India.
Why don’t you just change your name from Biswapriya to Biswadrohi, it seems more appropriate. No attacks on other commenters. Any further will go to trash. Mod.
Having suffered terribly from invaders, Indians abhorred the wanton destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha’s. Do remember, India lost not only it’s physical wealth, but more importantly, it’s cultural and spiritual wealth by the hands of various invaders.
“There is nothing connecting him to the rabble rousers of the said period.”
And yet this same Atal Behari Vajpayee gave India Today’s owner Aroon Purie a Padma Shree medal for “journalistic excellence and integrity”.
“Having suffered terribly from invaders, Indians abhorred the wanton destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha’s.”
And yet this same India Today, along with Indian Express, the Times of India, the Telegraph, and other yellow rags (notably not including Outlook, Frontline, and as far as I recall the Hindustan Times) jumped up and down like rabid hoolock gibbons demanding India join in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
How, pray, do you explain that?
The Indian news rags which are owned by extremely rich people, such as –
India Today, Times of India, Hindustan Times et. al. are subjective to their point of view.
If you think that these yellow journalists express the true ethos of Indians, then, I do appreciate your comment and the basis of your understanding.
Kindly desist from bringing our late Prime Minister Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee into the context of the above stated article. He had nothing to do with the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha’s.
The Taliban destroyed them.
The said destruction was first done mentally by the Taliban, and then, those Statues were destroyed by them by force. When they couldn’t destroy them by using physical force they then used artillery to destroy those beautifully magnificent statues.
The Taliban have endured for about a generation due to the emergency conditions obtaining in Afghanistan which mandates a radial, religiously based resistance against foreign invaders. It’s been rumoured that they actually fear American withdrawal and, not unlike the Vietnamese, seek an alliance with their conquerers. It may be that they seek the goodies enjoyed by Al Qaeda type militias who are sensible of funding and supply benefits of being on the ‘A’ team against the Russians and Chinese. But if Nato withdraws it will likely go back to what it was prior to the invasion, the Pashtuns in the South vs a Northern Alliance. A sectarian government cannot rule this country. This is why in previous times monarchies prevailed which presided over the Shura or assemblies of the tribes, clerics, and other stakeholders. That’s what the country needs. Religious governments must necessarily exclude. Republics are property owners clubs, well suited to oligarchies. The country needs what worked previously. It’s possible that the armed tribesmen might some day become mining magnates in which case they will come to appreciate the ability of employing titled lawyers to legitimise their plundering activities, just like their social betters in the West. But this will take time, and ‘development’. Until then Shanghai aligned diplomacy should facilitate negotiating forums for the tribes and stakeholders of the country with a view to evolving a political resolution and attendant mode of governance. This must obviously include the Taliban and the tribal and sectarian forces that constitute it. To this end Russian cooperation with Pakistani, Iranian, the Stans, and hopefully even Gulf monarchies will hopefully find ways forward that can return the war wracked country to stability. More inter-Asian cooperation is needed. In my view this is more important than Europe. These are the people who will have to make the Asian revival work. Europe is expendable. It is a spent force and is mainly important as vassals for American imperial leadership. The important thing is to sever the North Atlantic leash and prevent the undesirable prospect of a two front war. Beyond that they can be left to stew in their foul juices. As I understand things, the new order will see SE Asia integrated into the main industrial, high technological hub, then Asiatic consolidation, expelling Nato irritants, engaging Europe while liberating Africa and Latin America from the longstanding Western stranglehold. It’s all happening at once. I think we should try to keep the broader political context in mind. It’s not just a contest between a beleaguered Russia and a hubristic but spineless Europe. It seems to me that Russian diplomacy has lots of irons in the fire – and should.
The Buddha wouldn’t have cared – statues of him only appeared when Greek culture connected with India, and until then, the Brahmajala sutta was followed better (in general, there is no direct provision against statue making, to memory).
Now Islam, with its Al-Baqarah 256 and ‘there shall be no compulsion in (the acceptance of) religion..’, there’s your sticking point – these are Muslims who fail to follow the laws given to them.
The Buddha never claimed to be God.
According to foundational Buddhist scriptures, Gautama Buddha claimed to be an ordinary man—not a God, superhuman, or prophet. The Buddha even denied that he was omniscient, though he did emphasize that what he knew was all that really matters.
The Buddha presented himself as a philosopher, an enlightened human being. He was only exceptional in having deeply contemplated the true nature of reality.
The concept of an omnipotent God does not feature substantially in Buddhism. The Dhammapada, “Men driven by fear go to many a refuge, to mountains, and to forests, to sacred trees, and shrines,” and state that the Buddha believed that the concepts of religion and godliness stem from primal fear.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rightattitudes.com/2015/06/01/was-the-buddha-god-or-superhuman/amp/
Buddhism is a spiritual tradition that focuses on personal spiritual development and the attainment of a deep insight into the true nature of life.
There is no belief in a personal god. Buddhists believe that nothing is fixed or permanent and that change is always possible. The path to Enlightenment is through the practice and development of morality, meditation and wisdom.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/buddhism/ataglance/glance.shtml