One of the world’s tallest Buddha statues will soon be unveiled at Sarnath, where the Buddha delivered his first sermon. Funded by the Thai government, the sandstone statue, meant to evoke the famed sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas the Taliban destroyed, was sculpted in the Ghandaran style. (A Calcutta Telegraph article misidentifies the Bamiyan statues as the tallest Buddhas in the world: China’s Leshan Buddha, at 233 feet, and its Spring Temple Buddha, at 422 feet, would both tower over the Bamiyan sculptures and the more modest 100-foot Buddha in Sarnath.)
For more on the Leshan and Spring Temple Buddhas, click here. You can read the Telegraph article here.