Iron Nazi space Buddha may be fake, definitely from space

In a report released online, a Buddhism expert writes that the features of the statue are 'pseudo-Tibetan' and are more likely to be a European reproduction

|
Elmar Buchner
A Buddha statue dating back to the 8th to 10th centuries is carved from a rare iron meteorite.

Researchers who reported that a potentially ancient Buddha statue is carved from a meteorite said they are not surprised that an expert in Buddhist history believes the statue to be a fake.

"Honestly, that is what we expected," said Elmar Buchner, who along with his colleague reported on the statue in September in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science. "We heard so many opinions from so many experts in art history and experts for Buddhism on the origins and the age of the statue prior to and after the publication."

The most public of these consultations is a new report from Achim Bayer, a Buddhism expert at Dongguk University in South Korea. In a report released online, Bayer writes that the features of the statue are "pseudo-Tibetan" and are more likely to be a European reproduction dating from 1910 to 1970 than a true ancient carving dating back 1,000 years, as Buchner and his colleagues had estimated.

Bayer did not contest that the statue is a made of meteorite

"The non-Asian features of the 'lama wearing trousers' should be immediately obvious to any scholar in the field," Bayer wrote, referring to the statue as a "lama" or guru. The shoes, pants and sleeves of the man's garments are all wrong for ancient Tibet, he wrote. The statue's hands, eyes and ears are also shaped unusually for Tibetan art, he said.

The statue was said to have come to Germany in the possession of a pre-World War II scientific expedition commissioned by the Nazi party. Bayer called that into question, too, saying there is no documentation of the statue's transfer and arguing that it is more likely a fake created in the 20th century for the antique or Nazi-memorabilia market.

"For us, Bayer's hypothesis is just one opinion," Buchner wrote in an email to LiveScience. "However, we cannot decide whether this hypothesis is valid or not because we are not the experts in art history, and we told the press that our assumptions are speculative, accordingly," wrote Buchner, who is a geologist.

The geochemical analysis of the meteorite is still sound, Buchner said. The team found that the material used to make the statue is a rare type of iron- and nickel-rich meteorite from a meteorite fall along the Siberian-Tibetan border. [Top 5 Weirdest Meteorites]

That cosmic origin brings up one more mystery in the tale of the controversial space Buddha.

"I think it is not convincing that anybody took a very precious meteorite to produce a reproduction for the local antique market!?" Buchner wrote.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook Google+.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Iron Nazi space Buddha may be fake, definitely from space
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/1025/Iron-Nazi-space-Buddha-may-be-fake-definitely-from-space
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe