Buddha in Nirvana

Buddha in Nirvana or "Sleeping Buddha" is a statue which was found in 1959 in the south of Tajikistan by the archaeologist Boris Litvinskiy, during the excavation of the Buddhist temple on the Ajina tepe, in the valley of the Vakhsh River, near the city of Bokhtar in 1964–1968.

The statue of the Sleeping Buddha is now one of the most striking exhibits of the National Museum of Antiquities of Tajikistan in Dushanbe: it is a 13-meter long clay statue of a reclining Buddha, although only the original lower part and the head were preserved and the middle of the body is a restoration. When the temple of the Ajina-Teppa was severely damaged during the Arab conquest in the 7th century the statue of the Buddha in Nirvana was severely disfigured and the face and part of the chest were broken. A team of restorers from the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) collected and transported to Dushanbe 43 pieces of the clay giant.^[1]