c. 2007 Religion News Service

NEWARK, N.J. _ On a September morning in 2005, federal customs inspectors pried open a suspicious wooden crate labeled “decorative items” at the Newark airport and gazed at a gaunt 40-inch stone statue nestled in a bed of Styrofoam packing.

The figure in some ways resembled a Buddha, but this was not the rotund image of calm and happiness the world knows so well. This one was emaciated and stoic. The agents were awestruck, but had no idea what they were looking at.

“It’s one of the strangest items that’s ever been attempted to be smuggled into Newark,” said Tom Manifase, deputy special agent in charge of investigations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement here.

Last month, New Jersey’s starving Buddha was sent back to Pakistan, where officials say it was created at the decree of Buddhist kings as far back as 2,000 years ago, and illegally excavated and smuggled out of the country. Officials say there is only one other like it in the world.

Mohsin Razi, consul general of the Pakistani Consulate in Manhattan, praised the return as a triumph in the effort to prevent looting of his country’s ancient treasures.

“This is a part of the whole wide world’s heritage,” he said. “How can you put a value to a piece of priceless history?”

But the tale of the smuggled and starving Buddha is a tangled one _ of history, of religion, of precious antiquities, of smuggling and frauds and of the tensions of world politics.

And contrary to what the Pakistani diplomat says about this statue, some do put a price this particular Buddha.

“I have a place for that Buddha,” said John Eskenazi, a renowned London-based dealer of South Asian antiquities who viewed an e-mailed photo of the Buddha, “and it’s Disney World.”

“Everything about it is fake. The stone, the proportions, the head. Stylistically it doesn’t make sense. Everything points to a fake. It’s just a joke.”

In the six years that Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, searched for enlightenment, he experimented with denying himself food, at one point eating just a grain of rice a day.

It was only when he began to eat again that he was able to realize spiritual progress and became the benevolent figure the world is more familiar with.

For centuries around the time of Christ, the kingdom of Gandhara, located in what is now northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, produced some of the greatest sculpture ever crafted _ rivaling, some experts say, the marbles of ancient Greece.

The starving Buddha is a hallmark of Gandharan art. But today, after centuries of pillage by Arab conquerors, European colonials and modern-day smugglers, they are extremely rare.

With wars raging in Afghanistan and Iraq, customs officers worldwide are on high alert for antiquities being smuggled out of the region.

Experts say thousands of pieces of Gandharan art were taken from the area while it was under British rule and exported to Great Britain at the end of the 19th century. Those pieces can be legally traded and exported on the open market. But pieces excavated more recently must remain in Pakistan, or at least be issued an export permit by the Pakistani government.

In Pakistan, like many countries, those laws are often ignored by both smugglers and, all too often, government officials. John Huntington, a professor of Buddhist art at Ohio State University and one of the nation’s leading experts, describes “storehouses in Pakistan where there are thousands of pieces just waiting for transport.”

“You see dealers in Japan and Australia that can maintain an inventory some way or another. That means this stuff is moving all the time,” Huntington said.

In recent years, Gandharan art has made headlines primarily when it was being destroyed. The Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan until the U.S. invasion in 2001, systematically destroyed many Gandharan monuments, including two giant Buddha statues carved into a hillside.

New Jersey’s starving Buddha arrived in cargo at Newark Liberty International Airport on a flight from Tokyo. Two days earlier, customs agents had seized a crate full of smaller, similar artifacts arriving on a ship from London.

Forms accompanying both shipments wrongly listed Dubai as the country of origin, officials said. And both were being sent to a private residence in Flanders, N.J., according to Manifase.

The items were sent to a storage warehouse and placed under armed guard, Manifase said. “They knew something was fishy,” said Razi, the Pakistani consul.

After a yearlong investigation and consultations with experts, authorities determined the items were ancient treasures smuggled from an unknown archaeological site in northern Pakistan.

But one expert the customs officials did not talk to was Eskenazi, owner of a London art gallery and widely known as one of the world’s top appraisers and private dealers of Asian art. Customs officials were shocked when told of Eskenazi’s opinion that the starving Buddha may be a knockoff.

Manifase said the authenticity of the items was verified by two top experts, including Fazal Dad Kakar, director general of the Pakistani government’s Department of Archaeology and Museums.

“There was no doubt they said it was the real deal,” Manifase said.

If the Buddha statue is real, there are other worries about its return to its homeland.

Some experts fear the Buddhist treasures may not be entirely safe in the hands of Pakistan’s Islamic government, which some say has a spotty record of caring for non-Islamic artworks.

“This is material from a Buddhist culture and these are Muslim cultures now and Islam has no particular fondness for this type of image,” said Martin Lerner, former curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Razi said the starving Buddha and other items will be safeguarded in a museum, possibly in the city of Lahore, or at Taxila, an archaeological site containing the ruins of an ancient Gandharan city.

“These are really perfect pieces of art,” said Razi. “Thank God it was caught.”

(Brian Donohue writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)

KRE/PH END DONOHUE

Editors: To obtain a photo of the Buddha and a graphic on differences between a traditional Buddha and a starving Buddha, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.