A visitor

I met the Buddha in an alcove at Auckland museum. He had been carved in Gandhara, an Indian kingdom conquered by Alexander the Great, a zone where Eastern & European cultures melded, mutated, where Zeus & Shiva & Siddharta could be part of the same pantheon. Perhaps he was hiding his handsome hybrid face, with its Greek nose & Indian eyes, from the visitors who filled the museum's halls and large rooms; perhaps he despises our era of xenophobia & walls & puerile racial rhetoric. Who could blame him for missing Gandhara?