{"id":1632,"date":"2013-02-11T03:02:50","date_gmt":"2013-02-11T10:02:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/?p=1632"},"modified":"2013-02-11T03:12:41","modified_gmt":"2013-02-11T10:12:41","slug":"nazi-space-buddha-iron-man-indiana-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2013\/02\/11\/nazi-space-buddha-iron-man-indiana-jones\/","title":{"rendered":"Nazi Space Buddha (Iron Man Indiana Jones)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>It&#8217;s a headline that writes itself. \u00a0The <a title=\"Buddhist Iron Man \" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/news\/2012\/09\/buddhist-iron-man-found-by-nazis-is-from-space.html\">story<\/a> is that in the late 1930s, a Nazi-sponsored\u00a0<a title=\"Shaefer expedition\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/1938%E2%80%931939_German_expedition_to_Tibet\">German expedition<\/a>\u00a0to Tibet brought back a statue that, after recent testing, turns out to have been carved from a meteorite.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Cool, right?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The problem is that I smell a rat. \u00a0The statue doesn&#8217;t look right. \u00a0I can&#8217;t prove anything, and I&#8217;m not an art historian, but my bs meter went off when I saw a photo of it. \u00a0The iconography of\u00a0Vai\u015brava\u1e47a\u00a0is wrong, the posture of the figure, the face and beard &#8212; it just doesn&#8217;t look right. \u00a0I&#8217;ve seen enough Tibetan Buddhist sculpture to know that the surprises are endless and there is always more to learn, but I don&#8217;t think that uncritical acceptance of this figure is justified.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I don&#8217;t doubt the meteorite origin of the piece; it&#8217;s that I suspect it was carved in 1930s Germany,or somewhere besides Tibet.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>[update: recent <a title=\"counterfeit space Buddha\" href=\"http:\/\/www.buddhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de\/fileadmin\/pdf\/publikationen\/Bayer_2012-Trousers.pdf\">article<\/a>\u00a0(.pdf) supporting the counterfeit thesis]<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s a headline that writes itself. \u00a0The story is that in the late 1930s, a Nazi-sponsored\u00a0German expedition\u00a0to Tibet brought back a statue that, after recent testing, turns out to have been carved from a meteorite. Cool, right? The problem is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2013\/02\/11\/nazi-space-buddha-iron-man-indiana-jones\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1421,140],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-central-asia","category-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8jQA6-qk","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1632"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1634,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1632\/revisions\/1634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}