THE BEHEADED BUDDHA
ALM No.94, October 2026
ESSAYS
It has always been contested how Buddha died, but the prominent theory is that he was poisoned at the hands of food that was given to him by a blacksmith, probably meat- pork or beef that was either poisoned or simply not good meat.
I remember hearing a version of the story where the blacksmith gave him the food because it was the only food he had left, and he felt so happy knowing that he was the one feeding Buddha for the day. Gautama Buddha knew that the meat was spoiled. But even then, he consumed it, because what mattered to him in that moment was the peace and the joy that arrived on the face of the poor blacksmith.
Gautama Buddha died for the goodness of humanity.
I used to like to say that he died once, but he continued to live on for centuries, influencing people, enlightening individuals, putting people on a predominantly better, wiser, more spiritual path. However, in my visit to Siem Reap in Cambodia, what I witnessed was not a God that lived for centuries, but what I witnessed was a man who was beheaded and killed a thousand times over.
It was surreal to witness the large Buddha statues, intricately worked, all around Siem Reap; in Angkor Wat, on the path toward the Bayon Temple, and in several other such mystical temples. But if there is one thing that is common amongst these spaces, it is that the Buddha statues, almost all of them, had been violently beheaded.
They had been initially beheaded by the French colonisers, and then later on, some of them were beheaded by the Khmer Rouge soldiers who knew that they could sell them off into black markets and make money out of it to survive. These fragments could buy them another day, another meal, another chance to survive. Perhaps many of them did have ill intentions. Perhaps, for some, it was simply survival.
But what was the reason for the French colonisers? What was the reason for the French so-called explorers (thieves) to behead them? They were not trying to survive another day. They were not trying to put a meal on their plate tomorrow.
So what were they taking from Cambodia when they took the heads of its Buddhas?
I went to Siem Reap with my partner. She shared this insight about how a lot of the iconography that she is familiar with in Europe is of Buddha's head, of Buddha's arm, his hands. He is never imagined as a man in whole.
He is imagined through these concepts of symbolism. And as someone who grew up in India, that was never how I imagined him. To me, Buddha was a whole man. A person who sat in their meditative peace, a sly smile on their face. While they acknowledged all the realities around them, and from within the pain around them, Buddha sat smiling in peace, in hope that he could help create a better society around him for the future.
The reason why such iconography dominated the European market is because of the fact that you could not transport the entire body. It was only the head. It was only the hand. It was only the arm that was transported into Europe. Buddha arrived in Europe in fragments.
It would be rather crass to say, but if anything, staring at the statues, it looked to me exactly like how you would imagine those violent beheading scenes in real-life videos of terrorists killing innocent people. Except here, the violence had been frozen in stone and the fragments had been carried away and preserved as iconography.
You could say that these were statues. You could say that they meant nothing more than rocks and that perhaps all that was being insulted or neglected was the work of a group of talented sculptors. You could say that a head was only a head, a hand was only a hand, a piece of stone was only a piece of stone.
But to millions, the beheading of a statue of Buddha represents more than a sculpture being beheaded. It represents more of a violation and an insult towards a society, towards what it believed, and towards a man it saw as God. It represents the memory of a people being broken apart, piece by piece. And perhaps that is what made these statues so haunting to me. They represented another brutal reality of what colonialism instigated in Cambodia and all around the Global South.
The taking apart of a people, its history, its culture, its beliefs and even the very symbols through which it understood itself.
Being a man who still suffers, and who still has to continuously shape his decolonial mentality, the statues were nothing less than the realities of his great-grandparents, and the realities of a population that is still affected by the effects of colonialism and war. It was not just a statue that I was looking at. It was the reality of what happened to generations before me, and the reality of a population still living with its consequences.
Millions killed, starved, suffered and continue to suffer.
The beheaded Buddha remains at peace.
Limbs blown off. Kids killed by landmines.
The Buddha remains at peace.
Gautham Varada Narayan is a sustainability practitioner, activist and writer from India. He works with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and is a co-founder of Bus Ya Furaha. A graduate of the University of Geneva, his interests span human development, social justice, and decolonial literature.
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