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.

A team of restorers from the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) collected and transported to Dushanbe 43 pieces of the clay giant.

In early 2001, the United States allocated 30 thousand dollars for the restoration of the clay figure.

The largest clay statue of Buddha in the world appeared before the visitors of the Museum of Antiquities on September 9, 2000, the day of the 10th anniversary of the independence of Tajikistan.