India to build world's tallest Buddha statue

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India plans to build world's tallest Buddha statue

 

NEW DELHI (AFP) - India plans to build the world's tallest statue of

Buddha at 152.4 metres (500 feet), a newspaper reported Sunday.

The bronze statue, three times as high as the Statue of Liberty in

New York, will be the showcase of a 300 million-dollar park in

Kushinagar, a town in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh where

Buddha died two and a half millennia ago, The Times of India said.

 

The tallest Buddha statue now is the 71-metre (233-foot) Leshan

Buddha in China's southwestern Sichuan province, completed in the

eighth century AD in the prosperous Tang era.

 

While it is undecided when the statue will come up in Kushinagar, the

newspaper said a research team had been put together to make the

statue out of a special aluminum and nickel alloy that would last at

least 1,000 years.

 

Kushinagar had largely fallen off the Buddhist world's map until the

1860s, when a British team discovered remains of a temple and

identified the town as the spot of the Buddha's demise.