Manjul Miteri, New Age Araniko – Giant Buddha’s Story

The humongous task of constructing a giant statue of Gautam Buddha by cutting a part of a rocky cliff sounds impossible. But there is someone who has accomplished this task by carving a 65-feet tall stone statue out of one single mountain, and it is none other than Nepal’s Manjul Miteri and his team of sculptors.

Manjul Miteri, a senior sculptor at the Oshima Sekibutsuyama Company in Japan, hails from the Morang district in Nepal. He, along with his team, has successfully sculpted a huge stone into a statue of Gautam Buddha. The statue of the Great Buddha is in Kamiamakusa Kumamoto, a city in Kyushu, the Southern District of Japan. The herculean task of sculpting this statue of 18.23-metre height, along with six other huge-sized stone Buddhas and statues of local deities on the rocky cliff, was started on September 24th, 2016 and finished in 2022, after six years. The statue is the largest stone statue that has been created in the 21^st century.

The Story of Art

Manjul Miteri has already engraved his name in the sculptural art of Nepal. A student from Nepal, Dilip Lamichhane, was studying in Japan while working at a hotel owned by Oshima Shizuki, also the owner of Oshima Sekibutsuyama Statue Constructing Company, the same company that laid the foundation stone for this sculpting project.

Shizuki had a dream for 30 years: to construct a statue of Gautam Buddha and have it made by the citizens of the birthplace of Buddha, i.e., Nepal. This dream was inspired by a half-broken stone statue of Buddha in the Longmen Grottoes of the Henan Province in China. He shared his dream with Dilip Lamichhane and the latter discussed it with sculptor organisations in Nepal; the majority of the organisations suggested the name “Manjul Miteri.” Although Manjul was not ready for the project at first, multiple requests made him agree. 

The Team Behind Art

Miteri was accompanied by his three friends, viz., Sanobhai Vishwakarma, Ramchandra Pandit, and Surya KC. The team of four sculptors departed for Japan from Nepal. After working for a month, Surya KC returned, and in his place, Ganesh Rai departed for the project. The project then continued uninterrupted for about three years. But then, sculptors Sanobhai and Ramchandra returned. Instead, four sculptors again took the departure for Japan: Chaturlal Rajbangshi, Ramkumar Rai, Subhas Biswakarma, and Jiwan Poudel, for the completion of the project, making a total of six years since the foundation.

During this period of construction, Manjul and his team were given accommodation by the company, from which they left for the construction site every morning at 7:30 a.m. The distance from the accommodation to the site is about 9 kilometres. The construction site also has a temple of Gautam Buddha nearby, in which the miniature form of the same Buddha statue is kept along with a creatively styled biography of Buddha.

As said by Manjul Miteri in his videos, the rock in which the statue has been sculpted is a sedimentary rock formed by the compression of ocean sediments after years of the diagenesis process. The dimensions of the rock in its original form were about 70 feet in height and 200 feet in width. For Manjul, this has been a huge task and a moment of pride that he was given a chance to make his nation proud.

Manjul started the art of sculpture at the age of 11. His inspiration is the legendary sculptor of Nepal, Araniko. In an interview given to DreamLens TV, he said, “I have not taken any training for this art style. Everything which I have learnt till date is from my own practice and internet.”

Manjul has a website, Manjul Murtikala Kendra, in which it is written that he has a dream to make a whopping 1,000 stone statues within 10 years of time and gift them to the government of Nepal. With this announcement, Manjul gained fame among the Nepalese people. Although he had to delay his former dream of also handing over the business to his wife, Kaushila Miteri, another sculptor.

There is a Manjul Museum in Morang where all his artwork to date is kept. For possessing this talent, he was awarded the “Rashtriya Yuva Pratibha Puraskar” by the Government of Nepal. Manjul is not just a sculptor, he is a man with multiple talents, he is a writer, a poet, a singer, a lyricist, and a musician. On 29th October 2022, his maiden anthology of poems, titled ‘Kami’ was released. 

The Giant Buddha statue of Japan is set to be inaugurated in 2025 by the company for the general public. With time still left for the public to witness this piece of art, Manjul Miteri and his team have definitely created a big name worldwide.