Aurangabad is an overnight bus ride from Hospet followed by a short flight from Bombay. And once inside the terminal, one is trapped. You cannot leave. Oh, well. In any event, it would be a long way to travel for a noisy, dirty, overcrowded town if not for the spectacular, not-so-nearby (100 km) Buddhist caves of Ajanta and their even more spectacular sisters in Ellora. Both are World Heritage Sites and are well worth the effort.
In the 2nd Century BC, Buddhist monks began carving temples and monasteries out of the volcanic rock above a bend in the Waghora River. It took countless generations of monks 700 years, using primitive hand tools to produce the 29 caves of Ajanta. Equally impressive to the construction are the wonderful murals of the life of Buddha that still retain their natural color, probably because they lay abandoned for a millennium until their rediscovery in 1819.
Reclining Buddha
The 34 caves of Ellora are more recent and much nearer town than those of Ajanta. They were chipped and chopped out of the hillside by Buddhist, Hindus and Jains, respectively, each sect leaving its own style and stories. Of the twelve Buddhist caves, Cave 12 is by far the largest. Like the others is served as a monastery, not just a place of worship. But the piece de resistance is Cave 16, the Hindu Kailashnath Temple, 1700 square meters in size. Instead of a cave carved into the hillside, Kailashnath is a freestanding temple that was carved down from a mountain. Much as Michelangelo removed all of the marble that didn’t look like David, countless tons of basalt were delicately chipped away to produce a vision of Shiva’s residence at Mount Kailash in Tibet. The detail is amazing, the planning required boggles the mind and the dedication required gives one a feeling of the power of religion.
Cave 10
The day would have been perfect except for the mostly unsupervised groups of school kids who ran screaming and hooting through the caves. Kids are kids, so I blame their teachers. It was very evident which classes had class.
One of the well-behaved groups
