And Now: Ellora

Spirituality is a word that I've always had trouble with. It is very imprecise, very vague. Which, admittedly, is something I'm generally quite a big fan of. See the 23 previous usages of the word “beautiful” in this blog. And I'm not quite sure why I have so much trouble with the word “spirituality” when I don't have any qualms about the word “beautiful.” Perhaps it is the violence and vehemence attached to the word, in its darker contexts. More people have died and killed for their views on spirituality than their views on beauty, probably. Or perhaps its the range of meanings, from healing crystals you can buy in a shop in suburbia, USA that smells of incense and has plenty of wooden Ganesha statues for sale to people who are not, in fact, Hindu, to that feeling that gives people the power to live, to love, to die and kill. Perhaps it is simply that I don't really understand it at all. I'm more of an aesthete than a theologian. And I am definitely unqualified to write about it. It seems so perpendicular to everything else. I cannot deny its power, or the fact that certain things do seem to resonate, deeply within oneself.

Anyways, when I walked into Ellora's Cave № 10, a 70' long chaitya cave lined with columns, terminating in a large stupa carved with a Buddha in the teaching posture surrounded by Boddhisatvas and spirits and animals, with a tall, ribbed ceiling and dim light filtering through from the second floor balcony, there was no one there. Empty, silent, refreshingly cool, and dark, although my eyes quickly adjusted, and smelling sweetly of incense. And then, slowly, quietly, two clean and sonorous voices started to chant musically in some unknown tongue.

They were there, of course, hiding behind a pillar, or rather merely sitting in front of a pilar that I was standing behind: two elderly monks, a man and a women, the man in an orange monk's robe and the woman in a dull purple, holding incense and chanting. I stayed for a while, listening. It was an extremely beautiful sound, and the acoustics in this caves were spectacular, and it was an extremely beautiful moment. Something something spiritual. And anachronistic, or outside of time: these caves were never painted, and I am not enough of an expert to see where repairs have been made, so what I was seeing could have been mostly the same as it was 1500 years ago. And what I was hearing could have been the same as it was 1500 years ago. And I was feeling could have been 1500 years ago. Who knows?

I stayed for several minutes, off to the side, looking at the stupa and listening as other people filtered quietly in and out. The chanting was continuous, the monks practicing some sort of circular breathing, until they arrived at the end of a page at which point they'd stop and slowly turn it. At one point, the woman got up with the incense and walked pointedly around the cave, performing little gestures at several statues and at the main Buddha. Then she sat down again, and continued.

At the end, a large group of old Indian women dressed in polychrome saris and talking excitedly, loudly to each other came in, filling the hall. They seemed happy and ooh'd and ahh'd at the carvings and the architecture and mostly drowned out the two monks, who kept at it without changing their volume or missing a beat. I slipped out the back to get out of the way.

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And but so I'm at Ellora now. It is a quite different town from Fardapur, and seems to get much more tourist traffic in addition to being a place where much more people actually live. I still don't have wifi, or at least I have to pay for every hour that I use it. I finished the Harry Potter series again, admittedly by skipping four of the books, but. And I'm reading an interesting biography of the artist Amrita Sher-Gil, who was a quite influential painter in India's modernist movement and died at a young age and was influenced by Ajanta, although at this point I'm reading it more for fun than for my paper. She was a interesting person. On her recommendation, I'm also reading Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw, who keeps coming up in biographies that I read. So I guess I'm kind of able to entertain myself and procrastinate quite effectively, even without the internet.

The hotel is pretty nice. I'm paying a 10% “luxury” tax on it, so perhaps I could call it luxurious, but they still charge me for bottled water and I have as of yet found not one mint chocolate on my pillow. And my room hasn't been cleaned, and the internet isn't free and my TV is broken and they don't accept plastic and the ATM is broken and I'm kind of low on cash. But of course, I'm being silly and I have polished marble floors and 24 hour electricity and a view of the caves out my window and gorgeous lawn to sit out upon. I was going to stay somewhere else, and when that didn't work out I panicked and reserved this place at the rather exorbitant price of $30 per night, pre-tax, for 5 nights. Silly me, there are plenty of hotels that would have been comfortable and a good deal cheaper, just most of them aren't on the internet.

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The most notable thing about Ellora is probably the caves. They're pretty cool.

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Okay but consider: the location isn't as nice as it is at Ajanta. Here, the caves are just carved into the side of a hill, at the foot of which is a town, with honking and buses of tourists and people trying to sell you crystals and guide books. There, the caves are at a bend in the river, a 4 kilometer drive away from everything else, and that everything else is a space station and a town with a few hundred residents. And cotton fields stretching into the horizon. On the other hand, the cave compex at Ellora is gigantic! It covers several kilometers, several centuries, several religions and sects, with 4 story caves and caves that cease to be caves because instead the mountain is just carved into entire buildings with multiple rooms, each intricately and amazingly carved. There is no painting here, or at least thereis very little painting. In some places you can see where there used to be frescoes somewhat reminiscent of those at Ajanta, but mostly the flecks that you do see just reveal decorative patterns of little interest. The sculptures, though! And the architecture!! And the lighting and the sheer expanse! Cave 16 is wikipedia tells me the largest monolithic temple in the world: multiple rooms, multiple stories, lined with figures of gods and goddesses, lions and tigers and elephants and monkeys. Caves 12 and 13 are three stories tall, and expand for 50 meters into the rock, with five aisles of columns each ornately carved while figures of the Buddha line the walls. Waterfalls cascade over the cliffs above both caves 28 and 7,although in this season they are not the most impressive: rather just a trickle. And not everything is clearly marked; if you follow a small trail up in the rocks and up the hill,you arrive at a small spot next to a a slow-moving stream divided into several round ponds that run into each other (that eventually turns into the waterfall above cave 28) with several small caves around it, each containing a shiv lingam and a face or three, inscribed in the walls and only distinguishable after letting your eyes adjust to the dark. I sat there and ate lunch on my second day at the caves (one restaurant had been kind enough to box an alu paratha for the road) and in the hour I was sitting there, eating slowly and reading, not a single person came to see!

From this location, on the first day, I followed some paths that I believed to be human but decided on the second must be goat paths on to the Jain collection of temples, a bus ride away. After tromping through the long dead grass for half an hour, I turned a corner and through a crack in a rock noticed another small monolithic temple! When I went to visit, I woke an old man sleeping on the rock wall of the entrance.

The facade of cave 31 was covered by insects of a most heinous variety, with slightly translucent white shells and many legs. Noting that they could smell fear and presumably spit poison, I made a tactical retreat. I did visit it again on the second day, when I noticed a Canadian sculptor who was staying at my hotel and whose Canadian vibes presumably served as adequate protection; he excitedly pointed out the tool marks and explained the sculpting process of the unfinished interior.

Anyways, there were quite amazing. I probably won't write much about them, though.

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I had 4 full days in Ellora: the first and the last I spent at the caves, and then today I get to leisurely make my way to Aurangabad, where I have to catch an overnight train to Mumbai. Yesterday I also attempted to climb the hill above the caves. This is when I discovered that the trails were probably made by goats, due both to there numerousness and the fact that they keep going under low trees that are covered in thorns. It also became rather difficult and steep, with the trails mazing their way across the side of the hill and none making terribly quick upward progress, and then their being a fence before you get to the top and all. The sun beat down and felt rather oppresive in a way that it just shouldn't in late November. And some sections were kind of steep, with rocks that were not too stable under my foot. This is when I began to notice that my hiking flip-flops were also getting kind of slippery as sweat dripped down my legs and collected in the heels. The views, though! They were decent. Probably not worth all the effort.

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I need to get better at conveying imagery. Ellora was quite beautiful, and it wasn't just the caves. The area around reminds me slightly of Montana: flat and brownish, but punctuated by mountains. Or hills. Much shorter than Montana, but still. And then when you get closer, you notice that brownish doesn't really begin to cover it. Sure, the amber fields of dead or dying grass and shrubbery dominate the region, but other colors take hold, too. There are of course the women, visiting Ellora and some other nearby contemporary temples dressed up in their finest Saris of all colors, lined with gold or silver embroider edging in fantastic patterns. And the buildings and signs, of course, are many-colored and all about. But then you get nature: the sunset lights up the sky in bright red flames expanding out from the horizon, the distant mountains a deep purple with white smoke? Fog? Smog? spiraling up at their bases, fields a deep dark and fertile brown lined with plants bright neon green in rows. During the daytime you can make out the distant hills with temples balanced so precariously atop, trees growing irregularly, sporadically across their faces.

And aurally, too, the place is amazing. The rattle of the dried bushes you brush while walking in the hills is disconcertingly close to that of a rattle snake, and the dried grasses make a quieter, more subdued version of the same sound, sussurating around as you walk by. The rustle of dragonflies flying by and the drip and whoosh of large collections of water bugs skating across a pond marks the entrance to several temples, while their interiors frequently contain the gentle flapping of a birds wings, darting about somewhere in the dark, or the quicker rumble of a bat's wings, surprisingly like a distant thunderstorm, alongside the echoed whispers of people and the excited shouts of children and the occasional resonating chants of monks. And of course, the rush of water, creeping across the top of the ceiling and falling outside the cave you are standing in, or the gentle burble of the streams in that one location, secluded and surrounded by small forms of Shiva hidden away in the rocks