“You cannot travel on the path” ... “before you have become the Path itself”

A couple of years ago, in contrast to my self-imposed censorship when visiting with friends and relatives in India, I accidentally let slip into a conversation some of my thoughts on religion, temples, and history.   The self-censorship is because I have long felt that I had very little emotional investment in the old country and, therefore, an Indian could easily take offense at my comments.

But, hey, I am a mortal and I err.  Slips happen.  Visiting a temple, I blurted out in a conversation, is not really about the idol there. A temple visit offers plenty, I tried to convince them, by way of art and history, which almost all of them tended to completely ignore, and through that we gain insights into how we reached where we are today.  It is a wonderful opportunity to learn about, and reflect on life itself and, thus, to re-establish one's priorities.

As I recall, that comment did not generate any heated response at all.  In fact, there was pretty much no response at all, other than a rejoinder along the lines of "I wonder why only foreigners are so interested in India's history."

It was yet another confirmation that I was a certified "foreigner" in India.  "Ferengi" is what one friend said that I was (I hope I am correctly recalling that word.)

One of the most profound and humbling art and history that I have come across in India?  The ones at the caves at Ajanta and Ellora.

It felt blissful. After a day at the caves, I returned to the hotel with a better and richer understanding of life.

In reviewing a book on Ajanta by a foreigner, William Dalrymple--another foreigner--writes:

Excavated shortly after the collapse of Ashoka’s great Mauryan Empire (322–185 BC), which had once stretched from Kandahar to the Vindyas, caves nine and ten at Ajanta are some of the oldest extant rooms in the world: from the paleographic evidence, scholars believe the years between 90 and 70 BC to be the most likely period of construction. These long chaitya, or prayer halls, lined with tapering octagonal columns, ending in a rounded apse that encloses the perfect dome of a tall stone stupa, were thus probably already old when Augustus started the rebuilding of Rome.

Even now, I can clearly remember the columns and the dome that Dalrymple writes about.  And I also recall being completely dumbfounded looking at them and thinking that they did all that that long ago, when even a small little flickering light in the night would have been a luxury.  When living in the wilderness.  And, especially, even when they knew that they might not be around to look at the finished work.

the chaitya halls executed around 200 BC were some of the first spaces in Asia specifically made for congregational worship. They were created as part of a momentous change in religious practice, and provided a setting for a new form of communal Buddhist worship directed at the stupa, the domed, moundlike structure containing Buddhist relics, which had come to be seen as the living embodiment of the Buddha, rather as later generations of Catholics would look to the tabernacle, the place where the Eucharist is stored, as the location of the Real Presence. In these halls, the monks of Ajanta would gather together to have a “direct, intimate contact with a living presence.” The cult of stupa worship, writes Schopen, was “monastically controlled and monastically dominated…a primary concern for the monastic community and a necessary prerequisite for its continuance.”
The monks may have long gone, but reverence is still something these early caves invoke, and visiting them today you see crowds of chattering tourists instantly hushed by the dark, solemn splendor of their painted interiors. With some of these early images, particularly with the newly rediscovered and restored early cycles from cave ten, probably dating from the first century BC, we are in a world so astonishingly lifelike that even today they can still make you gasp as you find yourself staring eyeball to eyeball with a silent soldier who could have fought the Bactrian Greeks in Afghanistan, or a monk who may have seen the Buddha’s relics interred at Sanchi.

Indeed, the paintings and sculpture made me gasp.  They hushed me into silence.  They made me so conscious of the trivial nature of my existence. Of existence itself.

While the choice of subjects may surprise us today, the Ajanta artists clearly saw nothing odd in this juxtaposition of monk and dancing girl: in the Indian tradition, whether Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist, the sensuous is seen as an integral part of the sacred. As Vidya Dehejia puts it, “the idea that [such sensual images] might generate irreverent thoughts did not arise; rather, the established association appears to have been with accentuated growth, prosperity, and auspiciousness.” The celibate Buddhist monasteries of Ajanta were filled with images of sensuous, half-naked women—because in the eyes of the monks and their patrons this was not just permissible, but completely appropriate decoration.

We are all mere decorations, if at all. But we think that the decoration is the real thing. Even the paintings and sculptures at Ajanta are not really about the paintings and sculptures. They are phenomenal opportunities for us to think about the purpose of our fragile existence.