Money, Caves, Hoes

I have been trying to acquaint myself more fully with the Hindu faith about which I am constantly writing. I recently started reading the great epic poems that Hindus read as scripture. I just started the Ramayana, and near the beginning is an episode in which the woman Sumati, blessed by a sage, "gives birth to a fissiparous mass that became 60,000 babies." Even since ancient times it seems not a single goddamn thing in this country was ever meant to make any sense.

India makes even less sense through the sticky haze of waking up at 5am to catch a bus out to some caves. Imagine my confusion upon reading the following in the newspaper: recently a professional kabbadi player died in a hospital in Maharashtra. What is kabbadi, you ask? Kabbadi is a sport much like the game of tag, except the person who's "it" has to catch the other players within a single breath, and he proves that it is a single breath by shouting kabbadikabbadikabbadikabbadi as he runs. Take a moment for it to sink in that this is a professional sport. Now prepare to jettison any understanding of India you may have gleaned from this excercise when I tell you that after this kabbadi player died, 300 people rioted in the hospital and set it on fire. This country never ceases to bewilder.

Some three hours trapped in a hot bus did little to enhance my mental acuity, and as soon as I entered the epic, unmistakable gorge housing the Ajanta caves, I promptly walked in exactly in the wrong direction and found myself staring at the site's electrical substation. "Hmmmm," I thought,"funny there isn't a proper trail around it." I had to poke about the edge of the bushes a bit before being convinced I had taken a wrong turn, and the realization was sealed when I saw about 250 children on a class trip marauding in the opposite direction. Oh goody, goody, goody.

The Ajanta caves are a series of man-made caves carved directly into the side of a cliff at a dramatic U-shaped gorge just below a waterfall. For centuries, this remote spot contained the subterranean refuge of many groups of Buddhist monks. Though there had been hermits and monks nosing about here earlier, Ajanta truly became magnificent in the early centuries of the first millenium, when Indian Buddhists decided to embrace the idea of art, and produced a breath-taking collection of wall-paintings and sculpture within the caves. Indian sources typically extol the excellence of the paintings in particular as "the zenith of Indian art", while some Western sources I have read call it "the finest collection of ancient art from any civilization."

The paintings are remarkably well-preserved, primarily because they were forgotten. Shortly after Ajanta reached its peak, Hinduism was bouncing back with a vengeance and the caves were abandoned by the monks and left to be overgrown by the riverside forests. Then, in the 19th century, a group of British company officials out tiger-hunting stumbled onto the top of the gorge and saw the massive entranceway to one of the larger caves, went in looking for bears or whatever, and found themselves staring at murals that had been sitting there in the darkness for over a thousand years.

Now of course the place is far from undiscovered, and features quite prominently on the schoolbus circuit. Fortunately, realizing the futility of getting middle-schoolers to refine their tastes while out on an excursion, their teachers are quite content to shepherd them all into the most famous 'checklist' spots first, make a cursory walk of the site from one end to the other, and leave. It was as they were leaving that the dreaded horde of intellectually understimulated youth inevitably descended upon me. They were mostly engaged in roughhousing, and particularly in picking on this one kid whose skin tone was several shades darker than the rest of the class. He was shoved around and bumped into me. He began to apologize when he was yanked away and some gap-toothed doofus with his spittle practically hanging from his lip saw me and yelled (because I was all of two feet away) "This boy is Akon!" What?

"This boy is Akon!" he repeated, dampening the front of my shirt in his excitement. "He is from West Indies!" I took another look at the kid, and he most certainly was not from the West Indies. If I had to venture a guess, I would say he was from...India. Then, finally it became clear. "HE IS BLACK!!!", Saliva Boy shouted, and his classmates burst out in laughter. Great. Here we are, some 3500 years after the invading Aryans basically invented the caste system to keep Darkies in their place and still the fact that this kid has Dravidian genes in him and darker skin makes him a punching bag. Sometimes, no matter where you go in the world, you still catch glimpses of a terrible society founded on the worst aspects of our nature, tenaciously clinging to seemingly hopeless human behavior under the surface of supposedly modern civilizations. India has long been behind the curve on treating people well. Ancient Brahmanical Hinduism has a distinct taste of "our habits are henceforth holy law!" It's no wonder that contrarian religious sects have been springing up here for thousands of years, and that India is the cradle of at least three major egalitarian religions.

On the other hand, the encounter confirmed one of my pet theories: Indian people literally know nothing about Black people except for the West Indies cricket team, Akon... and in a distant third, Barack Obama. Seeing that my efforts to end the picking-on were to be in vain, I unsettled the offending children a bit by insisting that in the West only girls listen to Akon. "You're listening to girl music" is a pretty effective weapon against boys of a certain age, whereas the older ones were surprisingly easy to shame by pointing out that the Akon-Snoop Dogg collaboration "I Want To Love You" concerns fucking a stripper, and then explaining what a stripper is.

This episode aside, Ajanta was an amazing place. Every one of the twenty-something caves revealed new treasures, whether a mural of processions of elephants or a complete prayer hall with an enormous symbolic stupa in the apse. The paintings at Ajanta get all the glory, but the sculptures were quite fabulous too, especially in the last cave which has an astonishing giant sculpture of Buddha lying down to sleep before dying and ascending to ultimate enlightenment. I had suspected in the morning that spending all day looking at paintings might be a touch dainty even for Ghostface Buddha's eminently refined tastes, but the incredible quality of the works and their breathtaking setting above the gorge made it a most invigorating adventure. I returned on the long bus back to Aurangabad, and took my leisure.

It is not within the scope of this blog, thanks to my fifth amendment rights, to explain how exactly this happened, but I found myself later that night walking into a white-tablecloth hotel restaurant with no shoes or belt on and my top three shirt buttons undone, and then spent five minutes trying to debone bits of chicken with my spoon. It's a marvel I actually get anything done.

The next day I once again woke up in the dim light of an unreasonably early morning and....I'm sorry but I just got distracted by two insects trying to start a family on my monitor. Anyways, I went to Ellora, and let me tell you: there are cave temples and then there are cave temples. Ellora has some motherfucking cave temples. The caves are all along a lengthy ridge, and actually belong to three different religions, with Buddhist caves at one end, Hindus in the middle, and Jains off in the distance. They all held the place sacred, and over the course of a couple hundred years had something of a monastic slapfight trying to outdo eachother with the magnificence of their excavations.

I can imagine the scene now: a Hindu monk and a Buddhist monk meet while drawing water from the stream.

"So, how's that monastery going?" the Hindu inquires.

"Oh, quite well," the Buddhist responds, "it helps to be guided by the true faith."

"True faith my ass! Our gods were forming the world before your Buddha's tenth-previous incarnation was even in diapers! And besides, have you seen our Kailash temple? Looks to me like faith is leading us to the greatest heights!"

The Buddhist sneers. "Well, while some people are busy chiseling away at rocks, some of us are a bit occupied achieving ultimate enlightenment."

"Ultimate enlightenment?!?! You shall be reborn as a dog, you...dog! The wrath of Durga be upon you!" the Hindu sputters, spilling his handful of coconut slivers as his dripping sweat smudges the holy paste on his forehead into a formless splotch of vegetable matter.

"Please desist; you harm only yourself. Anger clouds true vision" the Buddhist recites, with a slight, smug curling of the lips.

"We shall see who is harmed when I call upon the flaming bow of Shiva! you little caste-less cu..."

At that moment the argument is silenced by the arrival of a Jain monk at the stream. "Still rehashing the same old trifles, I see" he says while plucking a hair from his scalp.

The Buddhist and Hindu both turn, their quarrel for a time forgotten. "Dude, put on some fucking clothes."

All three of the religions performed amazing feats at Ellora, and if you weer forced to give out medals the gold would have to go to the Hindus, but that's really not the point. The twelve Buddhist caves range from the austere cells of iconoclastic Hinayana Buddhists to massive, multi-storey Mahayana monasteries, self-contained with cells, shrines, meeting halls, and everything else a flourishing religious community in a giant man-made cave would need. There is even one cave carved in the form of an echoing Buddhist cathedral.

One thing you quickly notice at Ellora is that, apparently, renouncing the world does not compel you to renounce sculptures with big ol' titties, a feature that is seemingly second in importance in the Buddhist caves only to the figures of Buddha and the Boddhisvatas themselves, aglow as they nearly monopolize the light shining through the openings of the caves.

After the twelve Buddhist caves you get to the Hindu caves. Here, predictably, is where shit gets weird. The collossal sculptures that typically adorn these caves feature a full array of Hindu themes, from demons abducting buxom maidens, to many-armed gods rescunig buxom maidens, to the heroes of the epics resting in glorious victory while accompanied by an assortment of buxom maidens. By the time I reached the 29th cave and saw naked, pointy-nippled breasts at three times life-size, I began to suspect that consciousness was not the only thing the monks were habitually raising.

The Jain caves were pretty much as you'd expect Jain caves to be: smaller, more obsessively decorated versions of Hindu caves. It should be noted that based on the profusion of divine penises and nutsacks in evidence, these caves probably belonged to Degembara Jain monks, which is likely why they were shunted off to the far end of the ridge.

Though many of the caves could easily be attractions in their own right, together they are an overwhelming collection of sculpture. Even among such formidable competition one cave clearly stands alone against all contenders: the Kailash temple.

The Kailash temple is not, strictly speaking, a cave, as it is open-ceilinged and you can look straight up to the sky above. So, what is it? A hole? No. It is a full-size Hindu temple -a larger than average Hindu temple, in fact- sitting in a courtyard completely surrounded by what look like cliffs. The whole affair, temple, courtyard, and all was carved out of monolithic rock in the hillside. I'm trying to find how to make this clear...it is a large temple, carved entirely from a single chunk of rock, sitting in a large open space completely surrounded by the sheer sides of that same rock from which the temple and courtyard were themselves carved. Even the presence of the sky here is of man's creation. Though the sun shines down on you around the temple, you are walking through one vast, two-hundred year excavation. How many times am I going to end up saying this...India makes your jaw drop.

After 34 caves, (and about 26 the day before), a certain cave-fatigue begins to set in, especially when you are taking thorough notes on each and every one for your employers. You begin to feel a little dehydrated, the pungency of bat poop seems to increase fourfold, and one begins to regard sunlight as a temporary convenience to be held onto tightly while it lasts. So now I return to the bright surface-world of the Deccan, blinking like a mole, and set my regained sight on continuing my adventure. See ya next time.