Some visitors to India return home and say they loved it.  Others say they hated it.  Still others, like me, straddle the fence.  I hate India for the way it treats lower castes, Muslims, widows, servants, animals–I’m probably forgetting something–but I love India because it contains everything.  

I mean this in two ways.  The first is that I returned to Washington, D.C., in 1982 from eight months in India.  I’d always thought that Washington’s lines of uniformly truncated office buildings were ugly, but now I was shocked to see that the sidewalks in front of those buildings were deserted.  If I wanted animation, I had to wait for a limo passing with escorts and sirens.  I was close to Dupont Circle, and I didn’t have to wait long.

But when I say that India contains everything I also mean that most countries are preoccupied with the future. India rushes forward with the best of them–I want to add: more’s the pity–but it also remains saturated by ancient beliefs.  That’s why those cartoons with a guru on a Himalayan crag are funny.    

I have a question for him.  When I was a boy, people worried about nuclear war.  In elementary school we regularly pulled the classroom shades and crouched under our desks.  My only complaint was that the dog tag I wore around my neck had a blank space where it was supposed to show my blood type.  

The risk of nuclear annihilation hasn’t gone away, but in the 1960s it was shoved off the front page, in the United States at least, by people demanding civil rights.  That demand hasn’t gone away either, but in the 1970s it was pushed aside by worries about population growth, environmental pollution, and the loss of biodiversity.  Today’s crisis is climate change, which gives me pause because I was taught to expect another Ice Age. 

Meanwhile we are busy building a world unfit for human beings.  We worry about  the price that birds and whales and rainforests pay for our progress, but we assume that we’ll be much happier in the future than we are today.  At the very least, we vote for candidates who promise to make it so.

Sir Francis Bacon seems not to have seen trouble ahead.  His Novum Organum (1620) urges us to learn the secrets of nature so we can control it.  René Descartes similarly assures us in his Second Meditation (1641) that, because mind and matter are separate, whatever we do in the material world has no effect on res cogitans, the “thinking thing.”   Paul Simon wrote the updated version: “I am a rock, I am an island.”

In 1900, the historian Henry Adams disagreed.  Looking at a giant electrical generator displayed at the Paris World’s Fair, Adams anticipated “the annihilation of all human values.”  Quick correction: that phrase comes not from Adams himself but from the late Lynn White, a historian of the Middle Ages who, writing about Adams, argues that Adams is wrong and that we should see technology as “a chapter in the conquest of freedom.”  White may be right if we’re talking about medieval technology, but there’s a big difference between a groaning waterwheel and a silently spinning dynamo, 40 feet in diameter, that Adams saw.  One we understand intuitively; the other we do not.     

What should we do?  That’s what I want to ask the guru.  Forget politics, which I take to be like fiddling with the deck chairs on the you-know-what.  I mean what should we do as individuals. That’s the question I want to ask the guru, even though I’m sure he’ll come back with another question.  Gurus do that.  “What do you want?” he’ll ask.  It’s a trick question because it sounds trivial but isn’t.  He’s asking me to tease out what I want from all the things that I’ve been taught to want.  Just the other day I asked a woman stacking cookies in a Walmart if she remembered some Nabisco doggerel I had heard hundreds of times on the radio in the 1940s. I chanted it for her–“N A B I S C O, Nabisco is the name to know.”  She was old enough that I felt sorry for her knees, but she was too young to remember that jingle.  I feel sorry for myself because I know I will never forget it.  I know others, too, and it’s not as though my memory is perfect.  It’s that I’ve been taught by teachers far more effective than any in a classroom.  

The guru, bless his heart, won’t offer any help, but India will.  That’s why I’m  back.  

Over the years I’ve managed to see the Taj and Fatehpur Sikri, Khajuraho, Konark, Hampi, and Mamallapuram.  I’ve seen less visited places, too: the Dandeshwara Temple near Almora, Ramappa near Warangal, and the Badami caves east of Belgaum.  I’ve gone out of my way for temples that few Indians visit, places like the Kalla-Gudi Temple in Devgaon, between Belgaum and Dharwad.  

Some are crowded, but I remember the lonely ruins of Kalinjar, a fortress a hundred miles south of Kanpur.  I saw only one person there, an old man dressed in rags sitting next to a giant image of Kali, who was dancing with skulls tied to her belt.  I wasn’t exactly afraid of her, but she made me uncomfortable enough that I didn’t try chatting with the old man.  Odds are, he didn’t speak a word of English, but then again he might have been a retired Oxford professor.  He could even have been an unretired Oxford professor.  India’s funny that way. 

I’d seen Ellora, too, but had missed the Ajanta Caves, even though they’re only fifty miles north of it.  My excuse—it’s an exceptionally good excuse in India—is that fifty miles isn’t always fifty miles.  By the time I got to Ajanta, in 2019, it had a parking lot with cars to one side and buses to another.  Visitors made their way from the lot past a gauntlet of souvenir stalls, then boarded a rattletrap shuttle bus that took them a couple of miles to a ticket office and restaurant.  From there, the visitors either walked to the caves or paid to be carried on a doli, a chair lashed onto two poles resting on the shoulders of four men.  

On the first of my two visits I was smart enough, or antisocial enough, to miss all of this by starting a couple of miles away, at a deserted lookout at the top of a precipitous canyon.  Hundreds of concrete stairs led down from here about five hundred feet to a footbridge across the Waghura River.  (That’s Waghura as in wagha, “tiger” in Marathi.)  The river here makes a hundred-and-eighty-degree curve and is deeply entrenched though many layers of the flood basalt that sixty million years ago buried an area of India larger that California.   One of the basalt layers is about fifty feet thick.  Long ago, wealthy Buddhists hoping for a pleasant next life paid workmen to excavate in this layer more than thirty caves as monastic retreats for use during the monsoon.

Coming down the steps, I could see the entrances to all of them.  From the apex of the meander, the caves extended perhaps three hundred yards upstream, to the left, and a hundred and fifty yards downstream.  The shuttle buses stopped another hundred yards downstream, out of sight.  Knowing that I’d return the following day, I came down the stairs and did a run-through of the twenty caves open to the public, first those to the left, then those to the right.  

About a thousand people visit Ajanta on a slow day, and, because the buses bring them in groups, they flow through the caves like rush hour traffic at a subway station, full of people one moment, empty the next.  To shut out the chatter, I used headphones, which helped a bit.  Sometimes the pianist I was listening to would pause and someone in his audience would cough.  In a crowded cave, I didn’t notice, but if the cave was empty, I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder.  

Five of the caves are two thousand years old but the rest are only fifteen hundred.  This age distinction is important, because the early caves served Theravada Buddhists, which is to say Buddhists for whom the Buddha was a man, not a god.  The result is that there are no images of the Buddha in these caves unless someone came along later and added one.  The later caves served Mahayana Buddhists who, believing the Buddha to be divine, seem to have thought that the more images of the Buddha they had, the better.  I much prefer the early caves, but what do I know?  I can hardly use the word “aniconic” in a sentence.

All but four of the caves are viharas, or dormitories.  Whether Theravada or Mahayana, the floorplans are square and thirty to fifty feet on a side.  The ceilings are low—just out of reach—and flat, suggesting to anyone with claustrophobia the upper plate of a huge bookbinding press.  Cells have been excavated in the peripheral walls as rooms for the monks.  The cells are hardly larger than closets and are bare except for one or two benches carved out of the rock for a monk to sit or lie upon while meditating or sleeping.  Light came from lamps fueled with butter.                                    

The Mahayana dormitories, unlike the few Theravada ones, doubled as temples, so in addition to the peripheral cells they have a shrine in the center of the back wall.  Not much larger than the monks’ cells, the shrine contains a larger-than-life statue of the Buddha in the teaching position, with his right elbow at his side and with the palm of that arm facing outward with the tips of his thumb and forefinger joined to form a circle.   Although the rock is strong enough that the caves don’t need internal support, the Mahayana dormitories also have a peristyle of floor-to-ceiling columns left in the bedrock.                                        

All the dormitories, whether Theravada or Mahayana, were made by excavating a tunnel, then excavating branches perpendicular to the tunnel on both sides of it, then removing the rock between the branches.  Four caves, however, were excavated by starting at a higher level and working not only to the sides but down.  The openings to these caves are not horizontal slits in the cliff face but are instead higher than they are wide, and they lead into a church-like space with a barrel-vaulted roof that allows light to reach about fifty feet to the back of the cave.  Two rows of structurally superfluous columns support the vault.  These four high-roofed caves are chaityas, or prayer halls, and they have room for perhaps a hundred devotees in front of a hemispherical stupa, in theory a reliquary monument of the Buddha. 

I would have liked to walk around them, but the Archaeological Survey of India has erected wooden barriers.  Monks are allowed to cross, and I saw several sitting in front of the barriers and chanting from texts on cell phones exceptionally bright in the dim light.  A guard made sure I didn’t join them.  Ajanta has dozens of these guards, employees of a private security firm.  I couldn’t help wishing that somebody would go crazy just to give the guards something to do.  No dice.  Another sleepy day at a World Heritage site.

The stupas in the two Theravada prayer halls consist mostly of a truncated egg, or anda, resting on a cylindrical base.  The two Mahayana prayer halls, however, are carnivals of ornament.  Their stupas still consist of egg and base but have large, forward-facing statues of the Buddha, in one case standing and in the other sitting.  The columns, capitals, and entablatures of these later halls are covered with dozens of images of the Buddha, some small, some large.   The only undecorated surface in these later prayer halls, other than the floor, is the barrel-vaulted ceiling, and it’s plain only because over the centuries it has lost the wood sheathing that originally lined it.   (By the way, about two hundred miles to the southwest, between Mumbai and Pune, there are similar caves at Lonavala that, astonishingly, retain that ancient sheathing.)                                                

Most visitors, drawn to spectacle, seem to prefer the later prayer halls, but I consider them a distraction from the Buddha’s fundamental message.   The essence of that message—that desire leads to suffering—is tremendously pessimistic, and I prefer inverting it: instead of seeking a thousand pleasures, then a thousand more, and then coming to regret that there is no time for a third, focus on what you want.  Easier said than done, but if there’s anything to what I’m saying, Buddhist monks are happier than they look, because at least some of them, some of the time, have found what they want.  

There were no monks in the caves when the first Europeans arrived.  That was in 1819, exactly two hundred years before my visit.  Some British officers were on a tiger hunt, and local villagers took them to the larger of the two Theravada prayer halls and to at least one of the dormitories.  Abandoned for over a thousand years, the cave entrances were choked with vegetation and piles of rock that had fallen from the cliff overhead.

None of the officers seem to have written about the visit, but two years later one William Erskine read a paper to the Bombay Literary Society in which he referred to the caves as “newly discovered.”  He continued: “Very extensive excavations have recently been discovered both at the top and bottom on the Ajunta-pass.  They have been little visited, on account of the difficulty of approaching them.”  Erskine quotes a Captain Morgan writing that the caves “were described by the officers who visited them in 1819 as having sitting figures with curled wigs.  No traces of the Brahminical religion were discovered.  The paintings were in a decent state of preservation.” 

More about paintings in a minute.

One of the officers scratched his name on a prayer-hall column, along with the date, April 28, 1819, and his unit, the 28th Cavalry of the Madras Presidency.  I couldn’t find it, but then I caught the attention of a guide and diverted him for a moment from his group.  Without hesitation, he shone his flashlight at a spot about seven feet above the floor, too high to reach without a ladder.  The name was there in a line so fine it seemed to have been scribed with a nail, but there it was, Captain John Smith.  

Smith seems not to have written anything about the caves, but five years later a 21-year-old Lieutenant James Edward Alexander came by.  He later recalled the beehives hanging from the cave roofs as well as “the fetid smell… from numerous bats… which flew about our faces.” He wrote that they “rendered a continuance inside, for any length of time, very disagreeable.”  

The bats are gone now, as are the bees.  Bees and bats weren’t the only problems.  A soldier who was stationed nearby warned Alexander that “you will never return: for if you escape the tigers, these stony-hearted robbers, the Bheels, will destroy you.”  Alexander, who travelled dressed as a Muslim and who was accompanied only by servants and a guide, did run into Bhils.  He wrote that his guns scared them off.  (The Indian census of 2011 counts sixteen million Bhils, mostly in this part of India.  They are officially classified as a “scheduled tribe,” outside the Hindu mainstream.) 

Despite the bees, bats, and Bhils, Alexander wrote that he “was highly delighted with my excursion; and although many are the caverned temples which I have explored, and many which I wish to revisit, yet to none would I sooner return than to those of Adjunta.”  Alexander lived another sixty-five years, but it seems he never returned to Ajanta.  He was the leading force behind the transfer of an obelisk from Egypt to London, where, as Cleopatra’s Needle, it still famously overlooks the Thames. 

Alexander wrote of the Ajanta caves that “the pillars themselves are quite plain.  Many of them are broken off, and have fallen on the floor.”  Since then, they’ve been reassembled by the Archaeological Survey of India, which has worked at Ajanta since the mid-nineteenth century.   The work has been done so skillfully that I wouldn’t have noticed the repairs if I hadn’t read about them.  It may well be that Captain Smith scratched his name on a chunk of column lying on the cave floor.

In addition to its restoration work, the Archaeological Survey changed the way visitors approached Ajanta.  The historic path was the one I had first used: down the slope facing the caves and then across the Waghora River at the neck of its curve, then up a short flight of stairs bookended by a pair of facing and kneeling elephants, almost life-sized and carved from the cliff.  

The dormitory cave at the top of these stairs was the first to be excavated, and it became the model. The farther the cave from that initial point, the newer. Then the Survey came along and numbered the caves starting downstream and working up.  The logic was that visitors were now coming mostly from a road downstream, but the numbering is confusing because the first cave visitors now see, Cave Number One, was the last cave built, while the earliest caves built, near the stone elephants and midway in the set, are those numbered from Nine to Thirteen. 

Cave One had hardly been completed before the entire site was abandoned.  Walter Spink, an American scholar whose seven-volume study of Ajanta is unlikely to be superseded for a long time, writes that “after 480, not a single image was ever made again at the site.”  He continues with telegraphic brevity: “Situation worsens.  Craftsmen leave.  Some monks remain for a few years.  No donations at site ever again.”  The Vakataka Empire, renowned for its support of the arts, had collapsed, and King Harishena (or Harisena), who had been a major sponsor of the later caves, was succeeded by kings whose names are unknown. 

Cave One has a veranda with what Spink calls “loving couples.”  Harishena had sponsored the cave and, as Spink says, exercised “the prerogatives of kingship” to decorate it as he liked.  The result was that “loving couples seem to proliferate, apparently quite innocent of the use of the cave as a monastic residence.”  It’s less easy to understand why similar images decorate the entrance to Cave Twenty-Four, which was one of several later caves sponsored by a monk named Buddhabhadra.

Other sculptures at Ajanta are more in keeping with Buddhist teaching.   Cave Twenty-Six, for example, one of the two later prayer halls, has a wall carving showing Mara, a notorious Buddhist demon.  He rides an elephant straight at the Buddha and attacks not with spears but with beautiful women.  It’s no use.  The Buddha touches the earth with the fingertips of his right hand.  It’s the sign of his enlightenment. 

Cave Seventeen has another warning about women.  It’s in a painting now faded almost beyond recognition.  This is a problem for all the Ajanta paintings.  As early as 1879, James Burgess, head of the Archaeological Survey, wrote that “unfortunately the damp, bats, native and other ignorant visitors have wrought sad ravages among these pictures.”  Several contemporaries of Burgess undertook the huge task of copying them, but almost all the copies have been destroyed, some in the fire that levelled London’s Crystal Palace, some in a fire at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and some in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake.

The painting I’m thinking of depicts a cannibalistic variant of Ulysses and Circe.  Shipwrecked, Simhala and his crew are washed ashore on an island inhabited with irresistibly attractive women who want husbands.  The men settle down and raise families.  All seems perfect until—but of course—Simhala explores the far side of the island and finds an iron tower holding the previous batch of shipwrecked sailors-turned-husbands.  They tell Simhala that the women are man-eaters and that the tower is a holding pen.  As soon as the next unfortunates wash up, Simhala’s crew will be locked into the iron tower while they, the present occupants, will be eaten.  Simhala hurries to the other side of the island and tells his crew what he’s learned, but the alluring man-eaters seduce their foolish husbands yet again.  Simhala alone escapes to tell the tale.   

It’s a great story, but it’s hard for religions to endure on a diet of misogyny and abstinence.  Another painting in Cave Seventeen comes to the rescue with the Chhadanta jataka, one of hundreds of stories of the Buddha’s earlier lives.  In this story he is an elephant king with six tusks.  He has two wives, one of whom becomes jealous and decides to kill her husband.  She becomes a human queen and tells a hunter to bring her the tusks of the elephant king.  

The hunter fails to kill the elephant, but the Buddha pities him, cuts off his own tusks, gives them to the hunter, then dies in agony.   It’s a childish story until you set aside the elephants and hunters and the queen and get to the point.  The standard English translation, published about 1900, concludes by saying that “at the remembrance of the Great Being she was filled with so great sorrow that she could not endure it, but her heart then and there was broken and that very day she died.”  It’s easier to talk about elephants and tusks and broken hearts than to confront the pain of spending our lives chasing junk and hardly getting more than glimpses of what we really want.