One more Buddhist Cave Temple for the Road

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3 October 2010

Our time in India is growing short now. Several months ago I purchased several airplane tickets at once in an effort to save a little cash.

16 Aug     Mumbai (Bombay) ->  Chennai (Madras) -> Columbo, Sri Lanka
14 Sep     Columbo -> Chennai
7 Oct       Kolkota (Calcutta) -> Bangkok, Thailand


Chennai is on the southern tip and Kolkota is up in the northeast corner near Bangladesh. The two cities are really far apart but several months ago before I had even been to India the first time or really cracked the guide book I thought we'd just roll up the coast in those three weeks. Instead we made a bee line for the west coast and then tooled around in south central India. It was a thirty hour train journey from Hyderabad to Kolkota.


We decided to break up the trip with a quick stop over in the Vijawada on India's east side. With a population of 1.1 million it's a good sized town by Indian standards. A ways off the tourist trail and a little on the grubby side Vijawada does boast a Buddhist cave temple complex.


Rolling out of the Raj Hotel, our stately, slightly pretentious, and extremely economical billeting we caught a bus out to the Undavalli cave temple. It was impressive site. However, if we hadn't already been to the cave temple complex in Ajunta it would have been far less underwhelming. I have to give credit to those monks padding through the country side around the time the Romans are storming the feta strewn shores of Greece. The monks find this huge, sheer rock face and decide they're going to carve themselves a multilevel, elaborately decorated worship center and digs. That's some vision and moving all that rock they must have been pretty burly fellows.

Undavalli was interesting in that it contained Hindu and Buddhist elements were blended. It made me think of how Emperor Constantine decided to solve the problem of people celebrating the pagan holiday Saturnalia by putting Christmas conveniently on the same day. Buddhism fades out while Hindu gains prominence and you have this really cool temple dedicated to the the former. Well, Lord Buddha does has a passing resemblance to Garuda. Now, if we just add statues of Ganesh and Hanuman... That's good. Voila, a Hindu temple. 


The highlight of the cave was this massive reclining Vishnu. On the wall next to him were two mustachioed characters with wings. A few young guys outside the temple filled us in on the story behind the carving. Two robbers threatened to steal some gold (not certain whose) so Vishnu decided to sleep on the treasure thus thwarting their plans. That's what you get for not keeping your diabolical plot to yourself.


We eventually made our way back to Vijawada where we wandered around a bit and tried unsuccessfully to find the planetarium. Apparently this is becoming a theme in our journeys. We've got a date with a train early tomorrow. Next stop Calcutta.

Comments

Unknown said…
You are getting to know a lot about many of the world's major religions!
15 November 2010 at 02:49
Dave said…
These monks sound like legendary miner/mason dwarf material to me.
19 November 2010 at 09:34
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