This Place, Giving Incomparable
Favors, Is Agreeable And Useful In All Respects To The Spotted
Deerskin Of An Ascetic.
A safe boat given also by him who built
the gratuitous ferry daily transports to the well-guarded shore.
By him also who built the house for travelers and the public fountain,
a gilded lion was erected by the ever-assaulted gate of this Govardhana,
also another [lion] by the ferry-boat, and another by Ramatirtha.
Various kinds of food will always be found here by the scanty flock;
for this flock more than a hundred kinds of herbs and thousands of
mountain roots are stored by this generous giver. In the same
Govardhana, in the luminous mountain, this second cave was dug by
the order of the same beneficent person, during the very year when
the Sun, Shukra and Rahu, much respected by men, were in the full
glory of their rise; it was in this year that the gifts were offered.
Lakshmi, Indra and Yama having blessed them, returned with shouts
of triumph to their chariot, kept on the way free from obstacles
[the sky], by the force of mantrams. When they [the gods] all left,
poured a heavy shower....." and so on.
Rahn and Kehetti are the fixed stars which form the head and the
tail of the constellation of the Dragon. Shukra is Venus. Lakshmi,
Indra and Yama stand here for the constellations of Virgo, Aquarius
and Taurus, which are subject and consecrated to these three among
the twelve higher deities.
The first caves are dugout in a conical hillock about two hundred
and eighty feet from its base. In the chief of them stand three
statues of Buddha; in the lateral ones a lingam and two Jaina idols.
In the top cave there is a statue of Dharma Raja, or Yudhshtira,
the eldest of the Pandus, who is worshipped in a temple erected
in his honor, between Pent and Nassik. Farther on is a whole
labyrinth of cells, where Buddhist hermits probably lived, a huge
statue of Buddha in a reclining posture. and another as big, but
surrounded with pillars adorned with figures of various animals.
Styles, epochs and sects are here as much mixed up and entangled
as different trees in a thick forest.
It is very remarkable that almost all the cave temples of India
are to be found inside conical rocks and mountains. It is as
though the ancient builders looked for such natural pyramids
purposely. I noticed this peculiarity in Karli, and it is to be
met with only in India. Is it a mere coincidence, or is it one
of the rules of the religious architecture of the remote past?
And which are the imitators - the builders of the Egyptian pyramids,
or the unknown architects of the under ground caves of India? In
pyramids as well as in caves everything seems to be calculated with
geometrical exactitude. In neither case are the entrances ever at
the bottom, but always at a certain distance from the ground.
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