Of the twenty-four caves all except the eighteenth or chapel-cave were
originally _layanas_ or monastic dwellings and contained no images
when first their makers gazed upon their work and found it good. But long
after their earliest inmates had conquered Desire and had gained Nirvana
for their souls the followers of the Mahayana school from Northern India
took the dwellings for their own use and carved out of the austere walls of
their precursors' cells those images and idols which are now the chief
feature of the caves. Buddha seated upon the lion-throne and the figures of
his Bodhisattvas with their fly-whisks are symbols of a later and more
idolatrous form of Buddhism and are several centuries later than the days
(b. c. 110) when the great monk (Sramana) fashioned the nineteenth cave in
the reign of Krishna the Satakarni. Nor has Vandalism in the guise of the
Mahayana school been alone at work here. The tenth cave once contained a
relic-shrine or _dagoba_ similar to the relic-shrines at Karli,
Shivner and Ganesh Lena; but in its place now stands a hideous figure of
Bhairav aflame with red-lead, and nought remains to testify to the former
presence of the shrine save the Buddhist T capital, the umbrellas and the
flags which surmounted it. The eleventh cave bears traces of Jain sacrilege
in the blue figure of the Tirthankar or hierach who sits cross-legged in
the back wall and in the figure of Ambika on the right. But the most
conspicuous example of the alteration of ancient monuments to suit the
needs of late comers is the twentieth cave, where the colossal Buddha, who
muses with his attendants in the dense darkness of the inner shrine, has
been smeared with black pigment and adorned with gold tinsel and is proudly
introduced to you by the local _pujari_ as Dharmaraja, the eldest of
the five Pandavas, the surrounding Bodhisattvas being metamorphosed into
Nakula, Sahadeva, Bhima, Arjuna, Krishna and Draupadi, the joint wife of
the five! Alas for "the Perfect One" in whose honour, as the inscription
tells us, "the wife of the great war-lord Bhavagopa" commenced building the