200th Anniversary Year of Ajanta Cave Wall Paintings: Ajanta Cave 13

Summary: Abandoned excavations such as Ajanta cave 13 admit no tourists in the 200th anniversary year of European-accessed Ajanta cave wall paintings.

exterior of Ajanta Cave 13, off-limits to tourists; Ajanta Caves, Maharashtra, west-central India; Oct. 26, 2017: Akshatha Inamdar, CC BY SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Abandoned Ajanta cave 13 avoids the ambient stresses that afflict other Ajanta caverns in the 200th anniversary year of European access to Ajanta cave wall paintings in north-central Maharashtra state, central-west India.

Itinerant artisans built Ajanta cave 13, as one of the oldest six of 30 caverns, during the first excavations, between the third and first centuries B.C. Ajanta cave 13 and caves 8, 12 and 15A/30 comprise Ajanta's oldest monastery caverns even as Ajanta caves 9 and 10 constitute Ajanta's oldest prayer halls. Chaitya (from Sanskrit चैत्य, "funeral mound, pedestal or pile") prayer halls and vihara (from Sanskrit विहार, "walking [hall]") monasteries respectively designate pillar-ringed meetinghouses and cell-ringed courts.

Itinerant artisans, merchants and monks and resident monks entered Ajanta cave 13 through a façade wall door to a sculpted three-walled interior with flat, low ceilings.

Ajanta cave 13, as the 13th cave from the east, upper end of the horseshoe-shaped, 1,968.5-foot- (600-meter-) long Ajanta Caves, follows the most basic floor plan.

Ajanta cave 13 got the typical central entry room whose three interior walls got a variable number of doorways to a variable number of double-occupant dormitories. Seven cell-specific doorways, perhaps with hypothetically original wood doors, headed sleep-over artisans, merchants and monks into seven dormitory cells, each with two stone-ground beds and pillows. Inflamed candles, oils and torches and incoming moonlight, starlight and sunlight illuminated the Ajanta cave 13 cells and courts whose incompleteness is indicated by unpainted surfaces.

The 200th anniversary year of European-accessed Ajanta cave wall paintings juggles 30 caverns, none identical and some, such as Ajanta cave 13, more austere than others.

Ajanta cave wall paintings in chaitya and vihara caves kept the Sangha (from Sanskrit संघ, "multitude") lay and monastic community knowledgeable about devotional practices and stories.

Resident monks and sleep-over artisans, merchants and monks looked to Ajanta cave wall paintings and sculptures for instructive mudra (from Sanskrit मुद्रा, "seal") gestures and poses. Painted, sculpted interiors modeled jataka (from Sanskrit जातक, "born under") stories about enlightened Prince Siddhartha Gautama's (624?-544 B.C.?) 500 bodhisattva (from Sanskrit बोधिसत्त्व, "enlightened existence") reincarnations. Noticing an ascetic, orange-robed, shaven-headed cave- and woods-dweller nudged 29-year-old Prince Siddhartha into 35-year-old Gautama Buddha (from Sanskrit गौतम, "bright light [dispels] darkness" and बुद्ध, "awakened").

Ajanta cave 13, off-limits occupancy in the 200th anniversary year of European-accessed Ajanta cave wall paintings, perhaps observes a more comfortable opportunity than the ascetic's cave.

Buddha passed several rainy seasons in caves after preaching the turning wheel of truth through non-extravagant, non-mortifying understanding, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration.

Open woodlands and vegetated ravines qualified as alternative rainy-season shelters that Buddha and his Sangha quit for permanent seasonal quarters in ancient northeast India's Magadha kingdom. The 42-year-old Buddha remained in rainy-season residences at Magadha's Bamboo Grove and Jetavana Monastery and, in ancient India's and ancient Nepal's Shakya kingdom, Kapilavastu's Banyan Monastery. He otherwise stayed in such shelters, perhaps sparser than Ajanta cave 13, as Chunda's mango grove, Kusinara's sala grove, Rajagraha potter's shed and Vesali monastic lodgings.

Ajanta cave 13 tests theories, in the 200th anniversary year of European-accessed Ajanta cave wall paintings, about thwarted transformations of volcanic rock into completed monastery cells.

ground plan of Ajanta Cave 13; 1850 pen-and-ink and wash drawing by Madras Army Major Robert Gill (Sept. 26, 1804-April 10, 1879); British Library collection: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

exterior of Ajanta Cave 13, off-limits to tourists; Ajanta Caves, Maharashtra, west-central India; Oct. 26, 2017: Akshatha Inamdar, CC BY SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ajanta_Cave_13_exterior.jpg

ground plan of Ajanta Cave 13; 1850 pen-and-ink and wash drawing by Madras Army Major Robert Gill (Sept. 26, 1804-April 10, 1879); British Library collection: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ground_Plan_of_Cave_13_and_Cave_22,_Ajanta,_1850_sketch.jpg

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