The answer to ths question is located somewhere in the intersection between my particular preoccupations and the extant literature on Ellora. My curiosity about the temples there is generated, first and foremost, by their status as caves. This turns me towards an inquiry which examines them as places and which desires access to what might be called the "genius loci"1 of Ellora. Regarding the cave temples in such a way does not ignore their Indian origins or their ritual and formal importance to that culture. Instead, it acknowledges my biases and uses them openly to gain access to an aspect of Ellora which has not often been elucidated in the scholarship about it.

It is worth noting that Ellora has not generated a tremendous amount of scholarship at all. Few texts are devoted specifically to Ellora--it is usually considered in the general context of Indian temples. Those works which mention Ellora or which take the cave temples there as their primary subject are, in addition, rarely theoretically minded. I am not interested in filling the gaps of this history by privileging a theoretical bent; I do so in order to extend ideas about Ellora which are generally understood to be formulaic and organizational rather than essential. The things which constitute Ellora's physicality are not only the supports for ritual or the frames for cosmology and culture. They are things in themselves, and it is toward their nature that I am aiming.

Texts which concern themselves with Ellora generally take three forms. The first is archaeological in type: a good example is Geri Malandra's Unfolding a Mandala.2 Malandra's main concern is with the Buddhist cave temples at Ellora and his text seeks to position the reader chronologically and spatially at once. A series of essays moves through Buddhist developments at Ellora and their relationship to other Buddhist events and monuments. But the majority of Malandra's work is devoted to an extensive mapping exercise, registered in photographs and plans, which ostensibly conveys the way Ellora looks and works. The large photographs he includes are typical enough--they are not overly dramatic and attempt to contextualize the subject(s) in question. The manner in which Malandra documents the caves, however, is interesting and problematic. A typical cave plan appears in black and white with a figure-ground emphasis (fig. 1). Arranged on this plan in the appropriate places are small photographs of the sculptures and imagery to be found within the cave. Each diagram provides an imaginary walk through each cave while indicating the areas where visual or spiritual experiences are concentrated.

Malandra's graphic descriptions do fulfill certain necessary functions. They simplify formal comparisons between caves, reveal geometric patterns, clarify the relationship between space and solid. Yet there is something disconcerting about trying to imagine the experience of being in one of the Ellora caves through such a representation. The cave becomes a scientific collage of sorts, where information is mapped and plotted but with little concern for its relationship to the human body--that body which activates and is responsible for it in the first place. There is little sense of scale or material, of color or smell. The text which accompanies a given plan underscores how little experiential information Malandra conveys. He writes, for example, "Cave 4 appears to be squeezed into the space under Cave 5RW and to the north of Cave 3. Set at a slight angle to Cave 3, it was not cut as deeply into the cliff as were Caves 2 and 3 and compared to them is relatively small."3 This sort of statement is perhaps the most revealing of Malandra's methodological intentions. For him, the way to get at Ellora is to flip back and forth through pages, to overlay one plan on another, to calculate differences using quantifiable values and tools like angles, depths, divisions. The caves exist less as singular spaces than as part of a comparative network which relates to itself internally and to history externally.

A second type of source seeks to establish Ellora as a historical site, working between epigraphy, paleography, typology and iconography. These texts often include plans and reproductions of architectural details, but they are secondary to another kind of representational system. A primarily iconographic text like José Pereira's Monolithic Jinas4 includes what he calls "A Conspectus of the Elements of Ellora Jain Iconography" (fig. 2) and an appendix which presents the "Themes in the Temples" (fig. 3) The "conspectus" is an attempt to classify an array of iconographical elements, everything from gestures to objects to figures. It offers categories and types (for example, the "seat" category includes "cushion", "lotus with stalk", and "cloth") as well as frequencies of occurence. The thematic appendix juxtaposes plans of the temples, drawn in outline form, with textual lists of their contents. The plans include a key to decipher letters and numbers which appear at various points--these indicate the type of space being shown (shrine, antechamber, exterior) and the range of sculptural figures found inside.

Pereira makes absolutely no attempt to convey the spatial character of Ellora. When a sculptural form is represented, it appears not as a photograph but as a rough and naive outline sketch which is faceless and nearly formless (fig. 4). The plans as they are presented serve as little more than devices on which to locate the information listed next to them, so that they, too, become lists and mimic the status of the words and symbols which accompany them. Pereira's organizational constructs assume a direct correlation between what is described and what is. A given cave takes this form, contains this combination of things and organizes them in this manner. Ellora is made quantitative and as a result its pictorial, sculptural and textual contents are made to seem equivalent in nature. A list, a diagram and a sketch come to stand for Ellora, but they do not offer much entrance into it.

One of the great failings of texts like Malandra's and Pereira's is that they do not consider the importance of the diagram to Indian architecture when using it as a descriptive method in their own work. Given the existence of the ritual diagram for the construction of altars, temples, houses, palaces and cities (the vastupurusamandala, fig. 5), it would seem important for any Indologist to see and develop the relationship between their graphic and textual representations. I assume neither Malandra or Pereira would readily say that the vastupurusamandala is self-evident in its content and meaning. It is the representation of an entire cosmology and the regulator of architectural form, and it extends the realms of the mythic and intellectual into that of the physical. Since both authors essentially use diagrams to support the architecture of their work, they would do well to strengthen its character by treating their graphic methods in less scientific and literal terms.

I do not mean to suggest that Malandra and Pereira have nothing to offer; indeed, their efforts at documentation provide much of the groundwork for traditionally historical investigations, and points of reference for my own. I criticize their work because they mean to represent Ellora extensively and perhaps exclusively in the plethora of facts and forms they offer. Michel Foucault has clarified why such compilations of information and comparisons of extant structures do not necessarily secure historical meaning. He writes:

description...is nothing more than a sort of proper noun: it leaves each being its strict individuality and expresses neither the table to which it belongs, nor the area surrounding it, nor the site it occupies. It is designation pure and simple.5

There are some very basic aspects of Ellora which are lost in these detailed investigations. Authors such as Malandra and Pereira impose certain structures on what is to be found there which do not re-make Ellora so much as sit in for it. This is a loss, for what is most interesting about the imposition of minds and frameworks upon histories and objects is the nature of the worlds they make, and the generative capacity (in the best cases) of those domains to suggest others. This is a more classical historical approach. As Foucault notes, the classical historian is

the individual who sees and who recounts from the starting-point of his sight," and not the historian whose "task (is) to establish the great compilation of documents and signs--of everything, throughout the world, that might form a mark...(whose) existence (is) defined not so much by what he (sees) as by what he (retells), by a secondary speech.6

Foucault clarifies that "the documents of this...history are not other words, texts or records, but unencumbered spaces in which things are juxtaposed..."7 My own examination of Ellora works along these lines. I do not count sculptures, map caves, list details, or include an extensive bibliography to back each of my observations. I begin with the caves themselves, with what they show and what they suggest.

I should mention that there is a third type of text which does treat Ellora as a theoretical node. Perhaps the best of these, and the one I have used the most, is Stella Kramrisch's The Hindu Temple.8 While Kramrisch is obviously focusing on the Hindu temple, her methodology is the most phenomenologically oriented I have found among scholars with similar preoccupations. She does mention Ellora and other cave temple complexes, if only as types, and her words are grounded in observations and prior knowledge to which I do not have immediate access. I am less interested in discussing the merits or problems of this kind of work (there is plenty to be read about Kramrisch--this would constitute another paper) than I am in incorporating her methodology in the body of this study.

The cave temples at Ellora might be considered first as a site. Ellora is a village located Northwest of Aurangabad in the Western Deccan, and the thirty four carved temples line one of its rocky cliffs for a mile. A waterfall interrupts the linear progression of the caves as they stretch just underneath the crest of the cliff (fig. 6). Given Ellora's place in history as a tirtha, or center of worship and ritual, the element of water is almost expected as a "purifying, fertilizing element."9 The temples are at once a subtle and dramatic addition to the dry, rugged landscape. Because of their placement in the cliff, they are not visible from above, on the side of the cliff where the waterfall originates. This might explain their use as a place of refuge after their status as a tirtha began to fade in the thirteenth century.10 From the other side, however, they are visible from a well-traveled, ancient route which once connected Paithan on the Godavari River with Aurangabad, Maheshwar and Ujjain. Inscriptions in Buddhist cave sites throughout the Western Deccan indicate that monks, nuns and lay devotees traveled this route, and there is a strategic connection between Ellora's role as a religious center and its position on a commercial path. Ellora is immediately recognizable as the juncture of spiritual and physical paths.

From afar, the temples are not easily distinguished from the rocky outcropping which is their support. The cliff has its own solids and voids, so the darkened openings of the caves echo overhangs and penetrations which exist there without human intervention. From a closer vantage point, however, the caves come to describe a geometry which contrasts against the natural surface and shape of the cliff. Ornamental pillars, carved friezes, sculptures, and steps order the native domain, focusing the visitor on a new geographical pattern while providing specific way of experiencing it. Despite the clear formal differences between the cliff and the caves within it, there is a harmony between them. The caves are an integral part of the cliff, their material presence is dependent on it, they are made from it even if they alter its indigenous appearance. Photographs of the cave temples embedded there indicate that the structural elements of the caves are necessary to carry the weight of the entire rocky ledge above them (fig. 7) and in this sense the caves can never be perceived as entirely separate.

The cave temples at Ellora, in form and character, expose the interior of the cliff. As excavations their interior is the same as the cliff's own, and this exposure has deeper meaning. As Michael Meister has pointed out,

Rock-cut shrines of the early fifth century A.D....present two imperative metaphors for the temple: the sanctum as womb (garbha), in which the seed of divinity can be made manifest, and the temple as mountain. As the cave opens up the earth, so the sanctum opens up the temple...it is the concept of divinity made manifest and the practice of devotional worship (bhakti) that make the temple possible. The cosmic mountain and its womb/cave ultimately shelter a tender divinity, in the form of an image, and must open out to include and give shelter to the worshipper, who approaches the central point of cosmic manifestation along a longitudinal axis.11

The presence which originates in the cliff is communicated through the spaces made within it, both from the point of view of the architect and the worshipper. The divinity which is embedded in the cliff is expressed through and experienced within the caves themselves, especially since caves are understood to be the ancient residences of the gods.12 The cave is essentially the belly of the earth; a place of formation, gestation and generation.

The physical relationship between the caves and the cliff is a strange one. They differ from it even as they are of it, and they are visible within it even as they sometimes seem to disappear in its own variegated surface. In some sense, this physical relationship mirrors the philosophical and religious grounding which inspired the construction of the caves. While the relationship between a religion or philosophy and its physical manifestations is a complicated one13, the cave temples at Ellora clearly depict Indian beliefs about and desires for architecture, pilgrimage sites and ritual. Stella Kramrisch has written that

tirthas and ksetras on Indian soil are potent sites where a presence is felt to dwell. Its support is in the place itself. Whatever makes the site conspicuous or memorable is reinforced in its effect by the attention of the people directed towards and concentrated on that spot.14

The "presence" of Ellora was conspicuous before any excavation began there, the combination of cliff and waterfall serving as a dramatic backdrop and inspiration for construction. This presence is literally expressed in the act of making the caves, for in that process human activity and natural effect become inextricably linked. What is felt in presence is made visible in form, and the form then affords the means and inspiration for the activities which allow access to that presence again.

The making of the caves involves a complex series of preparations similar to those engaged by the worshipper in many Indian rituals. The earth and the architect must be readied before construction is to begin, since the architect's work is to be an image and reconstitution of the universe. The ground is purified, the soil is judged for smell, sound, taste, shape etc., and any extraneous matter in the soil is removed. According to Kramrisch, "magic is active and divinatory science establishes the correspondence between the soil to be built on and the body of the builder."15 This correspondence is later extended to the worshipper as well, who prepares his body and mind to meet the spirit of the architecture and the character of its foundation. The presence which is originally recognized in the natural site is preserved in the architect's sense of wonder about the architectural operations at hand. The architect is guided by a priest, and when the work is done the architect must be able to say "Oh, how was it that I built it."16 While the architect is recognized as a master, he can not claim mastery of his work for it is dependent on the spirit of the site as much as on his own spiritual state. Architecture is, like enlightenment, something to be attained. As Kramrisch has written,

a settlement...takes place in the intellect itself at the moment when its work is being given concrete form. The substance is its support and form is the nature of its activity. The form of the concrete work is the final seal of the process which leads to it.17

While architecture is decidedly physical and therefore stationary, its existence is tied to a series of processes and to a cosmology which understands it as a representation and not so much as an object. Its physical body is thus intellectually and spiritually diminished in favor of its role and its accompanying narratives.

The cave temple is a place where certain things happen, where states of being can be altered, experiences transferred, actions enacted. It is a complex form, relying, as I have mentioned previously, on the vastupurusamandala for its particular structure. No cave at Ellora is exactly like another. Some have more than one level, others have auxiliary shrines in addition to central worship areas, some have highly decorated entrances while others designate their entrance only by a set of steps. What they all share beyond these specific formations is a set of axes which refer to the "central axis of being." Kramrisch writes
symbols such as the vertical axis or pillar along which the varied forms are threaded on different levels or the cave in the mountain, and architectural forms such as the convergence of ascending lines which connect the perimeter of the building with the end of its vertical axis, or the various shapes of the superstructure, these and other images and forms constitute the symbolical and concrete structure of the temple.18 The cave temple is physically constituted by those movements and levels which must be experienced by the worshipper. The body of the temple thus serves the worshipper, but also mimics his own body in providing part of the path (physical and intellectual) which is to be traveled.

There is an ironic relationship between embodiment and bodily absence in terms of the cave (it is physical but representational), the architect (he is a builder but a wonderer without complete responbility for his work) and the worshipper (whose aim is to denounce the claims of the physical in his path to enlightenment). While it is generally understood that Indian deities, their representations and their places of refuge exist to support those still engaged in wordly pursuits, it still seems paradoxical that temples would manifest a solidity which the serious worshipper is meant to eventually denounce. Indeed, a worshipper's movement into and activities within a temple are organized to deny its physicality. It involves "an intention no longer to think or speak even of temple-connected matters" so that at the end of a period of worship, there has been a "transition from material worship to a form of purely mental worship."19 The temple should, despite its physical presence, aid the passage from the material world into the ideological one, where the physical world and all its manifestations should carry no import.

Perhaps this paradox should be seen in less literal and more conversational or metaphorical terms. As Dr. Patrick Olivelle has pointed out, a denial of the body generates a bodily discourse, and a denial of language necessitates a great deal of talking to explain it.20 If this is the case, the contrast between a physical architecture and its use in moving someone towards a disembodied goal is actually useful to the proper function of the architecture and the possibility of attaining the goal in question. The architecture is always a reminder of the world which must be renounced. In the case of the cave temples at Ellora, the cave is an intermediary between the realm of the divine which originates in the earth and the spiritual path of enlightenment which takes place external to but with constant reference to it.

The relationship between that which is external and that which is internal is also paramount to the program of the cave temples. All of the caves share an entrance and exit which is inherently a passage from light to darkness, and darkness to light--this is true regardless of the form and embellishment which initiates the sequence. Light and dark are important to Indian cosmology, for

In the beginning this Universe existed in the shape of darkness...The darkness in the Garbhargra (a secluded spot for ultimate realization) is a necessary condition for the transformation which is wrought in the devotee. In darkness his change is effected and a new life is attained. The rite of Garbhadhana had to be performed at night...If then the light is waved in front of the image, this illumination is an act of recognition of God in the potent, superluminous darkness, revealed now and known further in all the images outside on the walls of the temple, of the many gods, the Devas, the shining ones, in the light of day. The effulgence, the images of the gods, which are carved on the walls and set into their niches is the splendour of...the Golden Germ, the light which shines from the primordial darkness.21

The dark recesses of the caves are generative and mysterious. The transformations which occur there are internal (both in terms of the cave and the worshipper). They are made visible in the light, but their visibility is shrouded by the forms which they take. What is internally changed in the worshipper is manifested externally in architectural forms, details and divine images. These are the reminders and representations of activities and experiences which can never be entirely expressed or known.

It is an interesting exercise to juxtapose these observations with a Western allegory which treats the cave in a similar manner. In the "Allegory of the Cave," Plato describes an underground chamber with a long passage where prisoners are kept in the dark with their heads turned toward a series of constantly moving shadows that they may begin to identify over time. When one of the prisoners is pulled out of the cave, the passage from dark to light causes him distress and makes him disoriented. It takes a long time for him to see, but gradually, over time, he comes to recognize the things around him in terms of their nature and no longer solely in terms of their appearance, which is all he knew when he was in the cave. Plato says two things about this transition: "The ascent to see the things in the upper world you may take as standing for the upward journey of the soul into the region of intelligible"22 and "a sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways--by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul."23 There are obvious differences in Plato's understanding of the importance of moving from dark to light and that related by Indian creationist myths. In Plato's allegory, it is the light which is responsible for conferring truth where darkness is a metaphor for ignorance. In contrast, Indian philosophy treats darkness as the generative environment and light as the acknowledgment of its power. Yet both recognize a primary importance in moving from one to the other, and a changed state of being as a result of the transition. It is perhaps this physical aspect of the cave which has made it a mystical container not only for ritual but for plays of the imagination.

After Ellora's role as a religious center faded, it became known in less functional and more metaphorical terms. There are numerous written accounts of how the caves were perceived rather than used. A non-Indian travelogue entry from 915-916 exaggerates the character of the place and cites "the great temple named Aladra (Ellora), where Indians come on pilgrimage from the farthest regions. The temple has an entire city dedicated to its support and it is surrounded by thousands of cells where devotees consecrated to the worship of the idol dwell."24 There were never thousands of cells at Ellora, but this visitor was evidently impressed by the repetition of penetrations visible in the cliff face and not by their actual number. An historian from the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb's court whose job it was to record the progress of military campaigns across the Deccan in the mid-seventeenth century was compelled to an elaborated verse in his contemplation of Ellora. He recognized, perhaps, its genius loci when he wrote about a place

named Ellora where in ages past, sappers possessed of magical skill excavated in the defiles of the mountain spacious houses for a length of one (mile)...At present it is a desolation in spite of its strong foundations; it rouses the sense of warning (of doom) to those who contemplate the future (end of things)...It is a marvelous place for strolling, charming to the eye. Unless one sees it, no written description can correctly picture it. How then can my pen adorn the page of my narrative?25

In this author's narrative Ellora remains indescribable. Though the historian recognizes Ellora as a beautiful if dangerous and powerful place, he is concerned with the relationship of his description to the actuality of the site, and with his inability to convey it. It is the kind of site which invites both awe and misinterpretation. As late as the seventeenth century, Ellora's origins were mistaken for Chinese, and for nineteenth century travelers a trip to Ellora became popularized as a romantic and picturesque Indian adventure.

While these kinds of perceptions may seem insensitive to Ellora's role within India, they are also as much a part of its history and definition as those perceptions which emanate from its country of origin. Concerted efforts have been made in art history (as in most disciplines) to find ways to excuse or account for the less grounded and more poetic interpretations of objects which ostensibly prevent a true or total understanding of the subject matter at hand. Certainly, in non-Western histories written by Western authors there has been considerable pressure to diminish the distance between the culture of origin and the culture of consideration. In studies of Indian art, there are numerous methods employed towards this end: objects are examined with a view to their original context, they are linked to religious practices and historical developments, they are spoken about by those who have in-depth knowledge of Indian history and culture. Overall there is an explicit desire to de-modernize the object, to adorn it with its own clothing and not with foreign robes, to take it off the museum pedestal where it has no relationship to the carved and dark stone niche it might have once occupied.

Yet there is no reason to revert to a reverse prejudice which asserts that an Indian author or a scholar very familiar with that country would be without bias or romanticism in his observations about a place like Ellora. It may be useful to consider a way to use these biases in a creative manner so that they knowingly offer a colored history since truly, no other exists. Gaston Bachelard's distinction between the formal and material imaginations is useful here, for both are at play in histories and objects together. According to Etienne Gilson who wrote the preface to Bachelard's The Poetics of Space in 1963,

...the main point was that he found them both at work in nature as well as in the mind. In nature, the formal imagination creates all the unnecessary beauty it contains, such as the flowers; the material imagination, on the contrary, aims at producing that which, in being, is both primitive and eternal. In the mind, the formal imagination is fond of novelty, picturesqueness, variety and unexpectedness in events, while the material imagination is attracted by the elements of permanency present in things.26

The cave temples at Ellora have inspired lists, descriptions and graphic representations of those things familiar to the formal imagination. But they also engender a response based on things which are more experiential and perhaps, even, eternal. The appearance of the caves--all of the differences between their temple structures, contents, details--are known to the formal imagination. Here, sculptures, inscriptions and decorations are noticeably applied rather than permanent, and subject to the wear of use and the passage of time. These differ markedly in character from the voids and protrusions, areas of darkness and light, damp and dry which delineate what might be considered the more permanent and metaphorical content of Ellora.

Bachelard wrote with this distinction in mind. In his The Poetics of Space, he set out to describe the phenomenological and psychoanalytical attributes of various kinds of spaces, and his observations about the cellar indicate how such an approach can impregnate a place like Ellora with new meaning. While he writes specifically about the rooms and levels of houses, his discussion of the cellar both uses and recalls the form of the cave. He writes "the cellar dreamer knows that the walls of the cellar are buried walls, that they are walls with a single casing, walls that have the entire earth behind them..."27 and

From the cavern carved in the rock to the underground, from the underground to stagnant water, we have moved from a constructed to a dreamed world; we have left fiction for poetry. But reality and dream now form a whole. The house, the cellar, the deep earth, achieve totality through depth. The house has become a natural being whose fate is bound to that of mountains and of the waters that plough the land. The enormous stone plant it has become would not flourish if it did not have subterranean water at its base. And so our dreams attain boundless proportions.28

Ellora is a place of dreams. It has spaces for their development, niches for their storage and mysteries for their pleasure. It is also a place of certain realities, serving specific functions and taking particular forms. But Ellora's dreams and realities are inseparable. Standing across from the site, the caves are visible but the activity within them is not. Walking in front of the caves, details and structure reveal themselves as do the voices or movements of those within the constructed penetrations. Yet in many ways the perception of these things can only be to see them as shadows--as representations or celebrations of a mysterious transformation, and as untrustworthy indexes of human activity. Even within a cave, familiar with the rituals performed there and the meaning of the space, the different aspirations and experiences of each worshipper negates the ability to completely register their import. The closer one stands to the formal imagination in considerations of Ellora, the closer one's examination of its individual parts. Conversely, the more one engages the material imagination in reference to Ellora, the more external and metaphorical its import will seem in relation to the culture which produced it. Ellora, like most historical sites and objects, must come to be known through the conflation of both.

Notes

1 Christian Norberg-Schulz uses this term to describe the "spirit of place." He indicates it is "the concrete reality man has to face and come to terms with in his daily life" and that "architecture means to visualize the genius loci." See Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci (New York: Rizzoli International, 1984), 5.
2 Geri H. Malandra, Unfolding a Mandala: The Buddhist Cave Temples at Ellora (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
3 Ibid., 40.
4 José Pereira, Monolithic Jinas: The Iconography of the Jain Temples of Ellora (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977).
5 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 138.
6 Ibid., 130-31.
7 Ibid.
8 Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1946).
9 Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple, 3. Kramrisch points out that the word "tirtha" refers to a ford or passage, and water is clearly related to both.
10 Malandra, Unfolding a Mandala, 3. Malandra notes that a famous Maharashtrian saint, Cakradhara, used the Ellora caves for protection in the early thirteenth century.
11 Michael W. Meister, "The Hindu Temple: Axis of Access" in Joanna Gottfried Williams, The Art of Gupta India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 271.
12 Kramrisch refers to the Vayu Purana when she writes "on the Visakha mountain there is a great dwelling belonging to Guha, the Secret one...the god who is very fond of living in caves." See Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple, 169.
13 Numerous discussions in art history and elsewhere have broken the link (which was once understood to be direct) between artistic intention and expression, or between a given set of ideas and the way in which they are manifested (in words, images or anything else.) Thus it is important to recognize that an Indian belief about land or about site cannot be directly translated into physical form, since the form will have a life separate from the belief that may have inspired it (of course, the inspiration for a given form usually originates in more than one source anyway.) Nonetheless, it is the way in which a belief can be suggested or transcribed which comes to be meaningful, and the Ellora cave temples do suggest many aspects of Indian belief systems.
14 Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple, 4. Obviously Kramrisch's study concentrates on Hindu temples, and the cave temples at Ellora are Buddhist, Jain or Saivist. While each religion has its own belief structure and methods of worship, there are numerous more general systematic beliefs which they all seem to share. For example, John Cort points out that the architects of Jain temples are actually the same as those for Hindu temples. See John E. Cort, "Murtipuja in Svetambar Jain Temples" in Religion in India, ed. T.N. Madan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 213.
15 Ibid., 14.
16 Ibid., 9.
17 Ibid., 17.
18 Ibid., 168.
19 Lawrence A. Babb, "Giving and Giving Up: The Eightfold Worship Among Svetambar Murtipujak Jains," Journal of Anthropological Research 44:1 (Spring 1988), 69. Babb is speaking of a specific tradition among a specific group of Jains, yet the metaphor of physical and bodily renunciation holds true for most Indian religions in one form or another.
20 Dr. Patrick Olivelle, seminar lecture, University of Texas at Austin, February 8 1995.
21 Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple, 164-165.
22 Francis MacDonald Cornford, trans., The Republic of Plato (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), 231.
23 Ibid., 232.
24 Malandra, Unfolding a Mandala, 3.
25 Ibid., 1.
26 Etienne Gilson, forward to Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), ix.
27 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 20.
28 Ibid., 23-24.

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