The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad - Wat Florida Dhammaram

the aurangabad renaissance in the fifth century 109
hall, and in verse 24 it is said to include a caityamaṇḍir, likely referring
to the axial shrine with the Buddha image placed in it. The word
maṇḍir seems to be used in the sense of palace, and it is repeated
in verse 27 of the same inscription, where the cave is equated to the
surendramaṇḍir or palace of Indra, lord of the gods. Verse 27 celebrates
cave 16 ‘. . . [Which resembles] the palaces of the lord of the
gods and is similar to a cave in the lovely Mandara mountain . . .’, a
description that emphasizes the celestial nature of this cave and its
cosmic centrality, located on Mount Meru, at the nexus of a heavenly
realm. The metaphor used to describe cave 16 as the palace of Indra
on Mount Meru echoes the Buddhist cosmography included in the
Abhidharmakośa, a Buddhist Sarvāstivāda text composed in the fifth
century or earlier by the Gandharan Vasubandhu (Willemen et al.
1998, 270). Chapter 3 of the Abhidharmkośa describes in detail the system:
on the summit of Mount Meru is the residence of the thirty-three
gods in Indra’s city, and Indra’s beautiful palace is at the very centre
of this heavenly mountain (Vallée Poussin 1923–26, 2, 50–58, 145–48).
Perhaps small sculpted palaces or maṇḍirs appear on friezes and portals
in caves such as Ajanta cave 26 or Aurangabad cave 3 because they
are key motifs to recreate the setting of a heavenly city, the appropriate
space for the Buddha to reside, rather than just simple decorations.
In the inscription from Ajanta cave 16 the juxtaposition of the
expressions caityamaṇḍir in verse 24 to surendramaṇḍir in verse 27
suggests that much as surendra was used as a synonym for Indra, the
lord of the gods, the word caitya was used as a synonym for the Buddha.
The particular use of the term caitya maṇḍir in the fifth century
confirms what I have suggested earlier in this volume, that the term
caitya implies the presence of the Buddha, whether associated with an
aniconic or an iconic context. Around the beginning of the Common
Era the word caitya was used to designate stūpa-like structures carved
in apsidal halls. Such aniconic caityas were emblematic of the persona
of the Buddha present in those structures. In the fifth century the presence
of the Buddha was unambiguously associated with his physical
image, and thus iconic caityas were included in the monastic caves.
Indeed every vihāra included a place for the Buddha to reside. The conceptual
continuity that devotees must have perceived between iconic
and aniconic caityas and between stūpa-like monuments and Buddha
images is well illustrated by the example of vihāra 3 at Nasik. On the
back wall of this monastic residential cave, on axis with the entrance,
an image of a stūpa-like monument was placed in exactly the same