Monks ki baat

The Bhaja caves, dating back to the early second century BCE, open with a 30-foot-tall horseshoe arch

Arguably the most ancient near-intact Buddhist monastery in the world is the great hall of Bhaja, built into the side of a cliff face of a remote range of hills high in the Western Ghats. It lies to the west of Pune in the wild heartlands of the Deccan and dates from the early second century BCE. Open to the environment at one end and entered by a magnificent horseshoe arch thirty feet tall, it still miraculously preserves its ancient wooden roof beams, like the wrecked keel of a prehistoric ark smashed against the rocky ceiling of the cave. The hard teak blades of these rafters cut the light from the shade with the same Manichaean clarity that they did two millennia ago.

This amazing masterwork of early Buddhist cave architecture, every bit as spectacular as anything at Petra, is a prototype of the sort of cave monastery which would later spread with Buddhism over the Himalayas to Afghanistan, China and Japan, or by sea to Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and the rest of South-east Asia. The roots of all this lie scattered around these stark Deccan hills, alone among the crags and dragon's-back peaks, apparently forgotten by all.

The chaitya hall was one of the very first spaces in Asia made for congregational worship. Pics/Getty Images

This was also one of the very first spaces in Asia made for congregational worship. It was created as part of a momentous change in religious practice and provided a setting for a new form of communal Buddhist worship directed at the stupa, which had come to be seen as the living embodiment of the Buddha and the heart of Buddhist faith and devotion. For the stupa, visually austere and minimalist often contained what the inscriptions described as "relics of the Blessed one, Shakyamuni, which is endowed with life … infused with morality … wisdom, emancipation, knowledge and vision". In this hall, the monks would gather together to chant and seek the blessings of what they believed to be the living presence of the Buddha. Later generations of Christians would come to see the tabernacle, located in the same space at the end of the apse, as containing for them the real presence of Christ in much the same way.

Bhaja is usually described as a cave temple but it is really more like sculpture on an epic scale: an entire range of monastic buildings hewn out of the living rock and elaborately decorated with sculpted trompe l'oeils. Carved window frames, blind arches and tiers of fretwork mouldings give way to bamboo railings and balconies out of which half-naked men and women peer, as if surprised by the presence of a visitor, gazing out arm in arm from the terrace of their ancient apartment block as they survey the valley below. These carvings mimic long-lost multi-storeyed wooden buildings, all physical traces of which vanished many millennia ago.

And that is, in a sense, the point: as one inscription puts it, these chaitya[prayer] halls were deliberately made to endure a kalpa - an entire cosmic age. They were built, if not for eternity, then at least for the foreseeable future, as "a stairway to the city of liberation"…

Flanking the chaitya hall lies a vihara, once used for community discussions and theological debates; beyond extend the monastic living quarters. One cave whose roof is still black with petrified soot was presumably a kitchen; to one side, meals were eaten on a long low platform in the centre of what was clearly the refectory. Beyond that are the lines of austere dormitory cells, each with two stone beds crowned with stone pillows. Carved into each is a bookshelf for holy texts, a rod on which to hang monastic robes and a wall niche for an oil lamp. The monks could have vacated yesterday and, equipped with a sleeping mat to roll out, they could move back in tomorrow.

At the end of the range of halls and cells is the jagged roofline of a natural cave which shelters a cluster of fourteen circular stupas, some containing the ashes of the monastery's founding saints and abbots, dating from the third century BCE. Beyond is carved a magnificent frieze of the heavens, full of restless, churning energy.

These sculptures, sometimes said to be the oldest surviving stone sculpture of any Hindu god, probably show the sun god Surya in his four-horse chariot, with two female attendants and an escort of armed guards, trampling underfoot the coils of the demon of darkness. Flanking him is a regal figure covered with garlands and mounted on a caparisoned elephant, probably the god Indra on his mount Airavata. In the syncretic Indian way, early Buddhism adopted, or even helped create, many of the first images of the great Vedic gods, whose form had previously been thought too sacred for depiction.

Excerpted with permission from The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury