A section from the journey

From Cave to Temple

First, holy halls were cut into rock, like the caves of Ajanta. Then builders began to raise temples stone upon stone, out in the open. The dark inner room stayed at the heart, but now it stood in the light, with a roof and a tower above it. This is the great step from cave to temple — from carving down to building up.

We have stood inside a painted cave, and we have stood before a small built shrine of stone. Now let us see how one of these led to the other — for in this age, the sacred place takes a great step. It steps out of the rock and into the open.

Think of the two ways a holy place could be made. The first way is to carve downward. You find a cliff of good rock, and you cut a hall or a shrine straight into it, hollowing the chamber out of the living stone. That is the way of the caves, like Ajanta. It is patient, wondrous work.

But the cave has a limit. You can only carve where the cliff is. No cliff, no cave. The holy place is tied to the rock that happens to be there.

The second way sets that limit free. Instead of carving downward, you build upward — laying stone upon stone, raising a temple out of the open ground. Now the holy place can stand anywhere. By a river, in a town, on a plain, at a crossroads. Wherever people gather, a temple can rise to meet them.

And here is the lovely thing. The heart did not change. In the cave and in the built temple alike, there is the same small, dark inner room — the — holding the image at the centre. The cave taught the shape. The built temple simply lifted that shape into the daylight and let it stand on its own.

Once a temple could be built rather than carved, it could also grow. A solid roof rose over the inner room. Soon a tower would climb above it, lifting the sacred heart toward the sky and marking it for travellers far off. The plain little shrines of this age held, in seed, the soaring temples still to come.

This is the great step: from cave to temple, from carving down to building up. It set the building of holy places on the path it would walk for more than a thousand years, all across the land. We are watching, here, the very pattern of the Hindu temple being born.

Sometimes we shape what is given to us; sometimes we build something new from the ground up. Both can be acts of devotion. In your own life, when has it been right to work patiently with what was already there — and when has it been right to begin fresh and build?