A Misunderstood Masterwork I am an architect by training and experience. Soon after arriving in India in August 1968, to begin a three-year assignment as design consultant for the new campus of IIT-K (Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur), I visited the World Heritage cave temple site of Ellora. Its principal monument is the eighth-century Hindu temple called Kailasa, or, simply, the Kailas. It is not a cave in the usual sense, however: instead of being carved laterally into the face of a cliff, it was carved downward from the top of one. Or more specifically, a huge temple of primeval stone was left standing free, complete in every detail, in the middle of an excavation the size of a football field [figure 1]. Moving through the Kailas that first time, as a new view of its magnificent stone carving unfolded at every step, splayed against an omnipresent background of towering raw cliffs, was the most exhilarating and powerful architectural expression of space I had ever experienced. It remains so today. Thirty-seven years were to pass before I saw the Kailas again. Its spatial impact was just as I remembered it. But this time, with the knowledge and understanding of Hinduism that I had gained over those intervening years, superficial as it remains, I had come to realize that its spatial qualities are only a fraction of what this temple has to offer—to a visitor open enough in spirit truly to see and feel it. To experience the Kailas fully, one must open one’s senses to see its forms, to feel its space, and to comprehend the profound conceptions that lie beneath their surface, hidden in metaphor. Kailasa is a real mountain that rises dramatically from the Tibetan plain, beyond the high Himalayas. Isolated, strikingly formed, perpetually snow-capped, it was a major landmark on the fabled Silk Road, the caravan route that from before the birth of Christ linked Xian in China with ancient Tyre and Antioch on the Mediterranean Sea. Mount Kailasa is sacred to Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains, and devotees of all three faiths still come from afar to tread the pilgrims’ path that encircles its base, just as they have done for centuries. But A Misunderstood Masterwork
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