Thread by @DalrympleWill

"The far side of the same spine of mountains that shelters Bhaja also contains another spectacular rock-cut monastery, Bedsa. This is a slightly younger complex, and more remotely situated, high on a narrow ledge up an even more inaccessible valley."

ft.com/content/e0ce28…

"If you squeeze through a narrow cut in the rock to your right, you find, hidden away along a narrow passageway – as surprising as the façade of the great pink treasury at Petra – a magnificent rock-cut chaitya portico 12m high, conceived and sculpted on the grandest scale."

"Here the capitals are decorated with royal couples riding winged beasts – horses, gryphons, buffalo and elephants – that are clearly distant Indian cousins of those in the great imperial Persian capital of Persepolis."

"The 2nd century BC was a period of great expansion of international trade, and these monasteries, remote as they may seem to us, were built on the trade routes of their time."

"The valleys they crown once saw the frequent passage of the caravans of the great merchant houses bringing luxury goods – ebony, teak and sandalwood, elephant tusks and translucent Indian textiles, pepper and cinnamon – to the coast."

"Here Indian luxury goods would be shipped by Egyptian Jews and Greek middle men to the Red Sea and hence, via Alexandria, to Antioch and Rome."

"The rock-cut cave monasteries of western India predate almost all the surviving written texts of Buddhism, and all we know about them comes from the Sanskrit and Pali inscriptions left on the rock walls by the monks, their patrons and their lay devotees."

"The inscriptions show how surprisingly middle-class and mercantile early Buddhism was: not only were the monasteries built along trade routes but the patrons of these early monks were often merchants or bankers."

“You cannot travel on the path,” said the Buddha, “unless you become the path itself.” His last words to his disciples told them: “Walk on!” The Buddha envisaged his monks as leading peripatetic life – the life of the wandering scholar and thinker that he himself led

"Yet by the 2nd century BC, Buddhist monks had already begun to turn away from the road to embrace, instead, the more sedentary life of the hermit in his cell."

"As in the cycle of the Indian farmer’s year, it was the monsoon that acted as the engine of change. For the rains made travel impossible, and since the Buddha did not want his monks drowning in flood water, he allowed them a “rain retreat” or Vassa."

"During this time the bhikkhus were allowed to congregate on higher ground, or better still in natural caves in the rock faces of the Himalayas and the mountains of the Western Ghats. It was from these sites, in time, that the great Buddhist monasteries arose."