Ajanta Cave 2

        Cave 2, is somewhat alike in 

plan to Cave 1. The verandah has a lovely painted celing. Among the excellent murals, one on the left wall of the hall, near the third cell-door. dramatizes the legend of the Buddha's birth with some vivid panels. In the panel above the cell door the Bodhisattva is seen in one of the Heavens. He has already passed through a cycle of birth and rebirth on Earth and now that he will have to be born for the last time he selects the place of his ultimate mission, It is to be a place in India close to the Himalayan reign, and Queen Maya is to be his mother.

Maya has a strange dream (bottom left panel, this is badly damaged), While she sleeps in her. bed chamber, a white elephant with six tusks enters her body. Wondering, she speaks to her hus band about the dream (the last panel above. The Brahmanas at the royal court are invited to ent erpret its meaning (panel to the right). Their prediction is that the queen is about to bear a sor with all the auspicious marks of greatness on his person. If he acc epts a princely role, he will be a monarch of monarchs; but if he renounced the world for the ascetic life, he would become a Buddha. Maya, on her fathers's place with her ladies-in-waiting, stops awhile at the Lumbini garden and here the pains of childbirth come upon her and the nativity takes place (low er panel). The new born child walks seven steps over lotus blossoms while Indra, king of the gods, holds an umbrella over his head. And the end goes that as the child walks to the east he says, "I shall attain the highest release". As he walks southward he says, "I shall be the first of all created beings". And fin ally, "I shall cross the ocean of existence".

On the right wall of the front corridor a painting in a bad state of preservation is recognized as a superb piece of work, It shows a king, sword in hand, about to punish a woman for some reason. The woman is on her knees, begging for mercy. Her attitude is full of pathos: there is pleading in every curve of her slender body, gracefully rendered the figures are eloquent the clothes are deshevelled, huddled on the floor. Here is a picture rich in feeling and with great beauty of form. The chapeles on each side of the ante-chamber have good murals. The one to the right has female figures which have been com pared by art ceiling like Axel Jarl to Botticelli's "Primavera". No less remarkable are the ceiling decorations. Those in the ante chamber and the shrine are perhaps the best. One of the ceiling panels shows a procession of twenty-three geese rendered with great skill.