The great distinguishing feature of the Jains is the extreme to which they push the characteristic tenderness felt by the Hindus for animals of all descriptions. Jaina is, distinctly, the purified. The priests eat no animal food; indeed, they are said not to eat at all after noon, lest the insects then abounding should fly into their mouths and be crushed unwittingly. They go with a piece of muslin bound over their mouths, in order to avoid the same catastrophe, and carry a soft brush wherewith to remove carefully from any spot upon which they are about to sit such insects as might be killed thereby.
"Ah, how my countryman Bergh would luxuriate in this scene!" I said as we stood looking upon the various dumb exhibitions of so many phases of sickness, of decrepitude and of mishap—quaint, grotesque, yet pathetic withal—in the precincts of the Jain hospital. Here were quadrupeds and bipeds, feathered creatures and hairy creatures, large animals and small, shy and tame, friendly and predatory—horses, horned cattle, rats, cats, dogs, jackals, crows, chickens; what not. An attendant was tenderly bandaging the blinking lids of a sore-eyed duck: another was feeding a blind crow, who, it must be confessed, looked here very much like some fat member of the New York Ring cunningly availing himself of the more toothsome rations in the sick ward of the penitentiary. My friend pointed out to me a heron with a wooden leg. "Suppose a gnat should break his shoulder-blade," I said, "would they put his wing in a sling?"
Bhima Gandharva looked me full in the face, and, smiling gently, said, "They would if they could."
The Jains are considered to have been the architects par excellence of India, and there are many monuments, in all styles, of their skill in this kind. The strange statues of the Tirthankars in the gorge called the Ourwhaï of Gwalior were (until injured by the "march of improvement") among the most notable of the forms of rock-cutting. These vary in size from statuettes of a foot in height to colossal figures of sixty feet, and nothing can be more striking than these great forms, hewn from the solid rock, represented entirely nude, with their impassive countenances, which remind every traveler of the Sphinx, their grotesque ears hanging down to their shoulders, and their heads, about which plays a ring of serpents for a halo, or out of which grows the mystical three-branched Kalpa Vrich, or Tree of Knowledge.
The sacred hill of Sunaghur, lying a few miles to the south of Gwalior, is one of the Meccas of the Jains, and is covered with temples in many styles, which display the fertility of their architectural invention: there are over eighty of these structures in all.
"And now," said Bhima Gandharva next day, "while you are thinking upon temples, and wondering if the Hindus have all been fools, you should complete your collection of mental materials by adding to the sight you have had of a Hindu temple proper, and to the description you have had of Jain temples proper, a sight of those marvelous subterranean works of the Buddhists proper which remain to us. We might select our examples of these either at Ellora or at Ajunta (which are on the mainland a short distance to the north-east of Bombay), the latter of which contains the most complete series of purely Buddhistic caves known in the country; or, indeed, we could find Buddhistic caves just yonder on Salsette. But let us go and see Karli at once: it is the largest shaîtya (or cave-temple) in India."
Accordingly, we took railway at Bombay, sped along the isle, over the bridge to the island of Salsette, along Salsette to Tannah, then over the bridge which connects Salsette with the mainland, across the narrow head of Bombay harbor, and so on to the station at Khandalla, about halfway between Bombay and Poonah, where we disembarked. The caves of Karli are situated but a few miles from Khandalla, and in a short time we were standing in front of a talus at the foot of a sloping hill whose summit was probably five to six hundred feet high. A flight of steps cut in the hillside led up to a ledge running out from an escarpment which was something above sixty feet high before giving off into the slope of the mountain. From the narrow and picturesque valley a flight of steps cut in the hillside led up to the platform. We could not see the façade of the shaîtya on account of the concealing boscage of trees. On ascending the steps, however, and passing a small square Brahmanic chapel, where we paid a trifling fee to the priests who reside there for the purpose of protecting the place, the entire front of the excavation revealed itself, and with every moment of gazing grew in strangeness and solemn mystery.
The shaîtya is hewn in the solid rock of the mountain. Just to the left of the entrance stands a heavy pillar (Silasthamba) completely detached from the temple, with a capital upon whose top stand four lions back to back. On this pillar is an inscription in Pali, which has been deciphered, and which is now considered to fix the date of the excavation conclusively at not later than the second century before the Christian era. The eye took in at first only the vague confusion of windows and pillars cut in the rock. It is supposed that originally a music-gallery stood here in front, consisting of a balcony supported out from the two octagonal pillars, and probably roofed or having a second balcony above. But the woodwork is now gone. One soon felt one's attention becoming concentrated, however, upon a great arched window cut in the form of a horseshoe, through which one could look down what was very much like the nave of a church running straight back into the depths of the hill. Certainly, at first, as one passes into the strange vestibule which intervenes still between the front and the interior of the shaîtya, one does not think at all—one only feels the dim sense of mildness raying out from the great faces of the elephants, and of mysterious far-awayness conveyed by the bizarre postures of the sculptured figures on the walls.
Entering the interior, a central nave stretches back between two lines of pillars, each of whose capitals supports upon its abacus two kneeling elephants: upon each elephant are seated two figures, most of which are male and female pairs. The nave extends eighty-one feet three inches back, the whole length of the temple being one hundred and two feet three inches. There are fifteen pillars on each side the nave, which thus enclose between themselves and the wall two side-aisles, each about half the width of the nave, the latter being twenty-five feet and seven inches in width, while the whole width from wall to wall is forty-five feet and seven inches. At the rear, in a sort of apse, are seven plain octagonal pillars—the other thirty are sculptured. Just in front of these seven pillars is the Daghaba—a domed structure covered by a wooden parasol. The Daghaba is the reliquary in which or under which some relic of Gotama Buddha is enshrined. The roof of the shaîtya is vaulted, and ribs of teak-wood—which could serve no possible architectural purpose—reveal themselves, strangely enough, running down the sides.