We were to go to Sanchi this morning at 8am sharp. Jagdish and I were ready at 7: 50 and we ended up leaving at 9:30 Indian Standard time ;) Our hosts Kumud and Shalabh took us to Sanchi and other places all day today.
Sanchi is 30 miles from Bhopal. It is a world heritage site and has the oldest Buddhist Stupa dating 250 to 300 BC. Emperor Ashoka, after converting to Buddhism, constructed these Stupas all over India. Sanchi is the first and the oldest one. All these have one bone Buddha buried inside them. The Stupa is a perfect half sphere and has four intricately carved gates. The carvings are stories from Buddha's life and the writings are in Pali ( an ancient language predating Sanskrit) . The site has several monasteries as well as few temples with traditional Hindu carvings. It is clearly seen that Buddhism took Vedic stories and incorporated them in its philosophy. I thought it was interesting that the oldest of the statues was the one from Kandhar ( the muslim country) dating 250 BC. Sanchi is very clean and beautiful. This particular site is jointly funded by Indian, Shri Lankan and Japanese governments.
The road to Sanchi is also nice. We drove on the two lane road with small farms on both sides. It is nice to see the country site in India. The cities are a mess but the country is still beautiful. At one point we had to wait for ten minutes for the trains to cross. Within those ten minutes, all the vendors magically appeared and people from the cars bought all kinds of stuff including delicious looking dates, Guavas and other fruits. I did not dare to eat any but Jagdish did. I hope he will be ok.
We also drove to nearly Udaygiri caves. These are 4th century caves ( 15 of them) in a nice rocky mountains. They have Hindu as well as Jain statues and carvings. One of them ( the picture) tells the story of the incarnation of Lord Vishu ( remember the lesson on trinity in the previous blog :) This time the bad guy had kidnapped the Earth and lord Vishnu had to appear as the half human and half pig to save the Earth from the bad guy.
Back home, Jagdish is resting, I went out for dinner to my friend's home. Had a wonderful home made fush, chicken and other food. It was very nice to see her, her sister and family after soooo many years. Hope to see them soon. We are leaving for Jabalpur in next half an hour by train. This wil lbeanother adventure and will report on it tomorrow.
I hope the train will be on time. We will have total of five minutes ot get on...hope we will make it :)
Good night, saroj
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