Aryan courts—the main point of issue being the authority and spiritual significance of the Vedas.[1] Several of his successors popularised Saiva teaching and enlisted many non-Brahmans as disciples, so that, like Buddhism, it divested itself of its Brahmanical exclusiveness. It also found great favour in the royal courts of Southern India. At Bādāmi, the ancient capital of the Chalukyan kingdom, there are several Saiva temples of about the seventh century, small in size, but superb in craftsmanship, and distinguished by a noble simplicity of design, for Saiva teaching aimed at a return to the simple living and high thinking of the Vedic Rishis which inspired it. In the eighth century the Saiva temples became grander and more elaborate, for all the great ruling powers of Southern India were its patrons, and vied with each other in the splendour of their public works. Vikramāditya, the last but one of the Chalukyan line, built the great temple of Virūpāksha at Pattadakal, near Bādāmi; the Pallavas at Conjīveram built the Kaīlāsanatha temple, and sculptured some of the famous Raths at Māmallapuram.
In these two centuries one can trace the gradual evolution of the plan of a Saiva temple, symbolising the palace of the Lord of Death in his Himālayan glacier; but it was at Ellora, not far to the south of Ajantā, and within the territories of the Chalukyan kings,[2] that the royal craftsmen of India, with amazing technical skill and fertility of invention, perfected their ideal in the rock-cut temple of Kailāsa, which repeats on a grander and more elaborate scale the scheme of the structural temple at Pattadakal. Ellora, as before mentioned, is one of the most holy tirths (places
