Wonderful Indian Architecture भारतीय वास्तुकला

Monday, February 22, 2016

Shiva Ling changes color three times, राजस्थान के धौलपुर जिले में स्तिथ अचलेश्वर महादेव मन्दिर

वैसे तो पुरे भारत मे अचलेश्वर महादेव के नाम से कई मन्दिर है पर आज हम बात कर रहे है राजस्थान के धौलपुर जिले में स्तिथ अचलेश्वर महादेव मन्दिर के बारे मे। धौलपुर जिला राजस्थान और मध्य प्रदेश की सीमा पर स्थित है। यह इलाका चम्बल के बीहड़ों के लिये प्रसिद्ध है। इन्ही दुर्गम बीहड़ो के अंदर स्तिथ है, भगवान अचलेश्वर महादेव का मन्दिर। इस मंदिर की सबसे बड़ी खासियत है यहाँ स्तिथ शिवलिंग जो कि दिन मे तीन बार रँग बदलता है।

सुबह में शिवलिंग का रंग लाल रहता है, दोपहर को केसरिया रंग का हो जाता है, और जैसे-जैसे शाम होती है शिवलिंग का रंग सांवला हो जाता है। ऐसा क्यों होता है इसका किसी के पास जवाब नहि है। भगवान अचलेश्वर महादेव का यह मन्दिर हज़ारों साल पुराना है। चुकी यह मंदिर बीहड़ों मे स्तिथ है और यहाँ तक पहुचने क रास्ता बहुत हि पथरीला और उबड-खाबड़ है इसलिए पहले यहाँ बहुत हि कम लोग पंहुचते थे परन्तु जैसे-जैसे भगवान के चमत्कार कि खबरे लोगो तक पहुँचि यहाँ पर भक्तों कि भिड़ ज़ुटने लगी।

इस शिवलिंग कि एक और अनोखी बात यह है कि इस शिवलिंग के छोर का आज तक पता नहि चला है। कहते है बहुत समय पहले भक्तों ने यह जानने के लिए कि यह शिवलिंग ज़मीं मे कितना गड़ा है, इसकि खूदाई करी, पर क़ाफी गहराई तक खोदने के बाद भि उन्हे इसके छोर का पता नहि चला। अंत में उन्होंने इसे भग्वान का चमत्कार मानते हुए खुदाई बन्द कर दी।

भक्तों का मानना है कि भगवान अचलेश्वर महादेव सभी कि मनोकामना पूरी करते है खास तौर पर यदि कुंवारे लड़के-लड़कियां यहा पर आकर अपनी शादी कि मुराद माँगते है तो वो अति-शीघ्र पूरी होती है।

अब यदि आपको कभी धौलपुर जाने का अवसार प्रप्त हो तो आप भगवान अचलेश्वर महादेव के दर्शनों का लाभ उठाइयेगा। फिलहाल हम आप सभी को वीडियो के माध्यम से दर्शन कराते है।

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Temples of the Hoysala

The Hoysala Empire was a Southern mighty Indian empire that ruled from 10^th and 14^th centuries A.D. Belur was initial capital of the Hoysala Empire later moved to Halebidu.
During the reign, the Hoysalas built over 1500 temples throughout their empire. Today, however, only a little over a hundred of these monuments survive.Hoysalas promoted tolerance, with Shaivite, Vaishnavite, Jainism .They were meant to be expressions of spiritual purpose and vehicles of spiritual practice and attainment.

Stone Chariot at Vittala Temple - Hoysala

Stone Chariot at Vittala Temple displays the magnificence of the Hoysala architecture. Photo source.

Hoysala temples were built on platforms and had a star-shaped plan ,hybrid of the nagara style from northern India and the Dravidian style The intricate decorations cover the exterior walls include depictions of deities, dance and music, hunting, the daily life of the peoples, and scenes from three of Hinduism’s greatest literary works – the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and the Bhagavatham.

A section from the world famous hoysala architecture in India. Source: BigStockPhoto

At the first capital of the Hoysalas, Belur is the Chennakeshava Temple Complex. This is situated at the centre of the old walled town on the banks of the Yagachi River. It was dedicated to the god Vishnu, and Shiva. There are 118 stone inscriptions covering the period from A.D. 1117 to the 18^th century have been found there. These inscriptions provide us with fascinating details about the artists who were employed, grants made to the temple, and the renovations that were done.

Carvings of worshippers lined up along a wall at Hampi. Source: BigStockPhoto

Belur city was attacked numerous times,finally succeeded in sacking the capital in A.D. 1310. This resulted in the destruction of the main temple in the centre of the city as well as numerous other smaller temples, shrines and palace buildings. One of these remaining temples is the Hoysaleshwara Temple. This temple was built in A.D. 1121 during the reign of King Vishnuvardhana Hoysalas, and was dedicated to Shiva. While it was the kings who usually sponsored the grandest temples in Southern India, this one was dedicated by the wealthy citizens and merchants of Halebidu.

The intricate carvings on the Hoysaleshwara Temple. Source: BigStockPhoto

On the occasion of World Heritage Day 2014 (18 April 2014), UNESCO granted India another 15 sites on its tentative World Heritage Sites. This meant that India now has a total of 48 sites on this tentative list. Of these sites, 3 of them are from Southern India, and one of these is the Sacred Ensembles of Hoysala.
Featured image: The Chennakeshava Temple built in 1117 AD by the Hoysalas at Belur Karnataka India. Source: BigStockPhoto
chennakesava temple
Ḏḥwty
References
Drishti The Vision Foundation, 2014. World Heritage Day. [Online]
Available at: http://www.drishtiias.com/upsc-current-affairs-article-World-Heritage-Day
Government of Karnataka, Department of Tourism, 2014. Blazing Trail of Golden Era... Tourist Guide of Hassan District. [Online]
Available at: http://www.hassan.nic.in/pdfs/tourism/Hassan-District-Tourism-Golden%20Era.pdf
The New India Press, 2014. 3 Sites on Tentative Heritage List. [Online]
Available at: http://m.newindianexpress.com/karnataka/313147
UNESCO, 2014. Sacred Ensembles of the Hoysala. [Online]
Available at: http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5898/
Wikipedia, 2014. Chennakesava Temple. [Online]
Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chennakesava_Temple
Wikipedia, 2014. Hoysala Empire. [Online]
Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoysala_Empire
Wikipedia, 2014. Hoysaleswara Temple. [Online]
Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoysaleswara_temple

Thursday, February 18, 2016

Miraculous Bhuteshwar Shivling That Is Growing Every Year On Its Own

1. The land of miracles

When it comes to religious miracles, India is no stranger to them. Whether it was about a man claiming he had sighted “Lord Hanuman” in a cave or idols in a temple drinking milk a decade back, there have been such instances which have no logical explanation. Here’s another one that is bound to make your eyes open with amazement.

Erotic Indian temples

1. These erotic Indian temples

From Sun to Moon, and Soul to Sex, we Indians have god for almost everything. Lord Kamadeva also known as Mara is a Hindu god of human love and desire. A few might take his name in a hush-hush manner, others would rather pretend they do not worship him; on the other hand they praise him the most for enlightening them. So, it is but natural to explain why we Indians connect sex to spirituality!

Friday, February 12, 2016

Jain temple in Ajmer

अजमेर जैन मंदिर स्थापत्य कला की दृष्टि से एक भव्य जैन मंदिर है। इसे सोनीजी की णसियन के नाम से भी जाना जाता है। इसका निर्माण १९वीं शताब्दी के उत्तरार्द्ध में हुआ। इसके मुख्य कक्ष को 'स्वर्ण नगरी' (भगवान का नगर) कहा जाता है। इस कक्ष में सोने से परिरक्षित लकड़ी की रचनायें हैं।

https://m.facebook.com/jainamsiddhi/

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Thursday, February 11, 2016

The Druids : Brahmins of Ancient Europe

The celtic people spread from their homeland in what is now Germany across Europe in the first millennium bce. Iron tools and weapons rendered them superior to their neighbors. They were also skilled farmers, road builders, traders and inventors of a fast two-wheeled chariot. They declined in the face of Roman, Germanic and Slavic ascendency by the second centuries bce.
Here Peter Berresford Ellis, one of Europe’s foremost experts of the Celts, explains how modern research has revealed the amazing similarities between ancient Celt and Vedic culture. The Celt’s priestly caste, the Druids, has become a part of modern folklore. Their identity is claimed by New Age enthusiasts likely to appear at annual solstice gatherings around the ancient megaliths of northwest Europe. While sincerely motivated by a desire to resurrect Europe’s ancient spiritual ways, Ellis says these modern Druids draw more upon fanciful reconstructions of the 18th century than actual scholarship.
The Druids of the ancient Celtic world have a startling kinship with the brahmins of the Hindu religion and were, indeed, a parallel development from their common Indo-European cultural root which began to branch out probably five thousand years ago. It has been only in recent decades that Celtic scholars have begun to reveal the full extent of the parallels and cognates between ancient Celtic society and Vedic culture.

The Celts were the first civilization north of the European Alps to emerge into recorded history. At the time of their greatest expansion, in the 3rd century bce, the Celts stretched from Ireland in the west, through to the central plain of Turkey in the east; north from Belgium, down to Cadiz in southern Spain and across the Alps into the Po Valley of Italy. They even impinged on areas of Poland and the Ukraine and, if the amazing recent discoveries of mummies in China’s province of Xinjiang are linked with the Tocharian texts, they even moved as far east as the area north of Tibet.
The once great Celtic civilization is today represented only by the modern Irish, Manx and Scots, and the Welsh, Cornish and Bretons. Today on the northwest fringes of Europe cling the survivors of centuries of attempted conquest and “ethnic cleansing” by Rome and its imperial descendants. But of the sixteen million people who make up those populations, only 2.5 million now speak a Celtic language as their mother tongue.

The Druids were not simply priesthood. They were the intellectual caste of ancient Celtic society, incorporating all the professions: judges, lawyers, medical doctors, ambassadors, historians and so forth, just as does the brahmin caste. In fact, other names designate the specific role of the “priests.” Only Roman and later Christian propaganda turned them into “shamans,” “wizards” and “magicians.” The scholars of the Greek Alexandrian school clearly described them as a parallel caste to the brahmins of Vedic society.
The very name Druid is composed of two Celtic word roots which have parallels in Sanskrit. Indeed, the root vid for knowledge, which also emerges in the Sanskrit word Veda, demonstrates the similarity. The Celtic root dru which means “immersion” also appears in Sanskrit. So a Druid was one “immersed in knowledge.”
Because Ireland was one of the few areas of the Celtic world that was not conquered by Rome and therefore not influenced by Latin culture until the time of its Christianization in the 5th century ce, its ancient Irish culture has retained the most clear and startling parallels to Hindu society.
Professor Calvert Watkins of Harvard, one of the leading linguistic experts in his field, has pointed out that of all the Celtic linguistic remains, Old Irish represents an extraordinarily archaic and conservative tradition within the Indo-European family. Its nominal and verbal systems are a far truer reflection of the hypothesized parent tongue, from which all Indo-European languages developed, than are Classical Greek or Latin. The structure of Old Irish, says Professor Watkins, can be compared only with that of Vedic Sanskrit or Hittite of the Old Kingdom.
The vocabulary is amazingly similar. The following are just a few examples:
Old Irish – arya (freeman),Sanskrit – aire (noble)
Old Irish – naib (good), Sanskrit – noeib (holy)
Old Irish – badhira (deaf), Sanskrit – bodhar (deaf)
Old Irish – names (respect), Sanskrit – nemed (respect)
Old Irish – righ (king), Sanskrit – raja (king)

This applies not only in the field of linguistics but in law and social custom, in mythology, in folk custom and in traditional musical form. The ancient Irish law system, the Laws of the Fénechus, is closely parallel to the Laws of Manu. Many surviving Irish myths, and some Welsh ones, show remarkable resemblances to the themes, stories and even names in the sagas of the Indian Vedas.
Comparisons are almost endless. Among the ancient Celts, Danu was regarded as the “Mother Goddess.” The Irish Gods and Goddesses were the Tuatha De Danaan (“Children of Danu”). Danu was the “divine waters” falling from heaven and nurturing Bíle, the sacred oak from whose acorns their children sprang. Moreover, the waters of Danu went on to create the great Celtic sacred river–Danuvius, today called the Danube. Many European rivers bear the name of Danu–the Rhône (ro- Dhanu, “Great Danu”) and several rivers called Don. Rivers were sacred in the Celtic world, and places where votive offerings were deposited and burials often conducted. The Thames, which flows through London, still bears its Celtic name, from Tamesis, the dark river, which is the same name as Tamesa, a tributary of the Ganges.
Not only is the story of Danu and the Danube a parallel to that of Ganga and the Ganges but a Hindu Danu appears in the Vedic story “The Churning of the Oceans,” a story with parallels in Irish and Welsh mytholgy. Danu in Sanskrit also means “divine waters” and “moisture.”
In ancient Ireland, as in ancient Hindu society, there was a class of poets who acted as charioteers to the warriors They were also their intimates and friends. In Irish sagas these charioteers extolled the prowess of the warriors. The Sanskrit Satapatha Brahmana says that on the evening of the first day of the horse sacrifice (and horse sacrifice was known in ancient Irish kingship rituals, recorded as late as the 12th century) the poets had to chant a praise poem in honor of the king or his warriors, usually extolling their genealogy
and deeds.
Such praise poems are found in the Rig Veda and are called narasamsi. The earliest surviving poems in old Irish are also praise poems, called fursundud, which trace back the genealogy of the kings of Ireland to Golamh or Mile Easpain, whose sons landed in Ireland at the end of the second millennium bce. When Amairgen, Golamh’s son, who later traditions hail as the “first Druid,” set foot in Ireland, he cried out an extraordinary incantation that could have come from the Bhagavad Gita, subsuming all things into his being
Celtic cosmology is a parallel to Vedic cosmology. Ancient Celtic astrologers used a similar system based on twenty-seven lunar mansions, called nakshatras in Vedic Sanskrit. Like the Hindu Soma, King Ailill of Connacht, Ireland, had a circular palace constructed with twenty-seven windows through which he could gaze on his twenty-seven “star wives.”

There survives the famous first century bce Celtic calendar (the Coligny Calendar) which, as soon as it was first discovered in 1897, was seen to have parallels to Vedic calendrical computations. In the most recent study of it, Dr. Garret Olmsted, an astronomer as well as Celtic scholar, points out the startling fact that while the surviving calendar was manufactured in the first century bce, astronomical calculus shows that it must have been computed in 1100 bce.
One fascinating parallel is that the ancient Irish and Hindus used the name Budh for the planet Mercury. The stem budh appears in all the Celtic languages, as it does in Sanskrit, as meaning “all victorious,” “gift of teaching,” “accomplished,” “enlightened,” “exalted” and so on. The names of the famous Celtic queen Boudicca, of ancient Britain (1st century ce), and of Jim Bowie (1796-1836), of the Texas Alamo fame, contain the same root. Buddha is the past participle of the same Sanskrit word–“one who is enlightened.”
For Celtic scholars, the world of the Druids of reality is far more revealing and exciting, and showing of the amazingly close common bond with its sister Vedic culture, than the inventions of those who have now taken on the mantle of modern “Druids,” even when done so with great sincerity.

If we are all truly wedded to living in harmony with one another, with nature, and seeking to protect endangered species of animal and plant life, let us remember that language and culture can also be in ecological danger. The Celtic languages and cultures today stand on the verge of extinction. That is no natural phenomenon but the result of centuries of politically directed ethnocide. What price a “spiritual awareness” with the ancient Celts when their culture is in the process of being destroyed or reinvented? Far better we seek to understand and preserve intact the Celt’s ancient wisdom. In this, Hindus may prove good allies.
The Song of Amairgen the Druid I am the wind that blows across the sea; I am the wave of the ocean; I am the murmur of the billows; I am the bull of the seven combats; I am the vulture on the rock; I am a ray of the sun; I am the fairest of flowers; I am a wild boar in valor; I am a salmon in the pool; I am a lake on the plain; I am the skill of the craftsman; I am a word of science; I am the spearpoint that gives battle; I am the God who creates in the head of man the fire of thought. Who is it that enlightens the assembly upon the mountain, if not I? Who tells the ages of the moon, if not I? Who shows the place where the sun goes to rest, if not I? Who is the God that fashions enchantments– The enchantment of battle and the wind of change?
Amairgen was the first Druid to arrive in Ireland. Ellis states, “In this song Amairgen subsumes everything into his own being with a philosophic outlook that parallels the declaration of Krishna in the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita.” It also is quite similar in style and content to the more ancient Sri Rudra chant of the Yajur Veda.

Original Article

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Buddhism in China

ANCIENT BAUDDISM RAWAK STUPA KHOTAN SILK ROAD CHINA

The Rawak Stupa exemplifies a development from the stupa on a square base that emerges in and is seen elsewhere in the region, such as at Niya, to one on a cruciform-shaped base owing to the addition of staircases protruding out from the base on each side. This is seen in the Kanishka stupa dating to the Kushan and to Top-i-Rustam in Balkh. The form follows a scriptural description found in the Divyavadana, that describes a stupa as having four staircases, three platforms and an egg-like dome, as well as the other usual elements. Rawak is dated by several scholars to the fourth to fifth centuries, supported by finds, including coins, and stylistic considerations of the statues in the rectangular ambulatory, but also suggested by features such as the relic chamber placed high in the dome. This feature is common from the fourth and fifth centuries in stupas at Taxila and also seen in the Maura-Tim stupa at Kashgar. Stein suggested a possible late third to early fourth century date, based on the style of the stupa itself and the sculptures and paintings.[

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Monday, February 22, 2016

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Temples of the Hoysala

Thursday, February 18, 2016

1. The land of miracles

2. What is it?

3. One of a kind

4. On its own

5. Word of mouth

6. Huge number of devotees

7. How is it measured?

8. The story behind it

9. The story behind it

10. The story behind it

11. The best time to visit

12. The biggest natural shivling

13. Some statistics

14. The only one in the world

15. The mystery continues

1. These erotic Indian temples

2. Beautiful Indian temples

3. Temple famous for their carvings

4. Markandeshwar, Maharashtra

5. Virupaksha, Hampi

6. Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh

7. Padawali, Madhya Pradesh

8. Sun Temple, Konark

9. Bhoramdeo, Chattisgarh

10. Jagdish Mandir, Udaipur

11. Sun Temple, Gujarat

12. Osian, Rajasthan

13. Ranakpur, Rajasthan

14. Lingaraja Temple, Bhubaneshwar

15. Tripurantaka Temple, Karnataka

16. Kailasa, Ellora

17. Nanda Devi Temple, Almora

Friday, February 12, 2016

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Wednesday, February 10, 2016