Also the roofs had nothing Islamic about them. The roofs were built in a cathedral-like upwards surging style, rising tall like a series of graded peaks of a mountain range that represent the dawn of higher-levels of spiritual attainment. It appears as if India had been reaching far beyond the Islamic before the Islamic even emerged. 

It contrasted sharply with the Islamic world where the sexual isolation of women from men in society behind the hijab and later the burka, which the Islamic rulers increasingly demanded, casts a shadow that I found strikingly absent in these temples. 

While the explicit erotic scenes were a relatively small part of the carvings in the temples, the sensuous eroticism that is so much a part of the human form was proudly presented in the erotic sculptures. There was also an ordering apparent among the sensuous. The cruder sexual scenes appeared at lower levels on the temple walls while the more esoteric, associated with deities, appeared near the top. The guidebook told us that the goddesses and gods represent the many manifestations of the divine Shakti and Shiva, which are the female and male principles that are reflected in the Yin and the Yang in Chinese culture.

      I saw the erotic sculptures in a different way. I saw it as a tribute to Life embodying in human form what is sublime and spiritually spontaneous about our humanity. The spontaneous aspects and its universality seemed to me reflected in the way the statues and carvings cover in some places every inch of every ceiling and every wall. While the erotic carvings seemed to give the temples of Khajuraho its fame as a tourist attraction, it was the level of detail that I found magnificent. Sure, the erotic scenes were a kind of three-dimensional rendering of the Kama Sutra, a kind of graphical instruction manual chiseled in stone. But I didn't see them that way. One's sense of eroticism seems to change at the Khajuraho temples. The reality seems to cheat one's expectation by giving the erotic a budding spiritual significance hinting that these temples were more than just the outcome of skilled hands, but were the outcome of a spiritual idea that is rooted in the heart and was given an excelsior expression.

      "Of course every form of beauty is in the eyes of the beholder," said Indira at one point as we talked about these things. An object of a specific beauty may appear differently to you than to me, and differently again to other people."

      She pointed to an almost life-size sculpture of an exquisitely shaped woman. "She may appear as a divine mother to a priest, or as a sister to a Swami, or as a daughter to an old person, or as a lover to the romantic mind," she said. "So how do you see her?" she asked.

      "Maybe I see her as neither," I said. "I tend to see her in the universal sense, perhaps in the sense in which Judy Chicago incorporated the image of vulva on the dinner plates for the 39 women of her Dinner-Party. Maybe she is intended to break the isolation of women in society, the isolation that the Vedic Brahmanism had promoted for 2,500 years, which had finally come to an end at the time when these temples were built. Maybe they were built as a spiritual protest against 2,500 years of abuse."

      "We don't really know why they were built," said Indira. "We can only speculate. But we do know that the Chandela dynasty was involved in a Tantric cult of Hindism, and that Tantric mysticism teaches that the gratification of sexual desire is part of the path to self-knowledge and to "the infinite." The art may also reflect a type of Hinduism that focuses onto the feminine aspects of divinity. Or the sculptures might simply show scenes from everyday life in Chandela India."

      "I don't think the builders knew themselves why they built these temples," I said to her. "I see them as the clearest expression of the Principle of the Universal Kiss that my friend Helen discovered just recently. I believe the builders did know that men and women deeply depend on each other and not only in the family environment for the raising of children. Men and women depend on each other emotionally, even spiritually in unfolding relationships where sexual intimacy plays a key role."

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Stories about War from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche