Ajanta Cave Murals

• Theme: Buddhism, enlightenment

• Visual: Bodhisattvas, celestial musicians, Jataka tales, ornamented halos, deep reds and lapis blues

Thinking Through Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)’s Philosophy on Art Essence

If the Apollonian is the dream and the Dionysian the intoxicated ground of Being, then the Ajanta Cave Murals are an intoxicating dream of detachment, a sublime paradox where the path to extinction is painted in the colors of rapture. For Nietzsche, these murals would shimmer with contradiction: art in the service of renunciation, a Dionysian longing trapped in an Apollonian stillness.

Here, in the cool shadows of carved volcanic rock, bodhisattvas do not rage against suffering—they absorb it. Draped in silk, adorned with jewels, they turn their eyes inward or downward. They do not assert — they withdraw. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche decried Socratic culture for chasing knowledge and rationalism over myth and tragedy. Yet here, he would confront a different withdrawal: the will to extinction, not in the name of reason, but in the name of nirvana.

And yet! These murals are not austere. They are luminous — drenched in golds, lapis, vermillion. Every contour swirls with ornament. There is music, movement, animal tales, heavenly beings. This is not aesthetic minimalism — this is Dionysus dressed in robes of transcendence, bursting through a monastic philosophy that seeks to end desire even as it paints desire with unearthly tenderness.

What does this mean, Nietzsche would ask? That the Indian artist — like the tragic Greek before him — was more powerful than his religion. For even when commanded to depict the “cessation of suffering,” he does so with a painter’s cry of joyful elaboration. The frescoes do not whisper, “I want nothing.” They scream, “I have tasted life fully, and I choose silence only after song.” This is not nihilism. This is aesthetic overcoming.

Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, proclaims the artist as the one who dances upon the abyss. The painters of Ajanta paint the abyss — and give it wings. Their Jataka tales — lives of the Buddha across incarnations — are nothing less than affirmations of eternal return, retold in visual myth. The suffering animal, the wandering prince, the compassionate act — repeated, eternalized, given rhythm. This is not doctrine. This is the soul becoming aesthetic, pain becoming contour, compassion becoming palette.

And consider this: the Buddha himself, the “emptiness of self,” the conqueror of craving — is never rendered in crude renunciation. He is calm, but vast. Removed, but radiating. The ultimate No becomes a glowing Yes, because it is shaped into form. Here, as Nietzsche foresaw, even the most life-negating philosophies must bow before the power of art to affirm through beauty.

There is also eroticism here — not in overt gesture, but in form’s lushness, in the curve of hips, the softness of arms, the serenity of gazes. Nietzsche would nod to this. “There is more truth in the body,” he says, “than in your highest philosophy.” These murals are flesh spiritualized, but never disembodied. They are a metaphysics that does not scorn the senses, but redeems them through refinement.

In sum, the Ajanta murals are a Nietzschean paradox: they proclaim the illusory nature of the world, and yet do so through the most enchanting illusions imaginable. They are resigned, but they glow with the joy of resignation. They desire extinction, but not before singing life into the walls.

To Nietzsche, these caves would not be monuments to nihilism — but triumphs of aesthetic power, moments when even doctrines of negation were conquered by the will to create, and in creating, to affirm.