The monastery
Kanheri lies in a basalt hill inside what is now a national park within the city of Mumbai. It was close to the ancient ports of Sopara and Kalyan, whose merchants were among its main donors. Over about a thousand years monks cut more than a hundred caves into the hill: cells for living, halls, a large chaitya, and many small caves, linked by steps cut in the rock. A system of channels and rock-cut cisterns collected the rainwater on which the community depended. A cemetery of small memorial stupas for deceased monks has been found on the hill.
The name Kanheri is derived from Krishnagiri, "black mountain", which appears in the inscriptions. The hill lay in the region the texts call Aparanta, the western seaboard, where Buddhism was established early: a set of Ashoka's rock edicts was found at Sopara, and Buddhist tradition says that the merchant Purna, a disciple of the Buddha, came from Sopara and brought the teaching home.
The great chaitya
Cave 3, the chaitya hall, was cut in the late second century CE, during the reign of the Satavahana king Yajna Shri Satakarni, according to an inscription. It follows the plan of the great hall at Karla, with a pillared nave and a stupa in the apse, though on a smaller scale. Its porch carries large standing Buddhas, added later, and pairs of donor figures.
The Mahayana phase
From about the fifth century the monastery took up Mahayana practices, and many caves were altered and decorated with images of the Buddha and bodhisattvas. A notable relief shows the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara with eleven heads, and another shows him as the saviour from the eight great perils, a theme also found at other western Deccan sites. Cave 11, known as the Darbar hall, is a large assembly hall with a long stone bench, perhaps used for meetings of the community.
Inscriptions
Kanheri has the largest number of inscriptions of any Buddhist cave site in India, more than a hundred, in Brahmi and later scripts. They record donations by merchants, goldsmiths, monks and nuns, and the endowments made to support the community, and they have been important for understanding how Buddhist monasteries were funded. Among the later records are inscriptions in Middle Persian, Pahlavi, left by Zoroastrian visitors in the early eleventh century, evidence of the Parsi communities then living on the Konkan coast.
The site today
The caves are protected by the Archaeological Survey of India and are visited by large numbers of people from the city. Their survival in the middle of a modern metropolis owes much to the protected forest around them.
Further reading
- Dehejia, Vidya. Early Buddhist Rock Temples. Cornell University Press, 1972
- Ray, Himanshu Prabha. The Winds of Change: Buddhism and the Maritime Links of Early South Asia. Oxford University Press, 1994
- Schopen, Gregory. Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks. University of Hawaii Press, 1997
See also
- Buddhist rock-cut architecture — Buddhist rock-cut architecture comprises the chaitya halls and viharas excavated into the basalt of western India from the second century BCE, the earliest surviving Indian architecture of any tradition.
- Sātavāhana Empire — The Sātavāhanas were the first great power of the Deccan, ruling from the Konkan to the Andhra coast for some three centuries, and the dynasty under which peninsular India entered the Indian Ocean trade on a large scale.
- Elephanta Caves — The Elephanta caves are rock-cut temples on Gharapuri island in Mumbai harbour, dating mainly from the sixth century, whose great cave of Shiva holds the six-metre carving of Shiva with three faces, often called the Trimurti.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.