The Guṇṭupalli group of Buddhist Monuments is located in Eluru district in Andhra Pradesh. It is around 40 km away from Eluru itself. The rock-cut part of the site has two Buddhist cave complexes, a chaitya hall – which has a rare carved stone entrance replicating wooden architecture – and a large group of stūpas on an open plateau.
The climb to the site was up around 500 steep steps, and when we got to the top there was a good view out over the local countryside. The site is quite large, as will be seen from the photographs, and includes a Mahā Stūpa, and a plain of smaller, mainly votive stūpas; down from that plain are the cave complexes, on two levels. There is a legend that the great Buddhist logician Dignāga lived in this complex, and wrote his works there.
We went straight from that site to the smaller Pāṇḍavulameṭṭa Stūpa and Cave Complex. I was so exhausted though that I was unable to climb up to the site. Fortunately the driver who was helping me that day, Manikanta, had watched how I was photographing at Guṇṭupalli, and he took the camera and went and photographed Pāṇḍavulameṭṭa for me.
The Uṇḍavalli Caves are on the edge of the Krishna River in Vijayawada and were not far from the guest house we were staying in. We passed by them many times while on other excursions. The four-storey caves are excavated out of a cliff side at a low elevation. It appeared to have been originally a Buddhist site, which is now converted to a Hindu site dedicated to Lord Ananta Padmanābha.
We also travelled long distances sometimes to visit stūpa sites, which in fact yielded only a few interesting photographs at each of the sites. I have collected four such sites into one album covering Ghaṇṭaśālā, Bhaṭṭiproḷu, Jaggayyapēṭa and Kottūru.
