About the Place & what to see:

Surrounded by rivers Gharahara, Sona and the Sindhu, the picturesque Ayodhya village is situated at a distance of 10 kms. from Nilagiri town. The vast ruins of this place point at an old township combining Hinduism and Buddhism as it has a vast number of Hindu and Buddhist temples.However,all the temples have lost their past grandeur.From the inscriptions on the images, the date of Ayodhya can be assigned to 10th/11th century A.D.


The outskirts of the village is dotted with low mounds suggesting that several small Buddhist shrines existed there.Some of the best images have been removed from there and kept in several places of the village. The presiding deity of Ayodhya was Marichi, and this goddess is worshipped even to-day in the Jayadurga temple.The huge mass of architectural ruins indicate that the original temple of Marichi was a very large one and it was situated at the center of a large number of shrines scattered all around. The magnificient image of Marichi contains an inscription recording the famous Buddhist creed ye dharma hetu prabhava etc.in the script of the 11th/12th century A.D.indicating that the antiquities of the site belong to this period. The 3.6 meters high, three-faced and eight-armed Marichi image stands in the aldih pose on a chariot drawn by seven pigs. The effigy of Dhyani Buddha Vairochona is depicted on the crown. Attributes like Tarjani, goad ,thread ,needle,Vajra and arrow are shown in the hands of Marichi. The Manjusri image is kept to the right side of the Marichi figrue.The God is two-armed and placed on a lotus pedestal in a graceful Tribhanga pose.The image of Padmapani Avalokiteswar is installed to the left of Marichi.The four-armed and three-eyed image of Bartali is kept on the floor of the sanctum. An image of Buddha in bhumisparsa mudra is kept ona niche of the wall to the left of the entrance door.

Besides this some Matruka images such as Lokeswar and Tara and several images of Buddha and Bodhisattavas and one panel depicting the birth scene of Gautama Buddha have also been found here from the debris.The images found here are great treasures of local school of Buddhist art and they combinedly convey the intensity of religious feeling of an age when Tantric worship was at its peak. The Tara images of Ayodhya are most remarkable for their size, number ,variety, artistic beauty and grandeur. The image of Vajra Tara inside the modern temple of Uttareswar is a rare specimen of sculptural art in India.The product of the school of art are also to be seen in the Nilgiri town itself.One modern temple there containson its wall some Mahayana Buddhist images of considerable beauty and icnographic interest.Evidently the Nilgiri area was dominated by a Mahayana school of art in the 11th/12th century.