Krishna I carves the Kailasa temple at Ellora

Unlike earlier cave temples, hollowed into the cliff, the Kailasa was freed from it: its carvers cut away the rock around a block of the hillside and shaped it from the top downwards into a free-standing temple, leaving a court about 82 by 46 metres, over which the top of the sanctuary rises 32.6 metres. The shrine of Shiva and the pavilion of his bull Nandi are built on two storeys; the base is carved as if elephants were holding the temple aloft; two flagstaff pillars and a low gateway complete the ensemble, and its most famous relief shows the demon Ravana shaking Mount Kailasa, the abode of Shiva after which the temple is named.

The attribution rests on two later inscriptions: the Baroda (Vadodara) copper plate of Karkaraja II (812–813) says that Krishnaraja built at Elapura (Ellora) a temple so wondrous that even the gods and its architect were astonished, and the Kadaba grant of Govinda III similarly credits Krishnaraja. Hermann Goetz argued that the work spanned several reigns; M. K. Dhavalikar concluded that the main temple was completed under Krishna I, though some parts of the complex are later. The main shrine closely resembles, on a much larger scale, the Virupaksha temple of the Chalukyas at Pattadakal, which in turn reproduces the Kailasanatha temple of the Pallavas at Kanchipuram, so the Rashtrakuta temple continues the tradition of the two dynasties of the Deccan and the south. The Kailasa is one of the more than a hundred caves of Ellora — Buddhist, Hindu and Jain — inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1983.