The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

CHAPTER 8
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THE ROCK-CUT SANCTUARIES OF EARLY BUDDHISM
The earliest temples of Buddhism, properly
speaking, were buildings of wood and thatch
erected when the demand arose for actual shrines
to enclose some cult object, such as a memorial
stupa, to concentrate the worship ofthe Buddha's
followers on some material reminder or symbol
of his earthly mission. Prior to this, the services
had been conducted in the open air, in groves or
forest clearings, such as the Buddha was wont
to select for gatherings of his disciples. These
earliest structural buildings of Buddhism have,
of course, disappeared, but we can get a very
clear impression of their appearance from the
sculptural replicas of such edifices as began to
be carved from the living rock in various parts
of India as early as the Maurya Period. These
are the so-called cave temples of western India.
The word 'cave' is actually rather misleading,
since it implies a natural grotto that is the home
of wild beasts or savages, whereas these entirely
man-made recesses are among the most sophisticated
examples of religious art in all Indian
history. 'Rock-cut sanctuaries' is a better definition
for these enormous halls of worship hewn
from the rock in imitation of free-standing
architectural types. The definition, chaitya-hall,
sometimes applied to these monuments, is derived
from the word chaitya, which refers to any
holy place. The rock-cut temples are only the
most ambitious examples of the development of
monumental stone-carving that followed on
the invasion of Alexander the Great and the reestablishment
of relations with western Asia.
Although there is no direct resemblance to the
many examples of such sculptural architecture
in Egypt, Asia Minor, or Iran, there can be little
doubt of the influence of such prototypes as the
tombs of the Achaemenid emperors at Naqsh-i-
Rustam, in which the carved facade represented
the elevation of a palace at Persepolis in much
the same way, we shall see, as the facades of the
Indian chaitya-halls reproduced those of actual
buildings. In both cases we are dealing with
works of sculpture rather than architecture, and
in both cases there was an appeal in the very
permanence that was promised in the carving
out of tombs or temples from the very bones of
the earth. In the Indian examples there was
probably already the idea of preserving the
Buddha's Law through the bad times at the end
of the kalpa. Such grotto sanctuaries appealed
to the early Buddhists through their association
with caves that even in Vedic times had formed
the abodes of hermits and rishis. The development
of the religion from the isolated practice
of asceticism to the formation of a monastic
organization required the enlargement of the
single rock-cut cell provided for the retreat of
holy men by Asoka to the monumental rock-cut
assembly halls that we find in western India
to-day. All these principal sanctuaries of Hinayana
Buddhism are located within a radius of
two hundred miles ofBombay . They are hollowed
out of the almost perpendicular bluffs of the
Western Ghats. They are exact imitations ofpreexisting
structural forms, and in almost every
one the reminiscence of these prototypes is
carried to the point of having many parts of the
model fashioned in wood and attached to the
rock-cut replica. The relief of Indra's Paradise
at Bharhut accurately reproduces the appearance
of an actual wooden chaitya-hall [35].