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

THE
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HINDU RENAISSANCE
of types of buildings that persist for all the later
tradition of religious architecture in India.
Besides the evidence of the monuments themselves,
our chief sources for the understanding
of later Hindu architecture are the various
builders' manuals or sastras. These are late
compilations of far earlier oral tradition, because
the silpins or initiated craftsmen for many centuries
handed down their lore entirely by word
of mouth in the instruction of apprentices in
the guild. In some cases the sastras contain only
such dimensions and rituals as were likely to be
forgotten, since the essentials were the common
heritage and knowledge of the class of architects.
Among the sastras existing in English translation
is
the Mdnasara, a compendium of sculpture
and architecture for the silpins who are
designated as the descendants of Visvakarman,
god of craftsmen. An 1
Orissan document is the
Bhuvampradipa, a text devoted entirely to the
methods for constructing religious edifices. 2
Many of the observations in this book, which
is ascribed to Visvakarman himself, hold good
not only for Orissan buildings but for Hindu
architecture in general. These works, and the
many documents cited by Stella Kramrisch in
her monumental work on the Hindu temple, 3
deal with such matters as the types of structures
suitable for various deities or secular use, the
selection of an auspicious site, the laying out of
the plan with proper magical rites, and the most
specific instructions for every last detail of the
shrine's elevation.
Throughout the entire consideration of this
last phase of building activity, it must be remembered
that every work of Indian architecture,
Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain, must first and foremost
be regarded from its metaphysical aspect,
that is, as a kind of magic replica of some unseen
region or sacred being; and that it was precisely
this metaphysical factor that determined the
plan and elevation, rather than any aesthetic or
functional consideration. The temple or vimdna
is at once the house and body of the deity, its
fabric the very substance of the divinity.
The plan is prescribed by the most elaborate
geomantic rites designed to ensure the security
of the shrine on the earth upon which it is built
and to make it in every way the proper microcosm
which its plan and shape are intended to
reproduce. The plan is laid out in a square, the
perfect magic diagram repeating the imagined
shape of the world. This square or mandala is
divided into a number of smaller squares dedicated
to the gods concentrated around the
central Brahma, and with specific reference to
the influence and positions of the earth and the
heavenly bodies in the eight directions of space.
This whole aspect of Indian architecture, so
vast and so complicated in origin and history,
can never be disregarded in a consideration of
its essential nature, since it transcends and
determines what we call style. The only possible
comparison in the West for building entirely
for metaphysical rather than physical needs is
the Christian architecture of the Middle Ages,
in which we know that a similar concern for reproducing
the image of the world or of God in
architecture prevailed, combined with a regard
for the magic of numbers and proportions, to
ensure the harmony of the structure with the
cosmos that it reproduced. In such an architecture
as that of India an emphasis on the vertical
is not determined by any aesthetic or structural
necessities as in the skyscraper, but because this
vertical, the sikhara or spire, is literally meant to
point to God, to be the very embodiment of that
magic axis that pillars apart heaven and earth
and is variously symbolized by the mountain,
the tree, or the Universal Man, Purusa.
Every slightest measurement in the temple is
determined by the most specific laws of proportion,
in a manner comparable to the employment
of the Golden Mean, since the dimensions
of the building were designed not only for security
and appropriateness, but to put the struc-