So also with India. The British, through their massive intervention in the fields of law, administration, transport and communication, initiated a great many changes in the public realm. The other two realms stayed untouched, so the essential values of Indian society remained stable—not just for the rural masses but for urban dwellers as well. (If in doubt, glance at the matrimonial ads in any of our newspapers!)
Of course, by sacred, one does not mean only the religious but the primordial as well. Religion is perhaps the most facile path to the world of the non-manifest, but it is not the only one. In fact, as Europe has increasingly distanced itself from religion over the last two centuries, the primordial has become a fecund source of the mythic. This is why Picasso and Matisse in their paintings, Stravinsky in his music, and Le Corbusier in his architecture, intuitively searched out the primitive. They wanted to find the sacred.
Another fertile breeding ground of the sacred is nature. There is something intrinsically awesome in mountain ranges like the Himalayas, and in great seas and oceans, that triggers the metaphysical in us, and turns our thoughts towards the non-manifest. Certainly, the love of the English for their landscape and their sensitivity to it (perhaps harking back to the tree worship of the Druids?) is arguably one of the most mythic and sacred of their values. And in Scandinavia, the wellspring of the metaphysical is not only landscape (e.g., the fjords of Norway, the northern lights of Lapland) but also climate—hence the dark winters of Sweden reflected in the brooding films of Ingmar Bergman, with their epic struggles of good and evil. So also for us here in India, the word ‘aakash’ conveys much more than just ‘sky’. To walk on a seashore in the evening, or to cross a desert and arrive at a house built around a courtyard, is an extraordinary experience. At such a moment, subtle responses are set off in our minds, responses conditioned by thousands of generations of life on this planet. Perhaps they are the half-forgotten memories of a primordial landscape, of a paradise lost. In any event these spaces, open to the sky, condition our perceptions very powerfully, bringing a sense of the ineffable into our lives. Thus, while the symbol of education in North America is the little red school house, in India—as in most of Asia—it is the guru sitting under a tree. Not only is this image of the Lord Buddha under the peepal tree more sensible than the idea of sitting inside a stuffy room, it is also far more conducive to enlightenment.
In Hinduism, another source of the sacred is the ecstasy of physical union. This has always been central to Tantric philosophy. In Sri Yantra, the greatest of all the geometric depictions of cosmic order used as aids for meditation, this ecstasy is depicted as the interpenetrations of nine triangles, four facing upward and five downward, together symbolizing the union of Shiva and Shakti and representing the creative energy that created the manifest world. In this century, these ancient sources of the non-manifest were reincarnated in the novels of D.H. Lawrence, who through sex, through nature, through the primordial, strove to rediscover the sacred in the midst of an industrialized society.
All these sources of the non-manifest are also present in Hinduism, which can be described as a general theory incorporating in a pluralistic fashion a great number of subsystems, including animism and nature worship. Thus, to the Hindu, there is not only a sacred geometry (e.g., the mandalas, which we will examine presently) but a sacred geography as well, consisting of mountains, lakes, the confluence of rivers. Each of these makes the presence of the sacred vivid within the context of our everyday lives.
It is the main purport of this essay that this sacred realm is of fundamental importance to any understanding of traditional Indian architecture—and, by extension, to the rest of our built environment. The sacred is neither public nor private, though it qualifies both immeasurably by engaging the mythic dimensions inherent in the non-manifest.
II
Mankind has always been fascinated with the invisible, the unknown, the unknowable. Perhaps, as the economist E.F. Schumacher has pointed out, this reflects the hierarchy we experience in the very process of living, as we move along the natural progression from stone to plant to animal to human being. Stones are, by our definition, no more than the material they comprise (if there is a secret life of stones, we are unaware of it). Plants, consist of physical materials, with a new entity added—life!—and the journey towards the invisible has begun. Animals consist of materials, plus life, plus motivation. With humankind, there is yet another entity—self-awareness—which puts us in the world of the unseen. For everything essential in our fellow human beings—their thoughts, emotions, aspirations, fantasies—are invisible to us. These ‘invisibilia’ are of infinitely greater power and significance than the visibilia of everyday life.
Vastu-purush-mandalas
64 squares
81 squares
Man, since the beginning of time, has always sensed the presence of the invisible—and has used the most materialistic elements, like stone and earth, steel and concrete, to express the compulsive myths that obsess him. In India, the mythic beliefs that generate the deep-structure of built-form go back thousands of years. Since according to Vedic thought, the world we see is only part of our existence, the forms and events we perceive are significant merely to the extent that they help us understand the non-manifest layers that lie beneath. Hence the magic diagrams, the yantras that explain the true nature of the cosmos. Of these, the vastu-purush-mandalas form the basis of architecture. Thus, buildings are conceived as models of the cosmos—no less!
Each vastu-purush-mandala is a perfect square, subdivided into identical squares, creating a series which starts from 1 and goes on to 4, 9, 16, 25 . . . right up to 1024. In temple architecture, the most commonly used mandalas are those of 64 and 81 squares, with the various deities allocated places in accordance with their importance and with the mystical qualities inherent in the diagram. The mandala is not a plan; it represents an energy field. Its centre signifies both shunya (the absolute void) as well as bindu (the world seed and the source of all energy). In all mandalas, at this centre is located Brahman, the Supreme Principle. According to Hinduism, when the cycles of reincarnation are finally over, and the atman (the individual soul) is released from each of us, it goes to Brahman—that is, to the centre of this energy field.
The analogy to the black holes of contemporary physics is astounding! Energy devours itself, and the individual soul (after completing all the cycles of reincarnation) goes not to an eternal reward in heaven or the garden of paradise, but down the vortex of energy in the centre of the black hole. How incredible that such a concept should have surfaced so many thousands of years ago. As the noted French academician Gaston Bachelard pointed out, the intuitive insight of the artist (or for that matter, the seer) cannot be explained through the cause-and-effect structure of scientific reasoning—but, like a depth charge, is something that explodes at the centre of our being, releasing to the surface the debris of recognition. This is why the invisible, the mythic, the sacred, will always be central to art—and to our lives.
The Vedic altar:
the pre-cut stones were assembled only for the duration of the ritual, and then dismantled—because the sacred should not continue to exist in the profane world of our everyday lives
Purush: