Indian Architecture (Buddhist and Hindu Periods) c42.15

c42.15

Although the monuments in this ancient temple-city are mainly of two kinds, the stupa and the temple, the architectural treatment of both is of much the same order, as the difference lies largely in that of intention The stupa is the shrine or reliquary, and is therefore in itself an object of worship, while the temple is planned with its interior arrangements consisting of galleries and corridors devised for religious ceremonial Such were the primary attributions of these two types of structure, but in the course of time the Buddhist temple began to combine the two purposes, where the central block took the form of a great shrine with interior corridors carried around it for circumambulation and processions. The colossal Buddhist monumental shrine and temple at Paharpur in Bengal, at the height of its glory in the eighth century, but now a mound of ruins, is believed to have been the model for this form of structure, although only in its underlying essentials, and not in its architectural scheme For in the buildings of Pagan, as in much of the structural art of Further India, is illustrated the contact of two diverse trends, that from India implying in its exterior mass the quality of convexity shared by the stupa and the sikhara, and that from the Far East revealing the characteristic concavity or inward sweep of the pagoda. In the whole of the architecture of this great region lying between India and China, exemplified particularly in the buildings of Burma, there appears to have been a continual struggle for supremacy between the bulbous mass of the orthodox stupa combined with the outward curve of the Indo-Aryan sikhara on the one hand, and the ascending attenuated outlines of what is ordinarily known as the Chinese pagoda on the other. In an effort to bring about an agreement between these two somewhat conflicting architectural formations, the Burmese master masons were helped very considerably by adopting a form of elongated finial as a summit to their pagoda "spires," instead of the lateral *harmika* of the Indian stupa, or the short thick-set *amalaka* of the Hindu temple. This finial or *hti*, as it is called, is an adaptation of the multiform umbrella, and makes an appropriate finish to the tenuous shape of the Burmese superstructure In spite therefore of the fact that although "Burma is surrounded by India, Tibet, China, Siam and the Malay States" and "the culture of its people, their art and monuments are almost exclusively derived from India"¹ a glance at the elevational effect of the architecture of the country will show that it owes not a little of its character, or at least its external appearance, to Far Eastern sources