Early Indian Architecture: I. Cities and City-Gates, etc.; II. Bodhi-gharas c7.4

c7.4

In Coomaraswamy’s introduction to that essay, he wrote that Acharya was “too little, if at all, acquainted with the actual buildings” (below, p. 72). “Sculptures and buildings of this and earlier periods survive in thousands,” Coomaraswamy wrote. For him, a scholar such as Jouveau-Dubreuil had “had the immense advantage of a thorough knowledge of the actual architecture, and of personal contact with living *sthapatis* able to explain the meaning of technical terms.” Coomaraswamy also stated that “a very great deal of exact information about the early architecture [of India] can be gathered from the Śuṅga, Kuṣāṇa, and Āndhra reliefs” and admitted that “I have myself in preparation a work based on this early material, which can and necessarily will be very fully illustrated.”