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The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c15: Chapter IX

The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c15

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English

Chapter IX

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THE EVOLUTION OF INDIAN FINE ART AND ITS INFLUENCE ON TEMPLE BUILDING—THE GANDHARAN SCHOOL—THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIAN TEMPLE BUILDING — INDIAN ARCHES—THE TEMPLE OF men as Srî—is there. Indra upon his elephant, the rain-cloud; Dûrgâ upon her tawny lion, the scorching heat of the Indian plains—all the Vedic gods are there as witnesses of the Truth. But Buddha, the Blessed One Himself, is only represented by the precious relics placed within the Vedic altar upon the chaitya of the Pari-Nirvâna.

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Suddenly, about the beginning of the Christian era, the chaitya becomes something more than a nature-symbol and a reliquary: it is transformed into a shrine for the Buddha as the Deity, and everywhere images of the Blessed One as the Preacher, or as the Great Yogi, appear within the chaitya-houses and monasteries of the Sangha. Are we to suppose that during the five centuries which had elapsed since the first preaching of the Law, all the followers of the Buddha had kept strictly to the spirit of Aryan philosophy, as expounded in the Deer Park at Sarnath, and even refrained from making for themselves graven or painted icons to keep in memory the personality of their beloved Master? As human nature is, this would be altogether incredible. There must have been numbers of pious Buddhists, outside the strict rules of the Sangha, who kept among their household gods His pictured and graven image, before which they would sit in silent adoration as they meditated daily upon His inspired precepts. All that we really know is that from the chaitya-houses and monasteries of the orthodox Sangha, upon which the finest artistry of the Aryan genius was lavished, such pictures and images were excluded.

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It is easy to understand, also, that a close restriction of this kind upon the highest imagination of the painter and sculptor is sufficient in itself to account for the comparative barrenness of Indo-Aryan fine art during the centuries when the Western branch of the same family tree was producing such wonderful fruit in the temples of ancient Greece. In later times it had the same sterilising effect upon the Muhammadan art of Europe and Asia. But for this restriction early Aryan sculpture and painting might have grown to the same height in India as it did in Greece; for the ideal gods of Hellas were of the same æsthetic growth as the early hymns of the Rig-Veda, sung by the Aryans in their Eastern home to the nature-gods they worshipped. Here, however, the artistic genius of the Western Aryans stopped short. They never were inspired with a more profound metaphysic than the Homeric gods; for Greece lost her freedom, and her artists became the servants of foreign patrons less intellectual than their own countrymen before that consummation was reached. It was left to their brother-artists in the East to proceed from the primitive nature-gods of the Rig-Veda to the inspired conceptions of the Upanishads; but there never was at any time that irreconcilable antagonism between the ideals of Greece and of India which modern classical scholasticism fondly imagines—because the inspiration both of Greece and of India lies beyond its æsthetic comprehension.

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The first great impulse of the new movement, within the jurisdiction of the Buddhist Sangha itself, was synchronous with a considerable readjustment of political conditions in Northern India. In the year 184 b.c. the Mauryan dynasty founded by Chandragupta became extinct, and a new one, known as the Sunga, was established upon the imperial throne of Pâtaliputra. Pushyamitra, the first of the line, was not a follower of the Buddha, but celebrated his accession and a decisive victory over Menander, a Baktrian monarch who, like Seleukos, was ambitious of repeating the conquests of Alexander, by the old Vedic rite of the great horse sacrifice.

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But the dominions over which Pushyamitra ruled were of small extent compared with those of Asoka. After the death of the latter, the glory of the Mauryan empire was soon eclipsed by the rise of another dynasty, that of the Andhras, which at that time occupied the deltas of the Godâvarî and Krishnâ Rivers, but gradually extended their sway over the whole of the Dekhan; until in 27 B.C. they overthrew the successors of the Sungas, and established themselves as the leading power in Central and a great part of Northern India.

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The Andhra kings seem to have been Buddhist; the gateways of Sânchî (Pl. V) and the carved railing of the Amarâvatî stûpa (Pl. X) were among the architectural works dedicated to that cult which were completed under their patronage between the second century B.C. and the end of the third century A.D., when the dynasty was superseded by others.

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In the meantime the north-western part of Asoka's dominions had been occupied by invaders of Scythian or Iranian descent about the second century B.C., and by A.D. 45 a chieftain of the Kushans, one of their tribes, founded a dynasty under which Buddhism, the religion adopted by these clans probably as the result of Asoka's missionary enterprises, began to enter upon a new phase.

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The impelling cause was only incidentally dynastic and racial. The new invaders, by their adoption of Buddhist culture, merely contributed one more racial subdivision to the Indo-Aryan synthesis. The Kushan king, Kanishkâ, emulated Asoka's zeal for the religion of his Indian subjects, and there is no reason to suppose that the Scythian invasions disturbed to any great extent the organisation of the Aryan village communities in north-western India.

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The philosophy of Yoga, as expounded by Patanjali, seems to have been the basis of the teaching of the Buddhist monk, Nâgârjuna, who appeared in Kanishka's reign as the leader of a new school which eventually led to the secession of the northern Buddhists from the orthodox tradition of the Sangha. From about the beginning of the Christian era the northern or reformed schools were known as the Mahâyâna, or Great Vehicle, to distinguish them from those of the Hînayâna, or Little Vehicle, which remained steadfast to the early teaching of Buddhist philosophy.

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It is a common but erroneous view of the history of Indo-Aryan religion to regard this new movement as the herald of what Europeans describe as the triumph of Brahmanism, or of Hinduism over Buddhism. Brahmans were among the first disciples of the Buddha, and it was the Brahman acceptance of his teaching in the Deer Park at Sarnath dominions were in contact with the Roman Empire, and included part of the old Græco-Baktrian Empire of Seleukus. As this new dynasty grew in power and affluence, numbers of Græco-Roman masons and carpenters, who were always travelling in search of employment, were attracted to the Kushan capital, Purushapûra—the modern Peshawar—to assist in building the monasteries, chaityas, and chaitya-houses which were required for the crowds of Buddhist monks who collected there. This feeble backward splash of Aryan culture which thus flowed over North-west India until the Kushan dynasty came to an end in the fourth century A.D., created that Gandharan school of building and sculpture the influence of which upon Indian art has been so strangely misinterpreted and exaggerated by Western scholars.

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Whatever inspiration there was in this new court fashion, it was but a feeble reflection of the flame which the Aryan genius had lighted in India ten centuries before these Kushan kings came under its influence—a flame which continued to burn brightly for many centuries after the Kushan dynasty had passed away.

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Hellas herself was under the heel of Rome; the light of her own inspiration was becoming dim, and her best artists devoted their talents to the service of Roman patricians. Among the best of the Gandharan craftsmen there were sometimes a few to compare with the second-best of the Greek sculptors and painters who adorned the villas of Pompeii and Herculaneum. But except for an occasional piece of fine academic craftsmanship, Gandharan sculpture is generally petty in ideas and feeble in execution, and nothing that was produced under the patronage of the Kushan kings approached in grandeur of conception the chaitya-house of Kârlê or the monasteries of Nâsik, or showed the warm vitality and unaffected beauty of the Sânchî gateways. So far from inspiring the ideals of Indo-Aryan art, it was not until the Gandharan master-masons had drunk in the inspiration of Indo-Aryan philosophy and religion that any of their sculpture became worthy of comparison with the best original art of India.

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Indirectly, however, the inflow of this current from the West greatly assisted the new movement from within, which was already tending towards the removal of the restraint which had hindered the higher development of Indo-Aryan sculpture and painting from the earliest Vedic times. The Kushan kings were evidently liberal patrons of the fine arts, and, like the Great Moguls, were personally interested in sculpture and painting. Though of the Buddhist faith, they were indifferent to the rule of the Hînayâna school, which forbade any icon of the Master's personality in the service of the Sangha. The elders of the Buddhist Church in Gandhara, anxious to reconcile their royal patrons' dilettantism with the ritualistic traditions of their creed, withdrew the prohibition, but laid down strict rules, in the spirit of Vedic philosophy, to prevent vulgar idolatry. The image of the Blessed One was not to be fashioned, like those of the Olympian gods, as an ideal human; nor was it to be worshipped until it had been consecrated with appropriate rites. The imager by spiritual insight must realise the Divinity which transfigured Him when He attained Nirvana under the Bodhi tree at Gayâ: he must transport himself by meditation to the Tusitâ heavens, where the Buddha now watched humanity with compassionate eyes, and show the divine glory revealed to him there.

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The naïve endeavours of the unimaginative Western craftsman to adapt his materialistic art to these unfamiliar mystic ideas are to be seen in the early sculptures of the Gandhara school. The intellectual atmosphere of the Kushan court must have presented many analogies to that which exists in modern India: there were the similar endeavours to understand the Indian mind *de haut en bas*, the same aloofness from it, and the same honest, but hopeless, misconceptions. There is also a curious suggestion of modern commercialism in the average work of the Gandharan craftsmen. One can easily imagine them crying their wares in the manner of the Western shopkeeper: "Large stock of Olympian gods in latest fashion to suit every taste. Correct Baktrian images, as supplied to the Royal Court," etc.!

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The profound critical error which Western writers have made is in supposing that these new court fashions, imported from the West, were any more inspiring to Indo-Aryan artists at the beginning of the Christian era than the "styles" of architecture, principles of anatomy and perspective now taught in Indian schools of art. As a historical chapter in Indian art the Gandharan school is only the Mahâ-Nirvana Tantra, after giving elaborate rules for the consecration and worship of images, adds the warning : “Those who (in their ignorance) believe that Ishwara is (only) in images of clay, or stone, or metal, or wood, merely trouble themselves by their tapas. They can never attain liberation without knowledge. . . . Yoga is the union of the embodied soul with the Supreme Soul ; Pûjâ is the union of the worshipper and the worshipped ; but he who realises that all things are Brahman, for him there is neither Yoga nor Pûjâ.”¹

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¹ Translated by Arthur Avalon, pp. 348–9.

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The traditions of the Silpa-sâstras, which classify the structure of vimânas, or shrines, by the type of image contained by them, no doubt go back to this time. The Mânasâra says that they are of three kinds. The first, called *st'hânaka*,² contains an image standing erect ; the second, called *âsana*, contains a seated image ; and the third, called *sâyana*, a recumbent one.³

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² Standing firm, like the trunk of a tree.

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³ Râm Râz, p. 49.

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The st'hânaka type would contain an image of Vishnu as the Pillar of the Universe, or of the Buddha in a similar aspect as the Teacher of the Law. The roof of it would be the sikhara. The âsana type would be represented by an image of Buddha or of Siva in a Yoga attitude, or seated on a throne—the roof of the cell being flat or domical, or a combination of the terraced roof and dome. Arjûna’s Rath at Mâmallapuram (Pl. XXVI) is an illustration of it.

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Bhîma’s Rath at the same place (Pl. XXIV) is a monastic temple of the sâyana type : it is oblong in plan and covered by a vaulted roof with pointed arch or lotus-leaf gables. This was designed for a recumbent image, such as that of Vishnu-Nârâyana reposing in the cosmic serpent Ananta, or the analogous image of the Buddha in the sleep of Pari-Nirvana.

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The Teli-ka Mandir, or Oilman’s temple, at Gwalior

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THE TELI-KA MANDIR, GWALIOR

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(Pl. XXIX), is another fine example of the sâyana type, but here the cell remains square, and only the double vaulted roof, gabled at the ends with sun-windows, shows that it was meant for an image of Vishnu-Nârâyana. Fergusson attributes it to about the tenth or eleventh centuries; but the data by which he calculated, in the absence of inscriptions, were in most cases very unreliable, and probably the temple, like that at Bodh-Gayâ, is a good many centuries earlier than his estimate.

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The raising of sculpture from an accessory detail to the principal subject in design, or, in modern phraseology, from a decorative to a fine art, was an epoch-making event in Indian architecture. The sculptured images of the gods whom we see at Kârlê and Nâsik merely as onlookers, became the sacred symbols for which the shrines were built. The symbolism of the shrine, as regards plan and structure, had to be adapted to the particular type of image for which it was intended. And these considerations particularly affected the design of the roof. Indian temple builders never troubled themselves with pagan notions of beauty for beauty's sake. The skilful jugglery of lines and spaces which modern academicians teach as the art of building would have seemed to them childish play.

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The great thinkers of India, who anticipated Western endeavours to establish religion upon a scientific basis, taught their master-builders to express in concrete architectural terms the theoretical principles of the cosmic forces, as the different schools of philosophy conceived them to be. Indo-Aryan builders were pure scientists—philosophers in brick and stone. Yet the fine intuition of the artist-craftsman clothed the science of natural religion with a grace and splendour of its own; and thus Indian art grew, like a tree or flower, conscious of its own beauty and rejoicing in it always—receiving it in wondering adoration as a gift from heaven, but never struggling to attain to it by the pedantic and coquettish arts of the Renaissance.

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The builders of the Saiva schools aimed at expressing the power of knowledge, of abstract thought—the static force of the universe. And they did so first by the image of the Great Yogi sitting with mind and reason set upon the Eternal, like a lamp in a windless place "which flickereth not." The plain cubical cell, with a flat roof or dome, which contained

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FIG. 44*a*.—Diagram showing the Constructive Principle of Siva Shrines—with Flat Roof and Dome.

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FIG. 44*b*.—Diagram showing the Constructive Principle of Siva Shrines; with Sloping Roofs as used in Himâlayan Districts and on the West Coast of India.

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this sacred symbol expressed the same idea—the dome being only a symbol of the sky, or of the chhatra of royalty.

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When they sought to give importance to the shrine by additional height, they simply raised the roof by putting cube upon cube like a pyramid, and crowning the topmost one with a dome (fig. 44*a*).

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But in the Himâlayan districts, where the rainfall is very heavy, flat terraced roofs have obvious practical inconveniences; so here it was found expedient to adapt the sym- This page appears to be entirely blank, containing no printed text, headings, figures, or page furniture.

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JAIN TEMPLE AT MUDABIDRI

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bolism to the sloping wooden roof of the locality as shown in fig. 44*b*, a type of temple building which passed into China with the Buddhist religion.¹ Similar roofs were used on the west coast of India, where similar meteorological conditions prevail (Pl. XXX). In Bengal the local form of roof with convex curvature was adapted for the same purpose. When will the practical British architect in India begin to learn wisdom from the Indian master-builder?

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¹ The dotted lines in the diagrams indicate the roofing.

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FIG. 45.—Sculptured Shrines, Ellora.

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It will now become clearer why Indian builders before Muhammadan times used the arch, as a constructive principle, so seldom. The arch, as I have explained elsewhere,² symbolised the aura of the sacred image, and every possible variety of the arch was constantly used for constructing the shrines or niches in which images were placed (fig. 45). For larger structural purposes it was also used occasionally, as in the sikhara at Bodh-Gayâ (Pl. XXV); but the trabeate system of building was preferred because it suggested a philosophical idea. There was also the practical reason that when good timber and building stone of almost any dimensions were plentiful, the beam and bracket were generally more expedient than the arch, especially in a country liable to severe earthquakes.

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² "Indian Architecture: its Psychology, Structure, and History," Chap. VI.

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When the Muhammadans destroyed the images contained [Figure: LONGITUDINAL SECTION. SCALE OF 10 | | | | | | | | | | 10 FEET. SECTION OF A VISHNU TEMPLE]

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one temple serves to symbolise the Three Aspects of the One. There may, however, be another explanation of the appearance of Siva's symbols in this temple—that it is a Vaishnavaite shrine appropriated for Saivaite worship. But in either case the Three Aspects are represented in the structure of the temple—Brahmâ in the cubical cell for the image, Vishnu in the sikhara, and Siva in the domes of the mandapams and of the shrine.

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FIG. 46.—Plan of the Mârtând Temple (from Fergusson's "History"). (Scale, 100 ft. to 1 in.)

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The application of this symbolism explains all the forms of roofs which covered the holy of holies in Indian temples. Even in Gandhara and in the adjoining districts influenced by Gandharan art the construction of roofs is never a meaningless reproduction of foreign forms, but a well-reasoned adaptation of them to Indian philosophic ideas. The remains of Gandharan buildings in Gandhara itself have only an archæological interest; but when Indian master-builders had assimilated and revitalised the emasculated Aryan tradition brought by the Græco-Roman craftsmen, Indo-Gandharan art became really great, both in sculpture and in building—as even modern departmental art may become when the lessons of history have been learnt by Anglo-India.

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The finest building of the Indo-Gandharan school is unquestionably the ruined temple of Mârtând in Kashmir, built by King Lalitâditya-Muklâpîda between 725 and 760 A.D. There is not much left of it now, except part of the *garbha-griha* (the shrine) (Pl. XXXII), and the ruins of the quadrangular wall with monastic cells which enclosed it (fig. 46).

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The Indian master-builders of the eighth century have only taken some of the foreign suggestions brought in by the Gandharan craftsmen, and used them with much better effect than the latter did. An exact parallel to this is to be found in the way in which modern Indian builders sometimes adapt—when they are allowed to work in their own way—Public Works "Gothic" and "Classic" designs, reanimating the dry bones of Western academic formularies with the inspiration of real art.¹

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¹ Several good illustrations of this are found in the Report on Modern Indian Building, published by the Government of India in 1913.

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Except for its quasi-classic pilasters the design of the Mârtând temple conforms strictly to the Hindu tradition of the time. The trefoil arches were not a foreign suggestion: they were designed as a frame for the aureoled head and shoulders of the image for which the shrine was built. Nor is the pediment over them anything more than a decorative motif taken from the wooden hipped roofs of the Himâlayan districts. The actual roof of the shrine was probably wooden. If the latter was built for a Vishnu image, it must have been a wooden adaptation of a brick or stone sikhara. If it was meant for a Siva image, it would have been the Himâlayan form of the pyramidal roof (fig. 44*b*), like that over the shrine of the Mudabidri temple (Pl. XXX).

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TEMPLE AT MÂRTÂND (EIGHTH CENTURY A.D.)

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