The Hindu Temple v2.c11.s1.9

v2.c11.s1.9

The main display of the figure sculptures is on the perpendicular walls. (Pls. I, III, XLIII, LXXI). The temple has no façade; it faces the four directions. Its walls however are not four surfaces meeting at right angles. Each wall projects with a number of offsets, the main pier being in the centre. The buttresses vary in thickness; in the majority of temples built throughout India (except in the South) the offsets are moreover frequently superimposed resulting in a stepped, cross-shaped plan. Whereas the plain walls of the dark Garbhagṛha form a square in plan, the carved walls of the exterior of the temple, exposed to the light of the sun, the moon and the stars, form an indented plan. The plan of the centre of the temple, the square, is translated by its walls into a perimeter of variedly stepped and indented design which even may be 'star shaped'. The outside of the Prāsāda far from exhibiting carved surfaces only, itself has volume. It consists of the piers of varying thickness whose front and side walls have images and carvings; recesses, narrow vertical chases and steps hold shaded space, or darkness. The volume of the wall space of a Hindu temple forms a unity of relations in height, breadth and depth; in it are integrated space volumes. The texture of the walls is not only that of the stone of which they are built or of the plaster with which they may be overlaid; these lend a particular quality of the surface only to the closely built texture of the buttresses and offsets and their intervals which form space volumes and rhythms of graded light and darkness.