The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c9.192

v1.c9.192

The fourth canon is "Beauty," or the disposition of architectural ornaments in the most effective way. Of this much has already been said, and a few words more will follow. The fifth is "Life" or "the making of an edifice the exponent of living things and of the men who rear it",—a living handiwork, bespeaking of the immortal spark in the architect struggling "towards something unattained", and not the *caput mortuum* of a dead art. This yearning for advancement, to be really beneficial, should be controlled by "the Lamp of Obedience", and so it is found in Orissa. From the time of the Great Tower of Bhuvaneśvara, in the middle of the seventh century, to that of the Black Pagoda of Koṇārak in the beginning of the thirteenth, the laws of the *Śilpa Śāstra* represented the Lamp of Obedience, while "the luxuriousness of perpetually varying fancy", producing endless forms of ornaments in every possible mode of combination, bore evidence to that of life. From the last-named date life ebbed rapidly, and in less than a century was entirely extinct.