The Colas c35.31

c35.31

By its three central shrines of equal beauty and importance, and the multiplicity of its subshrines the Mūvarkōvil reminds one of the celebrated Brahmanical temple-complex of Prambanam in Java. Built within less than half a century of each other, and at a time when there were many opportunities of active intercourse between South India and Indonesia, the two temple-complexes exhibit very interesting differences in the application of the same idea. The Javanese temple takes up the pre-Cōḷa Indian idea of representing the manifestations of the same deity in the principal and subordinate shrines, and multiplies the latter indefinitely, the Prambanan complex having for instance 156 minor shrines; the Cōḷa architects resist the temptation to display by sheer number of subshrines, confining them to a more or less schematic and traditional group of attendant divinities waiting upon the main deity as it were. On the other hand, while the central temples in Prambanam enshrined Śiva, Viṣṇu and Brahmā, the Trinity of Hinduism, at Koḍumbāḷūr Śiva alone occupied the sanctum of all the three central shrines.