(6) Khajurhao
In 1963, fresh out of high school, a friend and I visited a local legendary bad boy who had grown up our town, graduated from our high school in 1958, and unlike ourselves had immediately embarked on a Korea/Casey inspired Odyssey to Mexico, Venice Beach, San Francisco, Big Sur and other Beat destinations in the company of his best friend, another local legend. The two adventurers represented more exoticism than we were capable of embracing in those days. A friend and I went to his tiny cottage behind an apartment complex where the tone of the visits were always conspiratorial, initiatory, always tinged with an enchanting them versus us illusion about the rest of the square world. I am sure that we were all insufferably smug. I think he thrived on wowing us pink hicks from the sticks with tales of iconoclastic and criminal daring-do from life beyond the central California tomato belt. On this particular visit he showed me a book from the library called Kama Kala, a sumptuously produced book of erotic images from the temples of Khajurhao and Konarak, in India. I was totally astounded by these images of Yogic couplings involving pairs and larger groups of people. My concept of art and artists at the time was consistent with the prevailing notions of the general public, that there were these separate special people who because of something indefinable in their characters were mysteriously licensed to go where the rest of us couldn't, so they could look at things that were volatile or forbidden, without being subject to the societal sanctions that applied to the rest of us. What they brought us from their vantage point was an avenue for the languid meandering of our erotic curiosity under the auspices of loftier concerns. Nudity abounded in their circles, it was a given, and their odalisques could loll where calendar girls dared not seek repose. I think art has always served that purpose, to let you see things you couldn't see any other way without some peril, whether to your person or your beliefs. Here in this book about Khajurhao and Konarak was the obliterating of all that frustrating obliqueness in classical nudity, here were people, here were crowds, making love as casually as if they were mingling in the park on a pleasant afternoon. An indelible imprint on my psyche occurred at that moment courtesy of that ultimately tragic beat sage, who killed himself in Reno a few years later in a fit of drug induced dementia.
I was on my way to Khajurhao, 38 years later, knowing a lot more about those sculptural reliefs, marveling at the difference between what I thought they represented when I saw them in that book for the first time and what I came to find out about them later, and wondering what else they would reveal in their next realization, as a primary experience for me. The train ride to Jhansi was uneventful, the train car was comfortable in a prison waiting room sort of way, the train station at Jhansi was a rerun of the station at Agra only smaller, and I was easy to find in the crowd by the driver that Singh had arranged to meet me for the rest of the journey to Khajurhao. We set out across a dry and uninviting landscape, blessedly further from Agra with each passing minute. Villages were infrequent, the weather was pleasant, the little Ambassador ground along the barely two lane road. The more rural the situation, the fewer motor vehicles we encountered. There were donkey carts, a few horse and ox carts and quite a few people on bicycles, sometimes carrying astoundingly precarious loads. It never was evident why people needed to move around in those areas because one village looked like the other, all about the same size and with the same offerings. The fewer the motor vehicles there were, the more people they carried. It was routine to see a motorcycle rickshaw, a glorified golf cart with a sputtering two stroke engine carrying a driver flanked by two adults, three more adults sitting in the actual passenger seat behind, and several children standing in front of them, all of them balancing belongings of all sorts . A few jeep like vehicles would be carrying a dozen or more people, many of them standing outside on the bumpers and hanging on to a rack on the roof that was piled high with peoples bundles. The most astounding rural vehicle I saw was a contraption I called the 'Snoutmobile' because it was a three wheeled monstrosity with a grillwork in front that made it look like a giant pig. This was at least twice as big as the three wheeled rickshaws. Unlike the rickshaw it had its motor situated above the front wheel, so that the massive one cylinder motor turned with the front wheel when it was steered by an outlandishly large tiller. These iron age eyesores would thump down the road spewing gouts of smoke, careening menacingly because of how severely they were overloaded with people, animals and goods of all sorts. I would pass these perilous conveyances alone in my chauffeured Ambassador, sprawled across a seat that could hold four or five natives is spacious splendor. They looked at me like I was a profligate Sultan, one person taking up the space in solitude that could accommodate so many more of them.
I arrived at my Hotel in Khajurhao around 4:30, it was overcast and gloomy as usual, but the town is in a rural area with nothing much around it so the air wasn't nearly as wretched as where I had come from. I hastily checked into the hotel and arranged to go immediately to the smaller Eastern group of temples. Thanks to the delay in odious Agra I would now have to leave after little more than 24 hours in Khajurhao. This was the down side of the totally organized itinerary, that any delays could not be added onto the visit, because of subsequent reservations and also because airline passage had to occur within a finite amount of time in order to get a crucial discount on the overall cost of traveling. I was determined to spend the bulk of my time at the much more revered and numerous temples of the Western group the following day before departing for Benares.
It is hard to know if the town of Khajurhao would exist at all without the presence of the temple groups. There is a wide range of accommodations there, an airport and what amounts to a small village. The Eastern group of temples is adjacent to Khajurhao Village. It consists of several modest and uncomplicated structures from the golden age of the Chandalla Dynasty that was responsible for all of these marvels, originally 86 of them, with 25 or so still standing in three groups within a couple if kilometers of each other. The Eastern group was surrounded by a compound that was built sometime in the 16th century that also housed a small Jain museum. There was a group of Japanese tourists there, a few European looking young people with backpacks, and me. Even though these temples are considered to be second fiddles to the ones at the Western group, they were quite astounding to me, the reliefs were in a profusion that I had not encountered in the other monuments I had seen, and there was a wonderful equilibrium between the activity of the surfaces and the stolidity of the building itself. The light was failing. I was accosted as I set up my tripod by an official who informed me that such equipment was taboo within the compound, even when it was set up on the dirt, let alone on the paving stones that surrounded the temples. This precluded the possibility of any worthwhile photography and I was a little relieved to not have to race with the coming of night for hastily considered images. I used the time remaining to sit and look capriciously and randomly at the largest of the temples, recognizing some images and deities, puzzling over others, enjoying the fact that there was no entry point into the comprehension of what was before me. I felt that I was visually and cognitively doing what someone does when they thump a melon to find a promising resonance. I was so spent from the traveling and my ever present flu that I finally laid down on the paving stones of the elevated terrace that surrounded the largest temple. It was very peaceful, taking in this masterpiece from such a vantage point, totally at rest, the stone beneath me producing a radiant heat warmer than the air around me, using my camera bag as a pillow, expending nothing other than my visual faculties. There was a defining Indian moment when the wandering group of Japanese tourists approached the temple and found that there was a wild dog nursing three pups in their path, not far from this beached American tourist who was also reclining inappropriately in the presence of one of the wonders of the world. I was far enough away to remain only an eyesore for these studious seekers, but mama dog was directly in their way and refused to budge. They came to a stop less than two meters from the nursing hound, she remained undisturbed, the guide did his staccato lecture while cameras clicked and whirred and the tumbling scruffy pups grappled for the most advantageous teat as the sun set on Khajurhao.
I gathered myself up and was given an individual tour of the Jain museum by a dapper uniformed official who seemed to be from another century. His English was so bad that I understood little of his animated presentation about the figures and artifacts in his charge, but he seem so sincere about his mission that I woozily went from display to display, nodding appreciatively to the sound of non-sequitur syllables. I thanked him, tipped him, and before I could reach my waiting taxi was assailed by a horde of vendors with the usual array of books, postcards and trinkets that are hawked outside train stations and tourist attractions. The local twist added to this inventory of schlock and geegaws was a number of crudely stamped silhouette figures of some from the erotic images from the temple reliefs, small brass figures that undulated in lurid pantomimes when their hinged bodies were moved by a small lever at their base, producing the same jerky repetitive copulation as in a pornographic film. These artifacts were presented with a conspiratorial leer from each of the dozen or so vendors, each trying to outdo his fellows in attributing a prurient desirability to these goofy trinkets. In better times and in better health, I might have found them hilarious and bought all of them, but I was resolute in my grumpiness not to endorse the degradation of greatness that these things seemed to represent at that cold fatigued moment, and the more decisively I rejected the figures, the more the frantic vendors lowered their prices. Their cajoling turned to curses as I closed the cab door in their faces without making a purchase. I made arrangements at my hotel to be at the Western group of temples at 6 am, to see the sunrise on Khajurhao, the gift of the medieval Chandella dynasty of a thousand years ago.
The morning was chilly and overcast. It was still pretty dark at 6 am. There was no one at the temple complex except a bleary eyed ticket vendor who looked at me like I was nuts. Neither of us had the right change. I told him to keep the extra 50 rupees rather than remain dickering over chicken feed when I was within meters of a lifetime goal. Then he was sure I was nuts. I entered the enormous park like setting of the western temple group. I think it was good to approach these monuments in the misty darkness. It was a visual equivalent of the time for which these astounding places had been shrouded for me by my not knowing. There they were, places that had names that now corresponded to an imposing and timeless presence rather than a picture in a book. Lakshmana, Mahadeva, Kandariya, Devi Jagadamba, Visvanatha, celestial sounding names, like grand ships now perpetually moored in order to be revered for the incomparable passages they represented, in their forms as well as their histories. It was immediately apparent that a lifetime wasn't enough time to inventory, let alone comprehend what was represented in these structures. I felt relieved, I was put in my place with a certainty that was like an embrace that told me I was in the presence of "intimate immensity" (Gaston Bachelard's wonderful term). There was a geological feel to the experience of the park, where these miraculous mesas remained thrusting heavenward while lesser salients had worn away. Being there for one day was a disappointment, but it was also clear that you needed to come back at many times in a lifetime to partake of the meanings of this place and that no single visit, a month or a year, would be enough. It is a place that demands you measure the change in yourself over a lifetime
A few years ago I saw a large exhibition of Alberto Giacommetti sculptures. Something that was central to the presence of many of the pieces that was totally absent from any viewpoint that could be represented in a photo reproduction was how uniformly dynamic the profiles of his figures were, from every angle of viewing. There were no "dead spots" or secondary views, no passages where the vigor of the representation lapsed into inattention or lost its composure. The net effect of this was that space within the gestures of the figures became animate, empty air was charged with import as surely as the bronze that bounded it. This same dynamic presence existed in the temples at Khajurhao, a uniformity of coherence from all angles that articulated an inductive charge between the components of the structures as well as among the groups of them, a phenomena vastly more complicated and multivalent than Giacommetti's wonderful figures. How different an experience from the Taj Mahal! The animate and vital profile of the temples from a distance became more charged as you approached, revealing within its boundaries that it is comprised of a richly varied strata of relief sculpture, one narrative hierarchically above another above another, an enactment of the components of the phenomenal world articulating the certainty of the immortal realm. The seamless continuity of this perfection kept the number of narratives from becoming overwhelming or intimidating. The effect was one of serenity and calm, with no hint of stasis, or inertia.
Another revelation of the temples was the ecumenical nature of the reliefs. Those reliefs were a revealing and enduring cross-section of the society that made them, and the erotic elements that are emphasized in the Westerners definition of the temples are proportionally small in relation to all that is represented in the many tiers of reliefs. There are far more militaristic narratives than the erotic, the Chandellas were warriors, almost continuously defending their geographically vulnerable empire from invaders. There are images of rows of elephants moving soldiers and supplies, confrontations between adversaries, real and fictional animals, musicians playing, dancers being taught, families celebrating, there is medical advice, allegories for righteous conduct, an encyclopedic inventory of the workings of the culture, arrayed for sequential and consecutive circumambulations And then there is the sex, graphically enacted but also sublimely implied in the gaze and embrace of the various partners.
There was erotic subject matter in the religious iconography of Buddhist, Jain and Hindu sculpture, in consort with architectural setting and in discreet objects from around 500 to 1300 AD. The common misconceptions about the images at Khajurhao are that they are Tantric, a term that has been annexed by moderns who seem to feel a need for a license for acrobatic abandon in their sexual habits. The temples we reputed to have been the sites of orgies, and that the images present are a kind of performance checklist, related to the Kama Sutra. Tantrism in any of its many manifestations was not a meaningful presence in the medieval civilization of the Chandellas, and consequently there would be no Tantric activities to depict. The Kama Sutra was written five centuries before the construction of the temples of Khajurhao, and several of the practices prominent in the reliefs at Khajurhao are specifically enjoined in the Kama Sutra. More widely accepted reasons for the presence of the erotic reliefs are: (1) the temples are analogous to bodies, and the body is the instrument of procreation, in the biological sense as well as in the more general sense of the positive generation of life enhancing situations and attitudes, (2) the pleasure of the viewers in a purely secular and sensual realm as an enhancement to all the other secular and spiritual guidance present, (3) the codification of certain yantras, diagrams of deific matters and personages in the symmetrical formations of some of the poses, particularly the intriguing head-down postures, and (4) the most diffuse but also most metaphorically potent expression, which is the position of the reliefs themselves in relation to the temples construction. Many of the reliefs occur at the architectural juncture of the cella, the sanctum beneath the highest spire of the temple which contains the cult image of the temple, and the vestibule of the cella, a boundary of crucial import in the symbolism of the temple as a model of the cosmos. You have ascended to a long porch, into an audience hall where public rituals and dances occur, then beyond into the vestibule, a more private and contemplative place, the final stop before entering the sanctum. This demarcation, between the mortal and the immortal can be symbolized by the act of procreation, the perpetuating of ourselves beyond our own lifetime. The passages in the perpetuation of life are formalized in the spatial poetry of this physical passage within the temple. The layered experiences here, from delectation to contemplation to awareness function as a schematic of the components of knowing, of being. It was and is an incomparable immersion in the cumulative efforts of a civilization to diagram the structures beneath appearance back to their sources, back to a beginning.
As I left the Western temple group to take a short flight to Benares I noted that the temples were still great teachers, that the group in its totality was doing what a teacher does by revealing the core knowledge of things and their states by isolating that core from its usually imbedded role in our experiences. The boulevards and hostelries and merchants and services that once surrounded these grand structures were gone, the lesser stuff was swept away to reveal the timeless wealth in what often is taken for a gulf between being and the reasons for it.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.
I was on my way to Khajurhao, 38 years later, knowing a lot more about those sculptural reliefs, marveling at the difference between what I thought they represented when I saw them in that book for the first time and what I came to find out about them later, and wondering what else they would reveal in their next realization, as a primary experience for me. The train ride to Jhansi was uneventful, the train car was comfortable in a prison waiting room sort of way, the train station at Jhansi was a rerun of the station at Agra only smaller, and I was easy to find in the crowd by the driver that Singh had arranged to meet me for the rest of the journey to Khajurhao. We set out across a dry and uninviting landscape, blessedly further from Agra with each passing minute. Villages were infrequent, the weather was pleasant, the little Ambassador ground along the barely two lane road. The more rural the situation, the fewer motor vehicles we encountered. There were donkey carts, a few horse and ox carts and quite a few people on bicycles, sometimes carrying astoundingly precarious loads. It never was evident why people needed to move around in those areas because one village looked like the other, all about the same size and with the same offerings. The fewer the motor vehicles there were, the more people they carried. It was routine to see a motorcycle rickshaw, a glorified golf cart with a sputtering two stroke engine carrying a driver flanked by two adults, three more adults sitting in the actual passenger seat behind, and several children standing in front of them, all of them balancing belongings of all sorts . A few jeep like vehicles would be carrying a dozen or more people, many of them standing outside on the bumpers and hanging on to a rack on the roof that was piled high with peoples bundles. The most astounding rural vehicle I saw was a contraption I called the 'Snoutmobile' because it was a three wheeled monstrosity with a grillwork in front that made it look like a giant pig. This was at least twice as big as the three wheeled rickshaws. Unlike the rickshaw it had its motor situated above the front wheel, so that the massive one cylinder motor turned with the front wheel when it was steered by an outlandishly large tiller. These iron age eyesores would thump down the road spewing gouts of smoke, careening menacingly because of how severely they were overloaded with people, animals and goods of all sorts. I would pass these perilous conveyances alone in my chauffeured Ambassador, sprawled across a seat that could hold four or five natives is spacious splendor. They looked at me like I was a profligate Sultan, one person taking up the space in solitude that could accommodate so many more of them.
I arrived at my Hotel in Khajurhao around 4:30, it was overcast and gloomy as usual, but the town is in a rural area with nothing much around it so the air wasn't nearly as wretched as where I had come from. I hastily checked into the hotel and arranged to go immediately to the smaller Eastern group of temples. Thanks to the delay in odious Agra I would now have to leave after little more than 24 hours in Khajurhao. This was the down side of the totally organized itinerary, that any delays could not be added onto the visit, because of subsequent reservations and also because airline passage had to occur within a finite amount of time in order to get a crucial discount on the overall cost of traveling. I was determined to spend the bulk of my time at the much more revered and numerous temples of the Western group the following day before departing for Benares.
It is hard to know if the town of Khajurhao would exist at all without the presence of the temple groups. There is a wide range of accommodations there, an airport and what amounts to a small village. The Eastern group of temples is adjacent to Khajurhao Village. It consists of several modest and uncomplicated structures from the golden age of the Chandalla Dynasty that was responsible for all of these marvels, originally 86 of them, with 25 or so still standing in three groups within a couple if kilometers of each other. The Eastern group was surrounded by a compound that was built sometime in the 16th century that also housed a small Jain museum. There was a group of Japanese tourists there, a few European looking young people with backpacks, and me. Even though these temples are considered to be second fiddles to the ones at the Western group, they were quite astounding to me, the reliefs were in a profusion that I had not encountered in the other monuments I had seen, and there was a wonderful equilibrium between the activity of the surfaces and the stolidity of the building itself. The light was failing. I was accosted as I set up my tripod by an official who informed me that such equipment was taboo within the compound, even when it was set up on the dirt, let alone on the paving stones that surrounded the temples. This precluded the possibility of any worthwhile photography and I was a little relieved to not have to race with the coming of night for hastily considered images. I used the time remaining to sit and look capriciously and randomly at the largest of the temples, recognizing some images and deities, puzzling over others, enjoying the fact that there was no entry point into the comprehension of what was before me. I felt that I was visually and cognitively doing what someone does when they thump a melon to find a promising resonance. I was so spent from the traveling and my ever present flu that I finally laid down on the paving stones of the elevated terrace that surrounded the largest temple. It was very peaceful, taking in this masterpiece from such a vantage point, totally at rest, the stone beneath me producing a radiant heat warmer than the air around me, using my camera bag as a pillow, expending nothing other than my visual faculties. There was a defining Indian moment when the wandering group of Japanese tourists approached the temple and found that there was a wild dog nursing three pups in their path, not far from this beached American tourist who was also reclining inappropriately in the presence of one of the wonders of the world. I was far enough away to remain only an eyesore for these studious seekers, but mama dog was directly in their way and refused to budge. They came to a stop less than two meters from the nursing hound, she remained undisturbed, the guide did his staccato lecture while cameras clicked and whirred and the tumbling scruffy pups grappled for the most advantageous teat as the sun set on Khajurhao.
I gathered myself up and was given an individual tour of the Jain museum by a dapper uniformed official who seemed to be from another century. His English was so bad that I understood little of his animated presentation about the figures and artifacts in his charge, but he seem so sincere about his mission that I woozily went from display to display, nodding appreciatively to the sound of non-sequitur syllables. I thanked him, tipped him, and before I could reach my waiting taxi was assailed by a horde of vendors with the usual array of books, postcards and trinkets that are hawked outside train stations and tourist attractions. The local twist added to this inventory of schlock and geegaws was a number of crudely stamped silhouette figures of some from the erotic images from the temple reliefs, small brass figures that undulated in lurid pantomimes when their hinged bodies were moved by a small lever at their base, producing the same jerky repetitive copulation as in a pornographic film. These artifacts were presented with a conspiratorial leer from each of the dozen or so vendors, each trying to outdo his fellows in attributing a prurient desirability to these goofy trinkets. In better times and in better health, I might have found them hilarious and bought all of them, but I was resolute in my grumpiness not to endorse the degradation of greatness that these things seemed to represent at that cold fatigued moment, and the more decisively I rejected the figures, the more the frantic vendors lowered their prices. Their cajoling turned to curses as I closed the cab door in their faces without making a purchase. I made arrangements at my hotel to be at the Western group of temples at 6 am, to see the sunrise on Khajurhao, the gift of the medieval Chandella dynasty of a thousand years ago.
The morning was chilly and overcast. It was still pretty dark at 6 am. There was no one at the temple complex except a bleary eyed ticket vendor who looked at me like I was nuts. Neither of us had the right change. I told him to keep the extra 50 rupees rather than remain dickering over chicken feed when I was within meters of a lifetime goal. Then he was sure I was nuts. I entered the enormous park like setting of the western temple group. I think it was good to approach these monuments in the misty darkness. It was a visual equivalent of the time for which these astounding places had been shrouded for me by my not knowing. There they were, places that had names that now corresponded to an imposing and timeless presence rather than a picture in a book. Lakshmana, Mahadeva, Kandariya, Devi Jagadamba, Visvanatha, celestial sounding names, like grand ships now perpetually moored in order to be revered for the incomparable passages they represented, in their forms as well as their histories. It was immediately apparent that a lifetime wasn't enough time to inventory, let alone comprehend what was represented in these structures. I felt relieved, I was put in my place with a certainty that was like an embrace that told me I was in the presence of "intimate immensity" (Gaston Bachelard's wonderful term). There was a geological feel to the experience of the park, where these miraculous mesas remained thrusting heavenward while lesser salients had worn away. Being there for one day was a disappointment, but it was also clear that you needed to come back at many times in a lifetime to partake of the meanings of this place and that no single visit, a month or a year, would be enough. It is a place that demands you measure the change in yourself over a lifetime
A few years ago I saw a large exhibition of Alberto Giacommetti sculptures. Something that was central to the presence of many of the pieces that was totally absent from any viewpoint that could be represented in a photo reproduction was how uniformly dynamic the profiles of his figures were, from every angle of viewing. There were no "dead spots" or secondary views, no passages where the vigor of the representation lapsed into inattention or lost its composure. The net effect of this was that space within the gestures of the figures became animate, empty air was charged with import as surely as the bronze that bounded it. This same dynamic presence existed in the temples at Khajurhao, a uniformity of coherence from all angles that articulated an inductive charge between the components of the structures as well as among the groups of them, a phenomena vastly more complicated and multivalent than Giacommetti's wonderful figures. How different an experience from the Taj Mahal! The animate and vital profile of the temples from a distance became more charged as you approached, revealing within its boundaries that it is comprised of a richly varied strata of relief sculpture, one narrative hierarchically above another above another, an enactment of the components of the phenomenal world articulating the certainty of the immortal realm. The seamless continuity of this perfection kept the number of narratives from becoming overwhelming or intimidating. The effect was one of serenity and calm, with no hint of stasis, or inertia.
Another revelation of the temples was the ecumenical nature of the reliefs. Those reliefs were a revealing and enduring cross-section of the society that made them, and the erotic elements that are emphasized in the Westerners definition of the temples are proportionally small in relation to all that is represented in the many tiers of reliefs. There are far more militaristic narratives than the erotic, the Chandellas were warriors, almost continuously defending their geographically vulnerable empire from invaders. There are images of rows of elephants moving soldiers and supplies, confrontations between adversaries, real and fictional animals, musicians playing, dancers being taught, families celebrating, there is medical advice, allegories for righteous conduct, an encyclopedic inventory of the workings of the culture, arrayed for sequential and consecutive circumambulations And then there is the sex, graphically enacted but also sublimely implied in the gaze and embrace of the various partners.
There was erotic subject matter in the religious iconography of Buddhist, Jain and Hindu sculpture, in consort with architectural setting and in discreet objects from around 500 to 1300 AD. The common misconceptions about the images at Khajurhao are that they are Tantric, a term that has been annexed by moderns who seem to feel a need for a license for acrobatic abandon in their sexual habits. The temples we reputed to have been the sites of orgies, and that the images present are a kind of performance checklist, related to the Kama Sutra. Tantrism in any of its many manifestations was not a meaningful presence in the medieval civilization of the Chandellas, and consequently there would be no Tantric activities to depict. The Kama Sutra was written five centuries before the construction of the temples of Khajurhao, and several of the practices prominent in the reliefs at Khajurhao are specifically enjoined in the Kama Sutra. More widely accepted reasons for the presence of the erotic reliefs are: (1) the temples are analogous to bodies, and the body is the instrument of procreation, in the biological sense as well as in the more general sense of the positive generation of life enhancing situations and attitudes, (2) the pleasure of the viewers in a purely secular and sensual realm as an enhancement to all the other secular and spiritual guidance present, (3) the codification of certain yantras, diagrams of deific matters and personages in the symmetrical formations of some of the poses, particularly the intriguing head-down postures, and (4) the most diffuse but also most metaphorically potent expression, which is the position of the reliefs themselves in relation to the temples construction. Many of the reliefs occur at the architectural juncture of the cella, the sanctum beneath the highest spire of the temple which contains the cult image of the temple, and the vestibule of the cella, a boundary of crucial import in the symbolism of the temple as a model of the cosmos. You have ascended to a long porch, into an audience hall where public rituals and dances occur, then beyond into the vestibule, a more private and contemplative place, the final stop before entering the sanctum. This demarcation, between the mortal and the immortal can be symbolized by the act of procreation, the perpetuating of ourselves beyond our own lifetime. The passages in the perpetuation of life are formalized in the spatial poetry of this physical passage within the temple. The layered experiences here, from delectation to contemplation to awareness function as a schematic of the components of knowing, of being. It was and is an incomparable immersion in the cumulative efforts of a civilization to diagram the structures beneath appearance back to their sources, back to a beginning.
As I left the Western temple group to take a short flight to Benares I noted that the temples were still great teachers, that the group in its totality was doing what a teacher does by revealing the core knowledge of things and their states by isolating that core from its usually imbedded role in our experiences. The boulevards and hostelries and merchants and services that once surrounded these grand structures were gone, the lesser stuff was swept away to reveal the timeless wealth in what often is taken for a gulf between being and the reasons for it.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.