The Temple Is a Cosmos

There is a place where everything this treatise has described stands assembled, in stone, in a single object you can walk around with your own feet and read with your own eyes. You have almost certainly stood in front of it. It is the Hindu temple. And once you have learned the classes of being we have been tracing — the host, the guardians, the mothers, the spirits, the artists, the officers — the temple stops being a bewildering mass of carving and becomes what it actually is: a map. A scale model of the peopled cosmos, with every class of being in its proper place, arranged around a single centre. Learn to read the wall, and you can read the universe.

Read the wall from the ground up

Start at the bottom, at the plinth, and look at the little figures carrying the building. Along the base of countless temples runs a frieze of squat, pot-bellied, grinning grotesques, straining upward with their arms — the bhūtagaṇa, the host of ganas we met in Movement I, carved so that they appear to be holding the entire temple up on their shoulders. This is where the wild, marginal, laughing beings belong in the architecture: at the very foundation, bearing the weight of the sacred, and clearly enjoying the job. The cosmos rests on the shoulders of Shiva’s rowdy host, and the tradition wanted you to see it.

Move up to the doorways, and you meet the dvārapālas, the door-guardians — the great armed figures, often fanged and fierce, who flank every significant threshold, one on each side, weapons ready. They are the guardian-principle we met in the Bhairavas and Kshetrapala, brought down to the specific and practical job of holding this particular door. You do not pass into the presence of the deity except between two guardians; the threshold is defended, as every boundary in this tradition is defended.

Now walk around the main shrine and note the figures at the corners and cardinal points, for they are placed by rule and not by whim. At the eight directional points of the vimāna, the sanctum-tower, stand the aṣṭa-dikpālas — Indra to the east, Yama to the south, Varuṇa to the west, Kubera to the north, and the rest at the intermediate points — the guardians of the directions from the last chapter, now literally built into the eight sides of the building so that the temple faces and holds all of space exactly as the cosmos does. Somewhere on the walls you will likely find the sapta-mātṛkā panel, the seven Mothers seated in a row; in a subsidiary shrine, the navagraha block, the nine planetary officers in their fixed arrangement. And across the broad wall-surfaces, in band after band, the celestial beauties — the apsarás and surasundarīs — dance and pose and adorn themselves, the artists of the sky from Movement III, bringing to the stone the beauty that heaven employs whole classes of being to provide. The famous figures of Khajuraho and Konark are these: the aesthetic dimension of the divine, carved across the temple’s skin.

The court around the centre

Step back from the single building to the whole temple compound, and the deepest pattern appears. Around the central sanctum, in their own smaller shrines, cluster the parivāra-devatās — the “retinue deities,” also called āvaraṇa-devatās, the “enveloping deities.” These are the presiding god’s court, given architectural form: around a Shiva sanctum you will find Gaṇeśa and Skanda his sons, the Mātṛkās, Nandin facing the shrine, Bhairava at the edge, the dikpālas at their points, Chandeśa the steward. The main temple is not a single isolated house; it is a palace with a court, the great deity at the centre and his whole retinue quartered around him in a deliberate spatial hierarchy — the intimate family closest, the guardians at the perimeter, exactly the “concentric belonging” we sketched at the very start of this treatise, now realised in brick and stone across an acre of ground.

And when a temple is founded, this whole populated order is not assumed to be empty scenery. The tradition holds that the local powers already resident on the site — the sthala-devatā, the guardian of the field, the spirits of the place — must first be acknowledged and ritually enrolled into the new sacred order before the great deity can be installed. The cosmic court, in other words, reaches all the way down to the guardian of the doorstep and the spirit of the ground, gathering even the most local powers into its hierarchy. This is the retinue at its most living and most local: the grāma-devatās, the village guardian-deities who ring a settlement’s boundary — Ayyaṉār riding out with his terracotta cavalry of horses, the fierce goddess Māriyammaṉ, the seven sisters of the fields — are the same principle carried into the everyday, the great god’s court reaching to the edge of every village in the land. (The forms this architecture takes across the regions — the soaring nagara tower of the north, the tiered dravida vimana of the south — are the subject of our study of the temple styles.)

The one at the still centre

And then, at the heart of all of it, you arrive at the one place on the whole site that is nearly empty of ornament. The garbhagṛha — the “womb-chamber” — is small, dark, unadorned, and often almost bare. After the teeming, laughing, dancing, guarding, ranked multitude of the outer walls, you step at last into a plain dark cave, and there, alone, sits or stands the single presiding deity — the liṅga, the image, the one. The entire crowded architecture has been leading you here, and the contrast is the final teaching of the building. All that populous, ranked, beautiful, fierce society exists around a centre, and the centre is still, and single, and quiet.

This is the temple’s version of the lesson the mountain taught us in the first chapter. You climbed toward Kailasa expecting a solitary god and a great silence, and found instead a crowded court and a great sound; and only after walking through the whole teeming host did you reach, at the summit, the still god at the centre. The temple stages exactly that journey, and stages it every time a worshipper enters: you pass inward through the whole peopled cosmos — ganas at your feet, guardians at the doors, the directions at the corners, the mothers and dancers on the walls, the court in its shrines — and arrive, finally, at the one dark quiet centre where the deity waits alone. The retinue is the sound; the centre is the silence; and the temple is the two, held together in a single object, so that to walk into a Hindu temple is to walk, in miniature, through the whole architecture of the divine.

One task remains. We have mapped the Hindu ecosystem from within. It is time to step outside it — to set it beside the angels and spirits of other faiths, to clear away the misconceptions that cling to these beings, and to say, at the close, what exactly makes this vast strange population Hindu.