South and Southeast Asia

The great monuments of India and of the lands that took their religions from India (Sri Lanka, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Java) are strange at first to eyes trained on Greek and Roman buildings. Many of them have almost no interior. A stupa is a solid mound; a Hindu temple is a massive tower over a room hardly bigger than a cupboard; Angkor Wat, the largest religious building in the world, is a stone mountain threaded with galleries. Their surfaces are covered with sculpture so densely that it is hard to say where architecture ends and carving begins.

The key is that these buildings are not primarily enclosures for people. They are images: of the universe, of the mountain at its centre, of the body of a god or of the Buddha, and of the path that leads the worshipper from the everyday world to the sacred centre. And they are built by rule: rules for finding the cardinal directions, for dividing the site into squares, for proportioning every member from base to finial, written down in Sanskrit treatises and handed on in the families of hereditary builders who still practise in South India today. This chapter follows those rules through four traditions: Buddhist India, the northern Nagara and southern Dravida temple, and the Khmer temple-mountain.

Cord and gnomon

The oldest Indian texts on geometry are rules for building. The Śulba-sūtras, “rules of the cord”, composed between about 800 and 200 BC as appendices to the ritual literature of the Vedas, tell the priest how to lay out the altars of the sacrifice. Their shapes and areas were prescribed exactly, and the texts explain how to fix the east–west line, how to make a right angle with a knotted cord, how to turn a rectangle into a square of equal area, and how to enlarge a falcon-shaped altar of a thousand bricks without changing its shape. Baudhāyana, the oldest of the authors, states in words the relation between the sides and the diagonal of a rectangle that the Greeks attributed to Pythagoras.

℟The rule of the diagonal

The cord stretched along the diagonal of a rectangle produces as much area as the cords along its two sides together; use this to set out right angles and to make squares of any required area.

d² = a² + b²; e.g. cords of 3, 4, 5 or 5, 12, 13 units

The first act of every later building is the same. The builder levels the ground, sets up a vertical rod, a gnomon, at the centre, and draws a circle round it. In the morning and again in the afternoon the tip of the rod’s shadow touches the circle; the line joining the two points runs east and west. A perpendicular through its middle gives north and south. The temple treatises, the Mānasāra and the Mayamata, repeat the procedure with corrections for the season; Vitruvius describes the same method for Roman towns. Once the cross is fixed, everything else is set out on it with cords and pegs.

℟Find the cardinal points with a gnomon

Set a vertical rod at the centre of the levelled site, draw a circle round it, mark where the tip of its shadow crosses the circle before and after noon, and join the two marks: that line runs east–west.

E–W = chord through the morning and afternoon shadow points; N–S ⟂ through its midpoint

The stupa

The first monumental buildings of historic India are Buddhist. The Buddha died, according to tradition, in the fifth century BC, and his cremated remains were divided and buried in mounds. In the third century BC the emperor Ashoka, who converted to Buddhism after the slaughter of his conquest of Kalinga, is said to have redistributed the relics among tens of thousands of new monuments across his empire. The stupa is the burial mound made permanent and sacred: a solid hemisphere, the anda or “egg”, of brick faced with stone, standing on a low circular terrace, the medhi. On its summit stands the harmika, a small square railing like the fence round a sacred tree, from which rises a mast, the yashti, carrying stone parasols, chattras. These were tokens of honour, piled up in number for the most sacred relics.

℟The stupa: a solid mound with a crown

Build the stupa as a solid hemispherical mound (anda) over relics, on a circular terrace (medhi), and crown it with a railed enclosure (harmika) and a mast of parasols (chattra).

Sanchi: Ø ≈ 36.6 m, height ≈ 16.5 m (without the crown)

The stupa has no inside. It is worshipped by walking round it, clockwise, keeping it on one’s right (pradakshina), and its architecture is the architecture of that path. At the Great Stupa at Sanchi, founded by Ashoka and doubled in size in the second century BC, a heavy stone railing, the vedika, encloses a ground-level path; a double stair leads to a second path on the terrace, with its own railing. The railings are stone translations of timber fences, their posts, three lens-shaped cross-bars and rounded coping all shaped as a carpenter would shape wood. At the four cardinal points the railing is opened, and before each opening stands a torana: two square posts carrying three curved architraves with scrolled ends, crowned by the wheel of the law and the emblem of the Three Jewels. The gateways, carved in the first century BC and the first century AD, are covered with the stories of the Buddha, who is never shown in human form but only by symbols: a tree, a wheel, a footprint, an empty seat.

Alongside the stupa, Buddhist communities developed buildings for gathering and living, and the best-preserved are cut into the rock of the Western Ghats. The chaitya hall is a long apsidal nave, divided from its aisles by pillars, with a rock-cut stupa at the far end and a barrel vault overhead, sometimes still lined with its original ribs of timber; light enters through a great horseshoe-shaped window over the door, the gavaksha. The vihara is a square hall surrounded by monks’ cells. The chaitya window became one of the basic ornaments of all later Indian architecture, and the stupa travelled with Buddhism across Asia, to become the stepped mountain of Borobudur in Java, the bell-shaped chedi of Thailand and, transformed through Central Asia and China, the pagoda.

The diagram of the site

The Hindu temple is laid out on a diagram, the Vastu Purusha Mandala. The treatises describe it as a square site divided by cords into equal squares, padas (one, four, nine, sixteen and so on up to 1,024), of which the grids of 64 and 81 squares are used most often for temples. Each square is the seat of a deity. At the centre lies the Brahmasthana, the place of Brahmā, the creator; around it, in concentric rings, are the squares of the gods, then those associated with human concerns, and at the edges those of lesser spirits and guardians. Over the whole diagram lies the Vāstupuruṣa, the being of the site, pinned face down by the gods who sit on his body, his head in the north-east and his feet in the south-west.

The diagram is at once a plan, a cosmology and a rite. Placing the building on it is an act of ordering the world, and it determines the most important decision of all: the sanctum, the garbhagriha or “womb-house”, stands over the Brahmasthana, its walls on the ring of the gods, its door on the axis, usually facing east. The image of the deity at the centre of the diagram is also at the foot of the vertical axis of the tower, which rises from it to the finial. Real temples follow the diagrams with more or less freedom; the treatises offer a generative framework, not a set of blueprints.

℟The sanctum over the centre

Place the garbhagriha (the small dark chamber that houses the image) over the Brahmasthana, with its walls on the ring of the gods and its door on the axis, usually to the east.

The northern temple: the mountain peak

Free-standing stone temples appear in India in the Gupta period, in the fifth century AD, as small cells with a porch. By the eighth century two great families had emerged, which the treatises call by the names of shapes and modern historians use as names of regions. In the north the tower over the sanctum, the shikhara (“mountain peak”), rises with faces that curve inward towards the top and ends in a great ribbed stone disc, the amalaka, and a water-pot finial, the kalasha.

The northern temple is shaped by two kinds of division. Vertically, each face of the square sanctum is broken into projecting planes, rathas (three, five, seven or more), which step forward towards the centre and continue unbroken from the base up the walls and the tower. Horizontally, the tower is divided into storeys, bhumis, each marked at the corners by a small amalaka. The result is a spire made of ribs and bands, whose light and shadow draw the eye upward to the summit.

In front of the sanctum, along the east–west axis, the halls are laid out in sequence. At the temples of Khajuraho, built by the Chandella kings mostly between about 950 and 1050, the visitor climbs to a high terrace, the jagati, and passes through a porch, a hall and a great hall with balconied transepts, then a vestibule, the antarala, to reach the sanctum. Each mandapa is larger and taller than the last, and their pyramidal roofs of stacked slabs rise outside in a continuous range towards the main tower. On the greatest of these temples, the Kandariya Mahadeva, the tower itself is multiplied: smaller spires, urushringas, cling to its faces, and smaller ones to those, so that the whole temple becomes a mountain range culminating in a single peak.

The southern temple: a stack of palaces

The southern tradition takes shape under the Pallava kings of Kanchipuram in the seventh century and reaches its greatest scale under the Cholas in the eleventh. Its tower, the vimana, is a different idea from the northern shikhara. It is not a single curving spire but a pyramid of storeys, talas, each a smaller version of the one below and each edged by a parapet, the hara, of miniature buildings: square pavilions with domed roofs, kutas, at the corners, and oblong pavilions with barrel roofs and horseshoe-shaped gable windows, shalas, in the middle. The tower is literally a stack of palaces for the gods. On top, over a short neck, sits a single domed crowning block (confusingly called the shikhara in the south) and a finial, the stupi.

The Mayamata divides the elevation into six parts from bottom to top: the moulded base (adhishthana), the wall or pillar zone, the entablature, the neck, the crowning dome and the finial. A small shrine has only these; a great one inserts storey after storey between entablature and neck. The treatises also classify the vimana by the shape of the crown (square, octagonal or round), a distinction that modern historians have turned, not quite faithfully, into the names of the northern, southern and Deccan styles.

The Brihadeeswarar temple at Thanjavur, completed by the Chola king Rajaraja I in 1010, is the southern vimana at its most monumental. From a two-storeyed base about thirty metres square, thirteen talas rise in a straight-sided pyramid to an octagonal crown some sixty-six metres above the court, at the time the tallest building in India. In front of it stand pillared halls and a pavilion for Nandi, the bull of Shiva; around it runs a great rectangular cloister; and its gateways, though large, are clearly subordinate to the shrine.

℟Storeys of miniature shrines

Raise the vimana in receding storeys (talas), and edge each with a parapet (hara) of miniature shrines: square domed kutas at the corners, oblong barrel-roofed shalas in the middle, and small panjaras between.

Thanjavur: 13 talas; vimana ≈ 66 m

Later history reversed the hierarchy. As the great temples of the south became pilgrimage centres and landowning institutions, they grew outward: new enclosure walls, prakaras, were built around the old core, each with a gateway tower, a gopuram, on its axes, and each new gateway was bigger than the last. Under the Vijayanagara kings and the Nayakas of Madurai in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the outer gopurams became colossal tapering towers of brick and painted stucco, fifty metres high and more, crowded with figures of gods and crowned by a barrel vault with a row of finials. At Madurai and Srirangam the pilgrim sees the gates from miles away; the sanctum at the centre, low and ancient, is hardly visible at all.

℟The gateway outgrows the shrine

In the later temple towns of the south, raise ever taller gateways (gopurams) in the successive enclosure walls, until the outer gates dwarf the shrine at the centre.

The Khmer temple-mountain

Indian religion and learning spread across mainland and island Southeast Asia in the first millennium AD, and nowhere did Indian architectural ideas grow to a more astonishing scale than in the Khmer empire of Angkor, in present-day Cambodia. From the ninth century the Khmer kings built at the centre of each new capital a state temple in the form of a temple-mountain: a stepped pyramid carrying shrines on its summit, an image of Mount Meru, the mountain at the centre of the universe, with walls for the ranges that surround it and moats for the ocean beyond. Their shrine towers, prasats, have redented plans and rise in diminishing tiers to a curving, lotus-bud profile.

Angkor Wat, built for King Suryavarman II in the first half of the twelfth century and dedicated to Vishnu, is the culmination. A moat some 190 metres wide encloses a rectangle about 1.5 by 1.3 kilometres. From the west a causeway lined with naga balustrades crosses the moat and the inner enclosure, passing libraries and ponds, to a cruciform terrace before the first gallery. Three rectangular galleries follow, one inside another, each on a higher terrace; the outermost, about 187 by 215 metres, carries continuous bas-reliefs of the Hindu epics and the Churning of the Ocean of Milk. The innermost enclosure crowns a steep pyramid, and on it stand five towers in a quincunx, the central one sixty-five metres above the ground: the five peaks of Meru.

The Khmer never used the true arch. Their galleries are roofed with corbelled vaults, which limits their width, and they built with sandstone blocks laid dry, often over a core of laterite. What they could not achieve in span they achieved in extent, in the rhythm of endlessly repeated galleries, pillars and tower tiers, and in the refinement of their carving. Angkor Wat is also unusual in facing west rather than east, which has been explained both by its dedication to Vishnu and by its role as the funerary temple of its king; the bas-reliefs are arranged to be read walking anticlockwise, the direction of funerary rites.

Architecture as cosmogram

The monuments of this chapter differ enormously in form, but they share a way of thinking about what a building is. Each is set out from a centre and oriented to the sky. Each is a model of the world: the stupa’s dome the vault of heaven, the temple’s tower the mountain of the gods, the temple-mountain the whole cosmos with its ranges and oceans. Each is approached by a path (round the stupa, along the axis of halls, through gate after gate and gallery after gallery) that leads from the edge to the centre and from the many to the one. And each is made by rule: the cord and the gnomon, the squared diagram, the canon of parts from base to finial. The same logic of concentric sanctity that the mandala draws in two dimensions, the temple towns of the south and the temple-mountain of Angkor build in three.