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Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences
Temple & Worship
Temple Consecration Rituals in Ancient India: Text and Archaeology
by Anna A. Slaczka (Brill's Indological Library: Brill) The
principal aim of this book is to study three important construction
rituals of the Hindu tradition: the laying of the first stones, the
placing of the consecration deposit and the placing of the crowning
bricks. These rituals are described in numerous Sanskrit texts on
architecture and religion, which date from ca. 7th to 16th
centuries CE.' It is therefore hardly surprising that the present
study is based mainly on textual sources. The chief source is the
Kasyapasilpa, a South Indian treatise on art and architecture and
ritual, written in Sanskrit, usually dated 11th- 12th century CE.
Three chapters from the Kasyapasilpa, which deal with the three
construction rituals mentioned above, have been critically edited,
translated and provided with a commentary. For this purpose,
unpublished manuscripts of the Kasyapasilpa were collected in
various Southern Indian libraries. In order to place the three
chapters of the Kasyapasilpa in a broader context, the descriptions
of the construction rituals given by cognate texts, some of them
still unpublished, have also been studied.
The construction rites play an important role in Sanskrit
texts on ritual and architecture. Nevertheless, this topic has thus
far largely been neglected by scholars. This is particularly
striking in view of the numerous publications, which have appeared
on the outer appearance of temples, the technical aspects of temple
building and temple worship. With the exception of Kramrisch (1946),
whose interpretations should be treated with caution there has
never been an attempt to study the construction rituals as a whole
and to explain their function and meaning.
For those who want to arrive at an understanding of the
construction rituals, textual sources alone are not sufficient. The
texts are mainly technical treatises, which provide only a very
limited interpretation for the actions they describe. Moreover, for
the questions about the relation between the textual data and
practice the answer has to be sought outside the textual sources.
Have rituals, such as those described by the Kasyapasilpa and the
related works, ever been performed? And if so, were the rituals
performed according to the textual prescriptions?
In order to answer this question, Slaczka began a search
for possible traces of construction rituals in various fields:
Slaczka looked for direct accounts that mentioned the performance of
such rituals and browsed through archaeological reports and museum
catalogues guided by the thought that since the construction rituals
are described by a great number of Sanskrit texts, there should be
plentiful traces of these ceremonies on the Indian subcontinent. The
search for written accounts, however, did not prove very fruitful,
at least not for the period in which the texts originated. The study
of archaeological remains, on the other hand, resulted in a mass of
evidence and revealed a highly interesting pattern: there were very
few material traces of construction rituals in India itself, while
plenty of them were reported in other Asian countries. In fact, the
search resulted in more than two hundred archaeological remains, all
most probably testimonies of building rituals, of which only around
fifteen actually originate from India. The remaining two hundred
were found in Sri Lanka, Nepal and in the countries of Southeast
Asia: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia. The
majority of them date from the 8th to the 14th CE. Many of the
archaeological remains correspond with the lists of objects that may
be placed in a consecration deposit according to the Sanskrit texts.
The situation is thus that a group of texts is available
which provide descriptions of a set of construction rituals.
However, it is not sufficiently clear where (if ever) their systems
were employed or in vogue. At the same time, a considerable number
of archaeological remains pointing to construction rituals in a
large geographical area are available, but the ideas that guided
their installation are not directly evident. Bringing the two sets
of data together unavoidably requires reflection on the relation
between the different regions involved, especially India where the
texts have originated, and the diverse places in South and Southeast
Asia. It should also be noted that the extensive geographical area
in which the search for the traces of construction rituals was
conducted roughly corresponds with what Sheldon Pollock has recently
called the 'Sanskrit cosmopolis', the "most complicated — and as a
totality least studied — transregional cultural formation in the
premodern world". This area, stretching from Pakistan to Vietnam and
from Nepal to Indonesia, was the place where the political elite
cultivated, or was familiar with, Sanskrit and Sanskrit texts as is
testified by numerous Sanskrit inscriptions. The presence of varying
but still remarkably similar construction rituals, which is
evidenced by the archaeological finds, may be seen as an additional
characterising feature of the `cosmopolis', even if there are
regional variations and continuities with rituals which precede the
`cosmopolis'.
An interesting feature is that while the textual sources
are nearly all Hindu, the material traces of construction rituals
were discovered at both Hindu and Buddhist sites. Another theme of
the present book is thus the relationship between these two groups,
the common elements and the differences.
It must be stressed that just like the textual descriptions
of the construction rituals, this wealth of archaeological (Hindu
and Buddhist) material has also never been studied as an entity. The
finds associated with building rituals have never been gathered and
analysed as a group and the possible connection with the Sanskrit
texts has hardly ever been suggested and certainly never examined.
This is perhaps due to the fact that the majority of Sanskrit
scholars do not study archaeological reports and very few
archaeologists and cultural anthropologists working on Asia are
actually familiar with Sanskrit, which demonstrates the importance
of interdisciplinary study. Furthermore, a great deal of Sanskrit
works on art and ritual has not been translated and many are still
only extant in manuscript form. The archaeological data, on the
other hand, are hidden either in very old reports in French or Dutch
or in new ones, often written in the languages of Southeast Asia,
which is yet another complicating factor in obtaining the necessary
information. The precious few articles written on the subject
concentrate primarily on a particular archaeological find or area
and are thus often not representative for a full range of material.
The second aim of this study is therefore to provide the
reader with an as complete as possible description of archaeological
remains that can be associated with the construction rituals.
Hopefully, the gathered material may one day serve as a basis for
future research in the areas of archaeology, temple architecture or
ritual. Yet another goal is to bring these two sets of data —
textual and archaeological —together in order to determine the
relationship between the construction rituals of the texts and the
practice of temple building as attested in archaeological finds. The
analysis of the correspondence between the archaeological finds and
the texts is an important contribution, thought inconclusive, A list
of material traces of construction rituals is given in Appendix 4.
One may well ask why, given the abundance of manuals, only
one text, the Kasyapasilpa, was chosen as the main textual source
for the present study. My first encounter with the Kasyapasilpa
happened by chance. However, the chief reason for continuing my work
on it was that the Kasyapasilpa, being mainly an art treatise, is
also connected with the genre of the ritual texts of Saiva
orientation, the so-called Saiva Agamas. In consequence, the
Kasyapasilpa pays more attention to ritual than many other works,
which are purely treatises on architecture, and yet it also
describes many architectural details. Secondly, in the situation
when art and ritual texts are not edited or not edited critically,
it seemed necessary to choose at least one text and to study it
deeply, on the basis of various manuscripts, not on the basis of the
often very unsatisfactory editions. The Kasyapasilpa, for the
reasons given above, seemed to be the right choice, which
(hopefully) resulted in a better edition of the three chapters of
this highly interesting work.
In addition, a few words should also be said about the
three rituals that are the core of the present study. Two of them,
the placing of the first bricks and the placing of the crowning
bricks, are analogous. They form a kind of a bracket in which the
physical construction of a temple is enclosed. The first marks the
end of the foundation works and the beginning, after the technical
and ceremonial preparation of the soil, of the actual construction
of a building. The second indicates the successful accomplishment of
the work. In short, both rituals consist of a ceremonial
installation of (four, five or nine) bricks or stones in the
prescribed location — either in the lower part of the temple or in
the superstructure. In the middle of the bricks a small deposit of
precious stones and other items is placed.
During the third ritual - the placing of the consecration
deposit (garbhanyasa) — a specially constructed box, usually divided
into compartments, is placed either in the base of the building in
the case of a deposit for an edifice, or in an indicated plot of
land in the case of a deposit for a settlement.? The box is filled
with objects of symbolic value. They mainly include various 'riches
of the earth', such as minerals, grains, metals, precious stones,
herbs and earth taken from different locations. Specific objects are
prescribed for temples of particular deities or for residences of
people belonging to a particular caste. The auspicious date for the
performance of the rituals has to be set by an astrologer.
The descriptions of these three rituals vary among the
texts with respect to detail, but the core remains largely the same:
they all consist of smaller units and elements, some of which are
confined only to a particular rite, while others might be employed
on other occasions as well. The analysis of the structure of these
three rituals on the basis of the Kasyapasilpa is followed by
descriptions of these rituals in other Sanskrit texts.
While the first two ceremonies are referred to in the
textual sources by quite obvious terms like prathamestakanyasa, 'the
placing of the first bricks' and murdhestakanyasa, 'the placing of
the crowning bricks' (or 'top bricks') respectively, the third rite
bears the curious name garbhanyasa, which may be translated as 'the
placing of the embryo'. The word garbha in Sanskrit may mean
'embryo', 'womb' or 'seed', but also 'the inside, interior of
anything'. In architecture it occurs, for example, in the technical
term for the main temple chamber in which the image of the principal
deity is housed, the garbhagrha (the garbha-house'). The latter term
was often, in my opinion misleadingly, translated as 'womb-house'.
With respect to the garbhanyasa, there are indications that the term
garbha, in a certain sense, reflects the nature of the ritual. The
plausible interpretations of the term and the supposed function and
meaning of the garbhanyasa and the other two construction rituals
described in the Kasyapasilpa are discussed thoroughly.
At this point it should be noted that the prathamestaka,
garbhanyasa and murdhestaka are not the only construction rituals
described in the Sanskrit architectural and ritual treatises. Apart
from these three, the texts also mention the placing of the
consecration deposit for an image of a temple deity (usually
referred to as ratnanyasa), the placing of the deposit consisting of
six objects in the centre of the foundation (known as sadadhara in
Kerala), the installation of the jars on the summit of the temple,
and so forth. However, due to the limitations of time and space, it
would have been impossible to extend the present study to all
construction rituals described in the Sanskrit texts. Besides, the
main textual source under consideration, the Kasyapasilpa, only
provides a detailed description of the three construction rituals
discussed above, that is, the prathamestaka, the garbhanyasa and the
murdhestaka. The remaining rituals are thus only briefly mentioned
in the present study, for example in Appendix 4 where the relation
between all material traces of construction rituals and all
available textual descriptions of such rituals is dealt with.
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