Kutagara Or From Mens House To Mansion In Eastern India And South East Asia

Author(s): W B Bollee
Publisher: W B Bollee
Catalog link: https://jainqq.org/explore/269707/1

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The kutêgara or, from men's house to mansion in eastern India and South-east
Asia.
When one looks up kūţâgāra in the Dictionaries one will find in Monier Williams for the few real Sanskrit references existing the meanings 'an upper room, apartment on the top of a house.' These only tell us something about its location and function, not about its form though the compound kūțâgara itself points to it. This information subsequently came from Rhys Davids and Stede who for their Pāli-English Dictionary had many more references at their disposal because we probably have to do with a kind of building which has its origin in the eastern part of India. They give as meanings 'a building with a peaked roof or pinnacles, probably gabled; or with an upper story.' They could have been more explicit had they known Jouveau-Dubreuil's Archéologie du Sud de l'Inde as this scholar had worked already before 1914 extensively on the development of the kūțâgāra restricting himself to pure history of art.
This induced Coomaraswamy, about 1930, in the frame of his studies of architectural terms, also to deal with the facts with which the Middle Indo-Aryan texts he had to hand at the time provided him. The translators of these texts, however, hardly took any notice of his works - the last to be written on the subject to my knowledge.
Taking this fact as an opportunity once more to revert to the kuțâgara I should like to first sum up Coomaraswamy's results and add some observations of my own in order eventually to
The French original of this paper will appear with more notes in the Bulletin d'Etudes Indiennes'in Paris (1987 ?). I should like to thank Professor T.S. Maxwell and Mrs s. Zingel for making adjustments to my English phraseology. - For illustrations see P. Brown, Indian Architecture. Bombay, 1976.

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- 1 - notes (conta)
- Dr. H. Sarkar, of New Delhi, kindly informed me at the conference on The Shastric Tradition in the Indian Arts held at Heidelberg in July 1986 of an article by Dr. A. Ghosh and himself entitled "Beginnings of sculptural Art in South-east Asia: a stele from Amaravati", in: Ancient India 20–21 (1966), pp. 168–177, esp. p. 172 and plate XL showing the caitya-arched entrance of a building with a vaulted roof with three pinnacles. Inside there is a pair of Buddha-pāda. The left upper corner over the roof bears an inscription saying (Vesalliya (-ye) viharati Mahāvane kuợaga[ra-sallaya '(The Lord) dwells in the kūțāgāra-cottage in Mahāvana at Vaiśāli.' This seems to be the oldest representation extant of a kūțågara inscriptionally defined as such.

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Upper part of a pillar found among the ruins of the Bharhut stūpa (ca. 150 B.C.). The inscription on the sanctuary's cupola says that it represents Sudhammā, the assembly hall of the Gods, at the time of the Buddha's Hair Relic festival.
The palace to the right of it is Vejayanta, Indra's residence. (A.K. Coomaraswamy, La sculpture de Bharhut. Paris, 1956. Planche xii, Fig. 32)

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discuss its geographic extension and possible origin. To begin with, it strikes us that the construction in question, or part of it, is more frequent in Middle Indo-Aryan languages than in old Indian.
From Coomaraswamy's papers it is clear that the meaning of some architectural terms in a certain context is difficult to define, e.g. as regards kūţa and kaņņikā which are both equally roof-plates to which the curved rafters converge in apsidal form
Kūțâgāra, sīha-panjara, hammiya and canda-sālā all pass for separate spaces in a large building each with a roof of its own. Kuţâgāra, however, also occurs as a kind of roof ornament or pinnacle, whereas Coomaraswamy elsewhere expresses the opinion that siha-panjara would really be a 'windowed bay.' The whole terminology of sālā he considers similarly difficult. In definin things from textual sources one has to bear in mind that one largely depends on commentaries written after all by monks.
At different places in his articles, sometimes adding "all references and representations considered" Coomaraswamy has defined kuţâgara in more than one way, e.g. in JAOS in 1928 'a house with a finial (or finials)' or 'an honourable building' whereas in Eastern Art in 1931 he states that "the term kuţâgara especially when combined with -salā may sometimes mean an entire building with a peaked roof, the 'gabled mansion of Pali translators, but I am not convinced of this; and usually the kūţâgara is a self-contained and separately roofed pavilion on any storey of a pasada, either a gabled pent-house on the roof (...) or more often a gabled chamber on other storeys." Finally, in IHQ in 1938 Coomaraswamy again admits of a general meaning 'gabled house.' However, in the Tipitaka passage in which good qualities such as behaviour and faith, so to speak as contribuents to

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opp. p. 3
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Lomasa Rși cave (v. Dehejia, Early Buddhist Rock Temples. London, 1972. Plate opp. p. 48)

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samadhi are compared to the converging rafters of a kūţågara he takes the latter to have "really a domed rather than a ridged or even a pointed roof."
In 1947 Coomaraswamy's remarks were provided with a parallel from Jain sources by J.C. Jain's useful cultural study Life in Ancient India as depicted in the Jain Canons whereas Moti Chandra only paraphrased both at the All India Oriental Conference in 1951.
For, in the Scriptures of the śvetâmba ra Jains kuţâgāra is also found, but the references are disappointing in technical details its form being compared e.g. to trees or to Mahavira's frontal bone, in the first case in a long list of architectural terms. Here, as in Pāli, the kūţâgāra's or kūțâgāra-sālā's being weatherproof (or rather, their not being so) seems occasionally to be mentioned. Sometimes, then, the adjective duhao-litta 'smeared on both sides' appears. This is important, because it supports Buddhaghosa's explanation of the ambiguous Pali compound ullittåvalitta by 'smeared inside and outside' against the Pali -English Dictionary's etymological translation by 'smeared up and down, i.e. all round' and proves the latter wrong.
As to this, the information from the texts nicely supplements data from architecture in which there no longer exist kuţâgaras as separate upper class accommodations (as opposed to houses for ordinary people) of the type offered already to the Buddha himself in the forest at Vesāli, and later to his monks as a dwelling during the rainy season. The only buildings of this kind that have come down to us are, in fact, sacred ones, and they are either hewn in the rock like the Lomas Rşi cave at Barabar (South of Rājgir; 3rd cent. B.C.), Ajanţā and Elūrā, Bhājā (between Bombay and Poona) etc., or else have a different function,
like the massive monuments in Mamallapuram. The original ones,

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however, made of mud and wood, and thereby not fire-resistant which very fact is hinted at by a Pāli text have long since disappeared. On the other hand, some so-called caitya halls such as the ones at Guntupalli or Bhājā (3rd/2nd cent. B.C.) give us a good idea of the interior construction.
We have just referred to a kuţâgara's attributes that seem to pertain to a weather-proof state, for which purpose the Buddha (at Vinaya II 148,24) explicitly allowed a coating on both sides as a temperature insulation. In doing so we had in mind particularly nivāta which may signify 'protected from the wind', but also
'safer and is followed by nivāta-gambhira; gambhira means 'deep, dense' when used of a forest, as well as 'secret, hidden.' Other adjectives in this context, such as gutta 'guarded' and gutta-duvara 'with doors guarded' or Pāli phusit'-aggala 'with fastened (clinched) bolts (or better: door -wings)' (PED) and pihita-vatapana 'with windows shut do not necessarily go with being weather-proof. Moreover, it should be kept in mind that Pali gutta-duvara is used only figuratively, that is of a monk guarding the doors of his senses. We retain this stock list for the purpose of later on defining the original function of the kuţågara and have yet to occupy ourselves with a use of this building to find which in India may at first strike us as slightly out of place. The Indians do, however, hold themselves to be its inventors - the inventors, that is, of the sauna - janta-ghara in Pāli, janta-hara in Prakrit, afterwards sanskritised as yantra-grha, whereas Sanskrit earlier borrowed from an unknown but probably Middle Indo-Aryan source the word jentāka.
The physician Caraka (14,46) describes the construction of this structure at the beginning of our era as follows, prescribing also its site: 'on a nice, even, fertile, black or yellow

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The metaphoric meaning of Pali gutta-duvara is only possible as long as the kūţâgāra gable is remembered as a face or with a face.

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opp. p. 5
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Sivika with a kutagara on top from an Amaravati coping relief (Coomaraswamy, "Early Indian Architecture", EA III [1931], Plate xcix Fig. 25).

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plot of land in the northern or eastern part of the village the patient should have a kuţâgāra built pointed towards these same directions. It should stand on the south or east side of a pond some 3,5 metres from the edge, hemispherical, 7,30 metres high and in diameter. All along the wall a bench should be placed, and in the centre a round clay stove as tall as a man and of 1,80 metre diameter with many holes.' It remains unclear why Caraka called the sudatorium kūțâgāra.
Incidentally, saunas already existed in Buddhist monasteries in pre-christian times. The Vinaya pali does not inform us either about their shape or about an oven. The text, however, speaks about a half-timber wall and a door with a bolt as well as about a probably open fire-place for one was allowed to protect oneself against the heat by means of water. Perhaps. the structure carved out of the rock at Bangala Motta Paramba, taken by Jouveau Dubreuil to be an Agnidhriya-hut, in fact is a sauna which would equally well have needed the kind of chimney visible but I have not seen it myself.
The kutagara is found not only as an ornament on buildings, but also on palanquins as is shown on a parapet relief at Amaravati, whereas the chassis looks like a covered waggon framework. Here we apparently have to do with a luxury object of a later period, probably after Christ, for the Canons of Jains and Buddhists only mention sibika-type palanquins for the use of sick bhikkhus only.
We first learn of kutagara palanquins in the commentaries Buddhaghosa wrote in Ceylon about 470 A.D. By that time the old Vinaya ban on means of transport had fallen into disuse and a contemporaneous or even invented state of things was projected back into the past. Thus e.g. we read of Sakka, i.e. Indra, the

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king of the gods turned into the Buddha's servant, addressing Vissakamma the divine technician and architect in the following words: "Friend, today the Lord (i.e. the Buddha) will go on a 3.000 miles' begging tour. Have 500 kūțågāras produced and make them ready on the entrance building of the Jeta forest (i.e. probably of the monastery named after its donor Jeta in that forest)."
Vissakamma does what he is told. Then, for the Buddha there is a kuţâgara with four openings or entrances, for his two main disciples the same with two, and for the other monks kutagaras with a single entrance. When all have got into their travelling carriage the latter rise into the air for, according to Buddhaghosa, the conquest of gravitation marks those who have given up earthly bonds. It is interesting for the development of Southern Buddhism as well as for the semantics of kuţâgara that this holds true also when the occupant has entered nirvana, to use the periphrastic terminology customary with monks, i.e. when he has died.
Such a case is narrated by Buddhaghosa concerning the Ceylonese thera Kujjatissa who feeling his end near told his fellow monks to put a second bench (pallanka) in his kuţâgara, Now he either died in it or was placed into it after his demise - at any rate the kūţâgara subsequently drifted with him to the Thuparama sanctuary. There another monk named Mahavyaggha who at the time was teaching the Vinaya rules high up in the nearby Lohapasāda palace caught sight of it. Mahāvyaggha then travelled through the air to Kujjatissa's kūţâgara, sat down on the second bench and also entered Nirvāṇa.
Here, therefore, kuţâgara has turned from 'portable seat' to "bier.' This emerges still more clearly from the Mahāvamsa, the older Ceylonese chronicle. For when Mahinda, the first missionary to the island, died, about 200 B.C., he was placed

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facing p. 7
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Toda hut near Ooty. Notice the stick-like objects at
roof top. Copyright W. Bollée

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into a gold coffin, this again into a gold kutagara which was burnt on a pyre a week later.
1
After this sketch of kuţâgara as a multi-purpose construction and of the semantic change involved we now turn to its geographical spread in order subsequently to occupy ourselves more closely with its possible original function. Coomaraswamy went into the former matter only in India, but he proved the existence of kutagaras all over Southeast Asia in his photographs.
When in some pre-christian period Jains and Buddhists emigrated to the West of India the kutagara as a type of building followed in their wake from the Barabar hills via Bharhut Sanci to Ajanta and Eļūra, Karl and Bhaja southwards probably first by sea to Ceylon, later overland to Amaravati and Mamallapuram.
on.
and
For us the kutagara's characteristic is the horseshoe shaped front an external mark, therefore, but to the Indians it is the kannika, i.e. the inner ring around the rafters, was just as typical, as emerges from the texts. The comparison to the horseshoe would by the way have been unintelligible to the ancient Indians because to my knowledge they did not shoe their horses. It is remarkable, though, that they did not use a term like mukha-vatti 'horizontal circle, ring; rim of a pot etc. for the kutagara's front. We shall return to this point later
At least since Jouveau-Dubreuil the kutagara's singular form has been traced back to an oblong hut with a vaulted roof common in India in pre-christian times as is shown e.g. by the st caitya hall in Karl (1-2nd cent. A.D.). Around 1910 the Toda tribe on the Nilgiri plateau on the southwest coast still used this type of hut "at the roof ends of which vertically implanted

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- 7 - notes
An interesting semantic development is shown by the Dravidian loanword Tamil kuţāram 'tent' (Burrow/Emeneau, A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary. Oxford, 2nd ed. 1984. No. 1881) and Alu-Kurumbaru gú: dagara 'tent; gopuram-like five or seven storied wooden funeral car' (D.B. Kapp, Alu-Kurumbaru Naya" - Die Sprache der Alu-Kurumbas. Grammatik, Texte, Wörterbuch. Wiesbaden, 1982. P. 342). See also T. Burrow's Review of this book in BSOAS 47,2 (1984), col. 368 foli. where gú:qagára is connected with pāli kūțâgāra the meaning 'bier' of which Burrow did not know. - I am obliged to Dr. Kapp for this piece of information.
A similar shift of meaning is shown by Prakrit siya (Sanskrit śibika); see J. Charpentier, Die Legende des heiligen Parśva", ZDMG 69 (1915), p. 337.
The custom of placing the dead in representations of men's houses is found also in China as is proved by the bronze coffin used in the Dian culture (5th cent. B.C.) and now in the Museum of the Yunnan Province in Kunming. The Rietberg Museum in Zurich shows it in an exhibition this summer (catalogue

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opp. p. 8
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Gable mask on community house. Sepik river region, New Guinea (J. Guiart. Ozeanien. München 1963. Pl. 29, p. 45)

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pieces of wood can be seen that seem to explain the V shaped part crowning the buddhist horseshoe" - to quote Jouveau-Dubreuil. However, nothing of the kind can be seen in Thurston's photographs in his Castes and Tribes of Southern India; and on the oldest detached stone building, the hall at Cezārla dating from the Gupta period (4th-5th cent. A.D.) the gable end has the shape of a supplementary triangle with a curving hypotenuse.
Previously we mentioned the gable end of the so-called #horseshoe" which often occurs in a V shape, though also as a kind of slim pointed vase, and, on the Gaņeśaratha at Mamallapuram, as a trident on a small human head. As is well known, anthropomorphic representations appear later than theriomorphic or symbolic ones. Thus from Bagh Gumphā to the NW of Bhuvanesvar (about 100 B.C.) one knows of a tiger's head with wide open muzzle over the cave's entrance; in later styles in the South it is a lion's head and is therefore called simha-mukham. Moreover, in Amaravati two centuries later a yakşi was carved in a "horseshoe" on the top of which, and partly covering it, a śrivatsa is found (representing prakrti) which from a distance resembles a face with its tongue stretched out: the roof end.
Now this fact reminded Held, in his thesis on the Mahābhārata,' of southeast Asian gable faces on which Rassers, an ethnologist, had worked. Neither of them, by the way, used Coomaraswamy's articles any more than the latter, apparently, knew of the former. In his treatise on the Javanese theatre Rassers had shown, by means of sacred men's houses such as those in the region of the river Sepik
in New Guinea, that their front side with the initiation demon's mask on the gable is identical with the stylised triangular kekayon or hand screen which the operating dalang waves at the beginning and end of

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facing p. 8
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The "Tigre cave" at Saluvankuppam (A. Jaenickel H. Goetz, Mamallapuram. Krefeld 1965. Plate 13)

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8 Notes -
1
G.J. Held, The Mahabharata. An ethnological study. Amsterdam, 1935. P. 212 ff.
2
W.H. Rassers, Panji, the Culture Hero. The Hague, 1959. P. 178 ff.
3
In New Guinea, such houses nowadays are community houses.

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to face p) 9
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Gable of a men's house, New Guinea
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Javanese kekayon
W.H. Rassers, op. cit,

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each scene; in so doing he either reveals or conceals the ritual acts from the point of view of the spectators who as non-initiates sit in front of the white screen (kelir) separating the sacred from the profane world in the shadow play. The leather puppet show (wayang kulit) is old- though we have no textual evidence for it before ca. 1000 A.D. and clearly bears South Indian influence. Its performances symbolize the cosmos, reactualize mythical events and connect the spectators with their real and adopted ancestors, i.e. the heroes of the Indian epics, divine beings, just as the Natyaśāstra - the theatre handbook prescribes a divine comedy as the original piece treating cosmogonic events on a human scale.
1
his
Returning now to our point of departure we can say that the kutagara originally was a men's house the horseshoe-shaped front of which represents the open mouth mukha-vatti - of the initiation demon; in the South it is still called simha-mukha, as we have seen. Now it also becomes clear why the rafter ends teeth are mostly represented vertically. Further, in view of the fact that the religious orders are in the first place men's sodalities, it should not surprise us that the Buddha and his monks live in kutagaras in the forest, just as the sacred men's houses are usually situated outside the village, and that the doors are guarded, most often by fabulous monsters, against incursion by the uninitiated. The Buddha is also an initiator: the monk Kassapa calls himself his son born from his mouth (Samyutta-Nikaya II 221,23).
2
The Jain rock monument of Rani Gumpha in Orissa shows that in India, too, there was still a connection between kuţâgara and cult drama, for a long frieze containing dramatical episodes runs along the outer walls of the upper storey. Percy Brown
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I would not be surprised if the manyheaded naga sheltering the Buddha, Vişņu etc. derived from the mukha-vatti and perhaps the same holds true of the ring, horseshoe-shaped or circular, of flames around Siva Nata-raja.
2
On "outside the village" see of late J.F. Sprockhoff, "Aranyaka und Vanaprastha in der vedischen Literatur", WZKS 28 (1984), p. 6 ff.

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facing p. 10
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Typically Balinese Kalaboma Bali. Köln 1983. Colour plate 4)
with threatening hands (G. Spitzing,

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thinks that the courtyard and terraces of Rāni Gumphā constituted an open air theatre in which during fairs the scenes mentioned were acted, like the so-called devil dances in Tibetan monasteries.
Finally, the gods inhabit the sacred men's house behind the village in the woods with which it is sometimes even identified. The forest is represented by a tree, the divine tree of life, the Banaspati in Hindu-javanese art which being the lord of the forest of initiation is identical with the demon of initiation. His head appears on the gable of the kutågara and what goes back to it as Rāhu- or Kirtimukha, Garuda, Kāla' or Naga – in Nepal and Burma also on columns in front of temples and monasteries. Jungle animals are found on the wayang kekayon as well as on the gables of buildings. Among these, aquatic creatures such as shellfish and makaras remind us of Varuņa, the god of death and the seas, for to initiation largely belongs enlightenment about the nature of death as a birth to something new.
* Cf. Bhagavadgitā 11,71f., esp. 25 where Arjuna compares Vişnu's mouths with their terrible tusks to the devouring fire of Time: danştrā-karālāni ca te mukhāni / drstvậiva kālânala -samnibhani and W.D. O'Flaherty's discussion of this passage in her Dreams, Illusion and other Realities. Chicago, 1984, p. 110

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facing p. 10
222
The Golden Gate (Sun dhoka) of the Bhaktapur palace (Nepal) with the Garuda on top, then the Nagas (snake deities living in the sea) and snails and, at the bottom, makaras (fabulous sea animals with a crocodile body and an elephant's trunk) with protruding tongue. In the centre we see Taleju, the 16-armed saiva Goddess of the royal family. The Goddess is accompanied by Sri and Laksmi representing the divine rivers Ganga and Yamuna. The gate opens to Taleju's temple. Copyright W. Bollée.

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last plate 447 A Mollalla 1:! A more recent development of the traditional type is found in the Dragon temple (Nagayon) at Amarapura in Burma. King Bodawpaya chose this site to found his capital in 1783. The aquatic animals were replaced by vegetal ornaments; the gable head has become a kalasa(vase as an auspicious symbol) and the Naga projects well beyond the roof. W.B. Bollee