Jignasa Journal Of History Of Ideas And Culture Part 02

Author(s): Vibha Upadhyaya and Others
Publisher: University of Rajasthan

Page 79

Encapsulated as Material Artistic Response
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being the exception which failed to establish the existence of popularity or prominence of the goddesses, to the Guptā period. But then following the dynastic decline of the Guptās, around the fifth or the sixth century AD, various goddesses suddenly appear in the iconographic and textual sources in situations of great importance, which pointed to an acceptance or resurgence of goddess worship in the Hindu tradition. Several goddesses were urambiguously identified with or called praksti, a central notion in most philosophic systems, where prakrti denotes a physical as opposed to the spiritual reality, and thus has been read as nature in all its complexities, orderliness, and intensity, and further through this reflection the descriptions of her nature and behavior emerged a commentary on the Hindu understanding of physical reality. In the Tantras and the early Sankhya the cause of the universe has been sought in the female principle or the Prakrti, which in time were equated with Purūşa and considered as one.
An attempt to assess the tradition of vastuśāstra of the early medieval period discern that, this period in particular, saw the synthesis of the ancient traditions merge with the new ideologies, and in this respect the attempt remains unparalleled.' The temple as an important site to begin the foray into the nature of feminine, is to be understood as Kramrisch has noted about the object of building a temple, which is that it is
"........... built with fervour of devotion (bhakti) as a work of offering and pious liberality, in order to secure for the builder, a place in heaven, which means a high level of inward realization and to increases the religious merit of his near relatives: by a transfer of merit, the Prāsāda functions similarly, for every devotee, who comes to and enters the temple. The temple is built as a work of supererogation, with the utmost effort in material means and the striving of the spirit so that the Prāsāda attains and
leads to the Highest Point." But the fact that the temple is viewed as a Purūşa, has to be borne constantly, as the temple rests on this earth, in traditional architectural terms covered by the Vāstupurūşamandala, whose origins, needs and planned organization stemmed from the empirical world, have been elaborated upon variously in the textual traditions. The character of the temple thus is likened to a tirtha or a pilgrimage, made by art, as she puts it, and as others are by nature, and she further emphasizes, sometimes both. A Hindu temple has the necessity of "to be seen, and thus the darśana, the looking of the temple, the seat, the abode and the body of the divinity" and its pājā or the worship, are the purpose of visiting the temple, which is further fulfilled by in addition to being an offering, work of pious liberality, and the temple has its proportionate measurement but also the carvings on its walls, and the total fact of its form." The Hindu temple has been deemed a monument, whose outer surface consists of sculptures, and thus when going to the temple (abhigamana) the speech, body and the mind are centered on the divinity, whose presence is installed in the image or the symbol, and the devotee becomes part of the architecture of the Mandapa whose interior he traverses, in which he also may pause and gaze at the images that confront him: images which are carved on the pillars, the capitals and on the ceiling; guiding him onwards to the main image or symbol in the garbhagrha, or upward to the dome and its central point." The stone texture of the walls apart, the plaster with which they might be laid, the closely built texture of the buttresses and offsets and their intervals which form space volumes as well as the rhythms of graded light and darkness: and as Kramrisch notes that carved figures belong to the body of wall and also to the spaces in between, in as much their own volume projects into the intervals, as well as reach even further into the space or else they are more deeply part of the wall than