The Hermit's Hut: Architecture and Asceticism in India

Notes

177 Notes INTRODUCTION 1 Gobila Gṛhya Sūtra, IV.3.22. See The Grihya-Sûtras: Rules of Vedic Domestic Ceremonies, trans. Hermann Oldenberg, pt. 2, The Sacred Books of the East, ed. F. Max Müller, vol. 30 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 109. 2 A declaration of the dhutaṇga practitioner, an ascetic active in the earliest period of Buddhism, as described by the fifth-century Buddhist commentator and scholar Buddhaghosa in his Visuddhimagga, II.56, vol. 1, 74. 3 The Pali form of the name is Siddhattha Gotama. “The Buddha” refers here to the historical figure Siddhārtha Gautama, who presumably lived from 543 to 483 BCE and was born and raised as a prince in the northern citystate of Kapilavāstu (in present-day Nepal). 4 These lines are from the Dhammapada, verse 154, trans. James Gray (Calcutta : Thacker, Spink and Co., 1887), 17. Part of the Pali canon, the Dhammapada is a collection of statements and sayings attributed to the Buddha. Different translations give different terms for gahakāraka, from “house builder,” “house maker,” “maker of a tabernacle,” to “architect.” Similarly, the word geha has been translated as “house,” “home,” and “tabernacle.” 5 This particular narrative is found in the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, an important Mahāyāna text composed around 100 CE that expounds on the notion of “emptiness,” or śūnyatā, through conversations with the bodhisattva lay figure Vimalakīrti. A Tibetan version has been translated as The Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti by Robert A. F. Thurman. 6 Vimalakīrti’s mythopoeic mansion rematerializes, in Japan, in the shack the twelfth-century courtier-turned-renunciant Kamo no Chōmei built for himself in a forest outside Kyoto, and in the tea-ceremony structure fashioned and codified by the sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Rikyū. 7 The traditions of Buddhism, despite the heterogeneity and distinctiveness, maintain an intricate link with both pre-Buddhist and non-Buddhist practices . A discussion of Buddhist architecture and ideology invariably invokes the other traditions. 8 This phrase is frequently mentioned in the Vinayas. Sir Robert Chalmers 178NOTES TO PAGES 4–14 notes this in Further Dialogues of the Buddha, translation of the Majjhima Nikāya (London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1926–1927), xvii. 9 For a discussion of various shelters in Vedic rituals, see Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1946), 156–159. 10 Hindu temples as stone buildings start to appear in the fifth century, preceded by tree shrines and other structures that housed a cultic object for worship, but none of the latter presided over religious rituals as powerfully as fire altars. See Michael W. Meister, “Hindu Temples,” in Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), vol. 14. 11 The term ratha, meaning “chariot,” may be a misnomer here, for the structures are more properly designated as vimānas, literally, “flying machines,” but more generally the full physiology of a temple structure along with the sanctuary. Brahmanical/Hindu shrines may have the additional designation as rathas, but here vimānas refer to the South Indian temple type with the multitiered pyramidal roof. Naming the shrines after the principal characters in the Mahābhārata was most likely a later, local event. 12 The shrines appeared at the time of King Narasimhavarman of the Pallava dynasty, with each “structure” being a monolith carved out from a single rock outcropping. The structures appear unfinished and may not have been used as temples. 13 Foucher, L’art gréco-bouddhique, 120–123. 14 Ananda Coomaraswamy, “Early Indian Architecture: IV. Huts and Related Temple Types,” in Coomaraswamy, Essays in Early Indian Architecture. Michael Meister has noted, regarding Brahmanical temples, how “the cupola is a veiled reference to the domed hut of the forest ascetic and to the cap of a vertical shaft around which the temple’s palatial forms have been organized ”; see Michael W. Meister, “Symbology and Architectural Practice in India, in Emily B. Lyle ed., Sacred Architecture in the Traditions of India, China, Judaism and Islam, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). 15 Two kinds of structures are identifiable: square, domed huts, called kūṭas, located at the corners, and rectangular structures with barrel roof vaults, called śālās, placed at the perimeter. 16 Sadler, Ten Foot Square Hut, 12, 17. 17 Though Coomaraswamy comments on the iconographic features of the hut and its ascetic provenance in various essays, he did not fully consider an anthropological or...