Architecture of the World's Major Religions : An Essay on Themes, Differences, and Similarities [1 ed.] 9789004441439, 9789004441422

Citation preview

Architecture of the World’s Major Religions

Brill Research Perspectives in Religion and the Arts Editor-in-Chief Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (Georgetown University) Associate Editors Barbara Baert (University of Leuven) S. Brent Plate (Hamilton College, New York) Zhange Ni (Virginia Tech)

Volumes published in this Brill Research Perspectives title are listed at brill.com/rpra

Architecture of the World’s Major Religions An Essay on Themes, Differences, and Similarities By

Thomas Barrie

LEIDEN | BOSTON

This paperback book edition is simultaneously published as issue 3.4 (2019) of Brill Research Perspectives in Religion and the Arts, DOI:10.1163/24688878-12340010. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020911683

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISBN 978-90-04-44142-2 (paperback) ISBN 978-90-04-44143-9 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Thomas Barrie. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Architecture of the World’s Major Religions An Essay on Themes, Differences, and Similarities 1 Thomas Barrie Abstract 1 Keywords 1 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Models and Methods of Interpretation 3 1.2 Definitions of Terms and Scope of Inquiry 6 2 Approaches, Reconsiderations, and Contextual Themes and Typologies 8 2.1 Approaches to Religious Architecture 9 2.2 Reconsidering Religious Architecture 12 2.3 Contextual Themes and Typologies 15 3 Judaism 18 3.1 Frameworks of Judaism 20 3.2 Architectural Themes 21 3.3 The Tabernacle and Temples of Jerusalem 23 3.4 The Early Synagogue and Ritual Observances 27 3.5 Later Synagogues 29 4 Christianity 31 4.1 Frameworks of Christianity 33 4.2 Architectural Themes 35 4.3 The Early Church 36 4.4 The Western Church 39 5 Islam 45 5.1 Frameworks of Islam 46 5.2 Architectural Themes 48 5.3 Columned Halls 50 5.4 Domed Mosques 52 6 Hinduism 58 6.1 Frameworks of Hinduism 60 6.2 Architectural Themes 62 6.3 Early Temples 63 6.4 The Dravida and Nagara 64 6.5 Formal, Organizational, and Symbolic Elements of the Mature Hindu Temple 67

vi 7 Taoism 72 7.1 Frameworks of Taoism 75 7.2 Architectural Themes 77 7.3 Wudangshan, Hubei Province 79 8 Buddhism 86 8.1 Frameworks of Buddhism 87 8.2 Architectural Themes 88 8.3 Early Buddhist Architecture of Stupa and Cave 89 8.4 China: Stupa and Pagoda 92 8.5 Chinese Buddhist Sacred Mountains 93 8.6 The Monastic Architecture of Korea and Japan 95 9 Coda 100 Acknowledgements 101 Cited Works 102

Contents

Architecture of the World’s Major Religions An Essay on Themes, Differences, and Similarities Thomas Barrie

North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA [email protected]

Abstract In Architecture of the World’s Major Religions: An Essay on Themes, Differences, and Similarities, religious architecture is presented and explained in ways that challenge predominant presumptions regarding its aesthetic, formal, spatial, and scenographic elements. Two positions frame its narrative: religious architecture is an amalgam of aesthetic, social, political, cultural, economic, and doctrinal elements; and these elements are materialized in often very different ways in the world’s principal religions. Central to the essay’s theoretical approaches is the communicative and discursive agency of religious architecture, and the multisensory and ritual spaces it provides to create and deliver content. Subsequently, mythical and scriptural foundations, and symbols of ecclesiastical and political power are of equal interest to formal organizations of thresholds, paths, courts, and centers, and celestial and geometric alignments. Moreover, it is equally concerned with the aesthetic—visual and material cultures and the transcendent realms they were designed to evoke, as it is with the kinesthetic— the dynamic and multisensory experience of place and the tangible experiences of the body’s interactions with architecture.

Keywords religious architecture – material culture – visual culture – communicative agency – symbolism – ritual spaces – kinesthesia

1

Introduction

Religious architecture, one of the most ubiquitous and significant of building types, has paradoxically suffered from a deficiency of diverse, cogent, and

© Thomas Barrie, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004441439_002

2

Barrie

syncretic scholarship. Typically covered by specialized studies according to sectarian, stylistic, or historical boundaries, or subjected to universalizing thematic overviews, the subject too often remains either truncated or doctrinaire. Studies on histories of religion can be equally limited, often parsing unique aspects of the subject or explicating it according to aesthetic, social, political, cultural, economic, or doctrinal determinants, and relegating the material culture of religion to a secondary status (or not addressing it at all). This essay will introduce alternatives to these divergent approaches, and challenge predominant presumptions regarding the roles, forms, organizations, symbolism, ritual settings, cultural contexts, meaning, and significance of religious architecture. In this essay, I will present particular aspects and contexts of six major religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism. The subject is introduced by a thematic chapter that summarizes some influential schools of thought and their limitations, and outlines alternative frameworks. Overall, I focus on differences as much as congruities between the material artifacts of the six religions. The perennial philosophy of ‘many paths—one goal’ may be true, but it is a partial truth. The fact is, even though the six religions may share similar ethical and spiritual positions, they often diverge in important and instructive ways. Consequently, the architecture built to serve them may share certain architectural syntaxes, but often ‘speaks’ in very different languages. However, the essay is not a cool appraisal of simple differences, but a celebration of what makes each unique. It is the diversity of materializations, expressions, effects, and uses of religious architecture where the human story of where and how to live in this mysterious world is most potently revealed. It is an essential part of the audacious human search for meaning in our individual and collective lives played out over millennia through an astonishing output of architecture. The essay has a particular focus on the communicative and discursive agency of religious architecture, and the multisensory and ritual spaces it provides to create and deliver content. Subsequently, mythical and scriptural foundations, and symbols of ecclesiastical and political power are of equal interest to formal organizations of thresholds, paths, courts, and centers, and celestial and geometric alignments. Moreover, it is equally concerned with the aesthetic—visual and material cultures and the transcendent realms they were designed to evoke, as it is with the kinesthetic—the dynamic and multisensory experience of place and the tangible experiences of the body’s interactions with architecture. Architecture is a particular kind of cultural output that has often been employed in service of individual, social, political, religious, and ritual agendas. Religious architecture in particular aspired to address and materialize the

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

3

most important issues of its time—and significant resources employed to this end. I will illustrate at times how architecture was, and is, a preeminent means through which humans structure their understandings of the world and their place in it. 1.1 Models and Methods of Interpretation This essay has a particular emphasis on material religion, which is a specialized subset of material culture, a subject area and methodology that is part of the ‘material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Material culture is often described as a challenge and alternative to the cultural, linguistic, literary, and textual ‘turns’ that began in the 1960’s. It proposes that a culture and its artifacts are integral, and that material things and the meanings they hold cannot be simply understood as culturally determined. It has been described as an antidote to the excesses of deterministic positions where material artifacts were often simply the result of technology, function, or social, political, or economic systems. Instead, material artifacts are the primary means to explicate a culture and uncover the motivations of its people. In the words of one scholar, material culture emphasizes “the dialectical and recursive relationship between persons and things,” and that “persons make things and things make persons.”1 It began in archeology and anthropology, but its proponents claim that it is broadly inter and multidisciplinary, or even “undisciplined.”2 Its critics challenge its broad disciplinary claims, question the inclusion of a diverse, unconventional range of cultural artifacts, and reject the independent agency it often assigns to material culture. Material religion shares material culture’s multidisciplinary and inclusive nature, and has been described as a challenge to the disciplinary limits of religious studies. It presumes that artifacts, and how they are experienced by people, have essential things to say about a religion and the people that produced it. As such, the somatic and kinesthetic experiences of religious architecture assume importance regarding how people think, and structure meaning, about particular places. Consequently, the “inextricable connection between the materiality of the human body and the intangibility of the sacred,”3 are often emphasized. In the words of one scholar, material religion insists that “beliefs are predicated on practices, spaces, objects, and bodies.”4 1  Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, Handbook of Material Culture, Los Angeles: Sage, 2006, pp. 2–3. 2  Tilly, et al., Handbook of Material Culture, p. 1. 3  Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, ed., Religion: Material Religion, Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference, USA, 2016, p. xvii. 4  S. Brent Plate, ed., Key Terms in Material Religion, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, p. 4.

4

Barrie

Within the broad definitions of these two areas of inquiry, this essay focusses on the material presence of the architecture and how it embodies content and facilitates individual and group interactions and rituals. I am equally concerned with orthodoxy, the creeds, doctrines, morals, and ethics of religions, and orthopraxy, its rituals and codified behaviors and how they play out in specific architectural settings. Architecture has a particular capacity to engage one intellectually and bodily. Its spaces, sequences, and surfaces often perform discursive roles, a subtle back-and-forth between subjects and objects within the contexts of beliefs and practices. Often created to engage and elicit responses, the architecture serves to disclose understandings through the dialectic of peoples’ particular world views and the ones materialized by the architecture. This essay’s emphasis on material religion presumes the value, and necessity, of understanding religious architecture from a contemporary position, and incorporates analytical and interpretive methods to do so. I do not speculate about how people in the past may have interacted with, or felt about, an architectural setting, but how current engagements, understandings, and methods of analysis in the context of history might produce more nuanced and integral assessments. Consequently, I present and analyze particular aspects of the architecture of six religions as a means to contribute to the body of knowledge regarding histories, concepts, and materializations of religious places and architecture. To do so I use comparative methodologies to identify key differences and congruencies between subjects, not to establish commonalities but as a means to provide specific understandings germane to specific religions, contextualized by recognized elements, strategies, and materializations of religious architecture generally. I recognize the challenges, and opportunities, of scholarship on ‘non-Western’ cultures and their artifacts that is inevitably influenced by western cultural approaches. The history of western colonialism, and its orientalist scholarly outcomes that relativized ‘foreign’ cultures according to western cultural values, is an unavoidable context. The West’s historical preoccupations with scientific rationalism and exclusive, categorical hierarchies are other contexts regarding the body of scholarship on religious architecture. But, even though atomized or universalized positions may have been appropriately challenged, postmodern critiques often leave unanswered the question of how to productively understand another culture and its artifacts. On one hand, the universalizing of another culture through the lens of one’s own is largely discredited. However, its postmodern obverse that there is no dependable commensurability between cultures, only differences, precludes any intersubjective analysis. A third way recognizes that there are connections between cultures that one can productively translate by

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

5

means of defined positions, but also which does not presume hierarchies of values or a priori deductions. According to one religious scholar, even though religions make competing and often contradictory statements regarding the ‘truth,’ their differences also “constitute a basis for a coming-together, rather than a reason for separation and mutual condemnation.”5 In these contexts, phenomenology can provide appropriate perspectives and methods. Incorporating the phenomena of religion and its artifacts can productively identify and assess intersubjective content and characteristics. Additionally, the key phenomenological positions that rational scientific determinism ignores the agency of consciousness, and direct engagements with objects and environments have the capacity to reveal the ontological significance of the ‘life-world,’ also have essential roles to play. However, the preoccupations of some phenomenologists with ‘pure subjectivity’ and ‘universal truths,’ which can detract from the heterogeneous experiences, conceptions, and meanings of material artifacts, do not.6 Alternately, Phenomenological Hermeneutics provides approaches that seek intersubjective congruencies between otherwise overlapping cultural structures, from a contemporary position, without prejudicing one over the other. This aspect of hermeneutic inquiry assumes that it is in between differences and distinctions that new knowledge about both subject and object might be disclosed. As such, it challenges false similarities and recognizes legitimate differences while also utilizing multiple perspectives to provide unique analyses of its subjects, with the goal of an intercultural middle ground, or ‘horizon,’ of understandings. This study is also informed by methods of hermeneutical interpretation, where it is the contextual nature of interpretation, and the diversity and often disparity of the experience of a work that are its predominant concerns. In this manner, historical artifacts are less objective objects and more ever-present sources of new meanings, especially ontologically productive ones. One understands the past by applying current understandings to it. This includes a healthy suspicion of scholarly or cultural presumptions, and the varying conclusions they can produce. In some cases, multiple and often conflicting histories of the same example reveal its changing fortunes, illustrate ones that become or remain dominant, and understandings that may lie between them. 5  Lloyd Ridgeon, Major World Religions: From Their Origins to the Present, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, p. 7. 6  For a cogent summary of phenomenology and its relationship with material culture studies see “Phenomenology and Material Culture,” in Chris Tilley, et al., Handbook of Material Culture, pp. 44–48.

6

Barrie

Consequently, an example’s ‘reception history’ or the history of its varied and often conflicting meanings, is equally important.7 A famous dialog by Chuang-tzu provides an appropriate analogy. In this brief exchange Chuang-tzu and his interlocutor Hui Shi stroll along a bridge over the Hao River. The former sees a shoal of fish and remarks that happiness for fish is swimming freely. Hui Shi replies that it is impossible for him to know so because he is not a fish, to which Chuang-tzu counters that he knows this from his position on the bridge. In other words, he situates knowledge in a particular position and also demonstrates that subject and object are interconnected. 1.2 Definitions of Terms and Scope of Inquiry The elephant in the room when it comes to religious architecture and other associated terms, are the varieties, and contested territory, of definitions of religion. Western scholarship on religions contains a plethora of definitions, all partial and routinely challenged. Many agree that religion is a human construct that can be understood according to its motivations and the problems it was designed to resolve, even though they can reach different conclusions. Emile Durkheim argued that religion was primarily a social phenomenon and served to bind a community through a “unified system of beliefs and practices.”8 Clifford Geertz suggested that religion is culturally constructed to represent a “group’s ethos,” which “tunes human actions to an envisioned cosmic order and projects images of cosmic order onto the plane of human existence.”9 Thomas Tweed, who is mostly concerned with the heterogeneous phenomena of religions, argues that, fundamentally, religions are designed to “intensify joy and confront suffering.”10 For Karen Armstrong, “human beings are spiritual beings” with shared religious sensibilities, and that religion, along with art, is a

7  Reception Theory was a mid-twentieth century literary analytical theory attributed to Hans Robert Jauss that emphasized how content is ‘received.’ Also called reader-response theory, it denies any autonomous meaning of a text independent of the “readers relation to it”—literary works are not objects to be objectified, but sources for a range of constructed meanings. See Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction, London: Methuen, 1984, xii. 8  Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Karen E. Fields, trans., New York: The Free Press, 1995, p. 44. 9  Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, eds., Reader in Comparative Religion, An Anthropological Approach, New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1979, p. 79. Adapted from Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, Selected Essays, New York, Basic Books, 1973. 10  Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 73.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

7

means to find “meaning and value in life.”11 Conversely, Christopher Hitchens argued that “the mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made,” and dismissed it as primitive, anachronistic, and ultimately destructive to contemporary culture.12 William James insisted that religion cannot be defined but is “rather a collective name.”13 Others, facing the disparity of definitions, have declined to define it at all. Comparative studies of religious architecture also present a variety of definitions, motivations, and materializations. William Lethaby, an English architect and theorist associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, pioneered comparative methods for analyzing sacred places in his influential Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, published in 1891. J.G. Davies was a church historian who wrote primarily about Christian architecture and liturgy, but his book Temples, Churches and Mosques, A Guide to the Appreciation of Religious Architecture, was a groundbreaking comparative study of the architecture of major western religions. The architectural theoretician Christian Norberg-Schulz introduced phenomenology and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to theoretical scholarship. Even though he did not write exclusively about religious architecture, his focus on the ontological function of architecture, and the experience, significance, and meaning of place, established his importance to the subject; and books such as Meaning in Western Architecture and Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture continue to be influential. The scholar of religions Lindsay Jones examined religious architecture through the lens of hermeneutical comparative methods. His two volume The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison is distinguished by its diversity of examples and critical comparative approaches. Recalling William James’ observation that the breadth of the subject of religion “need not prevent me from taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in for the purpose of these lectures, or, out of the many meanings of the word, from choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly, and proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say ‘religion’ I mean that” (italics by James),14 I will offer definitions of religious architecture periodically, and contextually, as a means to illustrate the specific positions I adopt when presenting particular works. However, a general definition of religious 11  Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, New York: Alfred A. Knoft, 1994, p. xviii. 12  Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, New York: Twelve, Hachette Book Group, USA, 2007, pp. 10 and 13. 13  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 30. 14  James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 32.

8

Barrie

architecture that contextualizes its multiple aspects germane to the subjects of this essay, is that it fundamentally serves to materialize shared axioms and conventions, communicates doctrinal, historical, cultural and often socio-political content, and accommodates the rituals of the religions it was built to serve. It may be created to serve specific functions and uses, but it is also deeply embedded in the culture that produced it—a cultural artifact of a particular type.15 Moreover, through its communicative capacity and ritual use, religious architecture embodies values and beliefs, while also often evoking them. As distinct places, albeit at a variety of scales, it orients participants in space and time, their bodies and culture, and the cosmic worldview of their religion. Like James, I recognize the impossibility of covering such a broad subject in any comprehensive manner. Instead, an essay of this scope and length must, of necessity, pick and choose examples limited to its overall theoretical positions, and at times make some generalizations about the subject itself. I do so, however, as a means to contextualize the subject rather than define it. Consequently, chapters take the form of short, selective, critical essays that aim to summarize predominant themes while also illustrating specific aspects of the architecture of each religion. In the following chapters, each religion is broadly outlined according to its principal historical, ethical, moral, and ritual aspects. Its architecture is then presented generally according to its formal, spatial, scenographic, and ritual characteristics. Lastly, specific case studies illustrate particular aspects of the architecture and its settings. Throughout, subjects are framed according to particular themes or theoretical positions, and key differences of each religion’s architecture, germane to the essay’s overall thesis and its emphasis on material culture, are presented and explicated. As such, each frame may be incomplete, but offers opportunities to understand the overall subject in new and hopefully useful ways. 2

Approaches, Reconsiderations, and Contextual Themes and Typologies

I begin with an obvious observation—or reminder—that a perennial human task has been to make sense of the world—to render it accessible, comprehensible, and meaningful. Religion of course was once a primary means to do

15  See Thomas Barrie, “The Communicative Agency of Religious Architecture,” in ApostolosCappadona, ed., Religion: Material Religion, pp. 65–85.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

9

so, and to varying degrees it coopted architecture to materialize and communicate ontological and symbolic content and accommodate its multiple ritual agendas, for desired effects. All this is self-evident—but how it does so, and to what end, is much less obvious. However, even though assessing what architecture does or means may be a fruitful enterprise, it is problematic due to its largely subjective nature. It is perhaps more reliable to consider what people have asked architecture to do. As it turns out throughout history architecture has been asked to do quite a lot. Consequently, this essay presumes what religious architecture is tasked to do and the roles and meanings that are assigned to it, are more important and dependable than what it may do, or mean. Like religion, architecture is a human construct. Even though there may be numerous scriptural examples of the divine directing, influencing, or requiring the specific design of the sacred edifice, which was positioned as reflecting what the divine communicates, requires, or represents, architecture is constructed by humans out of very real and compelling motives and needs. It was often created with the desire, belief, and even hubris, that through it the divinity, knowledge, and power it represents might be manifested and accessed. Moreover, theories about, understandings of, and scholarship on, religious architecture are also human constructs that similarly aim to render it accessible and comprehensible, and its scholarly historiography includes a diverse range of postulations and preoccupations. 2.1 Approaches to Religious Architecture What are some of the positions one can take in the analysis of religious architecture? First, it can be described as expressions of dependable core ethical, historical, scriptural, and doctrinal elements of a religion—what it professes and agreed-upon norms, and how the architecture serves to symbolize and broadcast them. This position begins with religion as an intellectual construct, which then determines secondary architectural materializations. Conversely, one can focus on the architecture itself in the context of building traditions and cultural contexts. Here the architecture, in all of its complexity, is explicated according to organizations, scales, environmental settings and orientations, structure, materials, surfaces, spatial sequences, and scenographic tableaux. A third situates its ritual uses as primary. This position retains a focus on the architecture while incorporating how the architecture accommodates, facilitates, and expresses individual and communal rituals, from the episodic to the calendric. In this study, I utilize all three approaches, but with a particular emphasis on the second and third. There is no shortage of scholarly studies on the histories, phenomena, values, ethics, and practices of religions. However, there is a deficit of scholarship on religion that directly addresses architecture. Some may present ritual

10

Barrie

or cultural spaces, or sacred geographies, but typically neglect general and specific architectural references, or they are depicted as lessor, mute, or impassive backgrounds.16 An obvious exception is Mircea Eliade, the historian of religion whose theories on sacred space have been particularly influential in scholarship on religious architecture. Eliade’s convenient constructs of the sacred and profane, hierophany, cosmogony, and axis mundi, for example, have found broad, if uncritical, applications, and have proven to be particularly durable, irreducible, and adaptable. For those interested in the formal and organizational aspects of religious architecture, and its uses and meanings, Eliade’s comparative and universalizing presentations provided a reassuring stability for a complex and difficult subject.17 Eliade’s scholarship often focused on the architectural setting of ‘the sacred,’ typically presented as clearly defined and separate from ‘the profane,’ and prefers the architecture of place-based, hierarchical cultures.18 For Eliade, and others, religious architecture typically represented the unchanging order and sacrality of the universe, and was the setting for adherents to connect with the divine through prescribed rituals facilitated by a hierarchical priesthood. Conversely, the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith considered the social and political aspects of religion to be much more important and dependable than architecture, and outlined complementary theories of sacred space, what he termed the “locative” and the “utopian.” According to the utopian position, sacred space is possible anywhere humans choose places as ritual settings. For Smith, the “social map, rather than artifacts of mortar and stone,” are his subjects.19 He was suspicious of any fixed concepts regarding the origins, forms, 16   Notable exceptions include Sigurd Bergmann, ed., Theology in Built Environments: Exploring Religion, Architecture and Design (2009), Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison, Volumes One and Two, (2000). Richard Kieckhefer, Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley, (2004), and Jeanne Halgren Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space: An Introduction to Christian Architecture and Worship, (2008). 17  See Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison, Volume Two: Hermeneutical Calisthenics, A Morphology of Ritual-Architectural Priorities, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 37. 18  He was not the only one to propose this dualistic construct. Emile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, originally published in 1912, stated, “Whether simple or complex, all known religious beliefs display a common feature: They presuppose a classification of the real or ideal things that men conceive into two classes—two opposite genera—that are widely designated by two distinct terms, which the words profane and sacred translate fairly well” (Italics by Durkheim). Durkheim, Fields, trans., The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, New York: The Free Press, 1995, p. 34. 19  Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987) p. 48.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

11

and meanings of religious architecture, and instead argued that the sacred is more often sought beyond the confines of place and priesthood. Smith associated locative approaches to the scholarship of Eliade and dated it to the nineteenth century Pan-Babylonian school, which, in his words, established the following influential positions: There is a cosmic order that permeates every level of reality, this cosmic order is the divine society of the gods; the structure and dynamics of this society can be discerned in the movements and patterned juxtapositions of the heavenly bodies; the chief responsibility of priests and kings is to attune human order to the divine order.20 Smith was more interested in the situational rituals of mostly non-hierarchical, aboriginal, and/or nomadic cultures. He did not dispute Eliade’s claims, but argued that unified concepts regarding locative sacrality miss the heterogeneity of sacred places. Instead, the locative is largely restricted to belief systems where an imperial, singular god is positioned as an omnipotent world creator, and is the product of “well organized, self-conscious scribal elites who had a deep vested interest in restricting mobility and valuing place.”21 The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan observed that religion either embeds a people in a specific place, or frees them from it.22 The philosopher Paul Ricœur presented “manifestation” and “proclamation” as two complementary and, at times, congruent characteristics of religion. The former is typically place based, where the sacred is revealed or evoked as a manifestation of the orders of the cosmos. Often described in myths, manifestation served to connect a people with an immanent god(s), and their place. In proclamation a “theology of the Name is opposed to any hierophany of an idol,” where sacred nature “withdraws” before the “word and ethics.” Ricœur argued that in Judeo-Christian traditions place is secondary to scripture—there may be temples and festivals, but they are 20  J onathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory, Studies in the History of Religions (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978), p. 293. 21  Smith, Map Is Not Territory, p. 293. Jeanne Halgren Kilde named Smith’s complementary terms the substantive and situational. Jeanne Halgren Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space: An Introduction to Christian Architecture and Worship, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 4–8. See also Lindsay Jones, “Locative versus Utopian: Two Competing Approaches to Sacred Space,” unpublished paper, Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum Annual Symposium, 2016. http://www.acsforum.org/symposium2016/papers/ jones.pdf. 22   Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977) p. 152.

12

Barrie

“fundamentally ethical and not aesthetic.”23 God may be present, but is also transcendent.24 In many indigenous cultures, there are rarely clear distinctions between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane,’ and their ritual settings are generally autonomous with only periodic needs for specific spaces. Consequently, it is important to recognize that for many the sacred doesn’t necessarily need to be a defined place, or be consecrated by architecture at all. Hindu sadhus renounce their households to wander homeless and focus on spiritual practices in hopes of liberation from the cycles of rebirth. Devout Muslims pray five times a day at appointed hours, mostly independent of the mosque. There is also the phenomenon of movable, temporary, and personal shrines. Domestic spaces can also include special religious places, such as shrines in the homes of devout Hindus. Jewish homes possess a particular sacrality, and in some orthodox urban communities an eruv, or a district that is considered domestic, is established to ease restrictions on the Sabbath. Protestantism, which began as a reform movement to the ritual and, by extension, architectural excesses of the Roman Church, has generally relied more on personal and scriptural beliefs than on architecture. Most explicitly, there is the phenomena of placeless televangelism, and voluminous evangelical churches that evidence little interest in architecture beyond their seating and theatrical capacity. 2.2 Reconsidering Religious Architecture So, what are we to make of all this? First of all, assured and unqualified adoptions of universals in studies on religious architecture perhaps say more about a need for unnuanced and dependable answers, then they do about the subject they were applied to. That categorical comparative methodologies often favored in analyses of religious architecture have proven to be productive is self-evident, but perhaps more as a means rather than an end. Often, it seems, what was sought was what was found. Formal and thematic simplifications of religious architecture are also related to the so-called “perennial philosophy” construct, which insists that religions are more alike than not, a position that has been routinely challenged.25 The scholar of religion Stephen Prothero stated that universalizing the world’s faiths “is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, 23  Paul Ricœur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, David Pellauer, trans., Mark I. Wallace, ed., Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995, p. 56. 24  For a discussion of the “immanent” and “transcendent” in Judaic and Christian architecture see Harold W. Turner, From Temple to Meeting House: The Phenomenology and Theology of Places of Worship, The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1979, pp. 10, 31–33. 25  Originally, philosophia perennis sought enduring themes in Christianity and philosophy. It was popularized by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which focused

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

13

disrespectful, and untrue.” He goes on to argue “the world’s religious rivals do converge when it comes to ethics, but they diverge sharply on doctrine, ritual, mythology, experience, and law.”26 He could have added architecture. Second, it is often assumed that the more aesthetically mature the architecture is, the more affective it will be, and thus more effective in uplifting one’s spirit. In this case, the spiritually affective nature of religious architecture needs to be contextualized by western notions of the beautiful and the affective. As Elaine Scarry reminds us, western concepts of beauty (which date from the Classical world), have been confused with the sublime ever since Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke first distinguished the two and demoted beauty to a secondary status.27 The phenomenologist of religion Rudolf Otto’s influential book The Idea of the Holy insisted that experiences of the mysterious holy, which he termed the numinous, and sublime feelings of religiosity, the mysterium tremendum, were most important in understanding religion, and its settings. “In the arts nearly everywhere the most effective means of representing the numinous is the ‘sublime.’ This is especially true of architecture.”28 Some may be affected by their experience of religious architecture, but that doesn’t mean everyone is, or in the same manner—or that this has consistently been the case. Christianity certainly has many places that challenge expectations of conventionally beautiful and spiritually uplifting architecture. The Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal, a place where architecture is asked to provide little beyond blunt symbolism and functional needs, is one of the most visited Catholic shrines in the world. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which can be charitably described as an incoherently organized domed basilica, is not an edifice that garners the architectural accolades bestowed on Chartres or other mature medieval works, and yet it is the most important edifice in all of Christianity. Third, truncated notions regarding the spiritually uplifting effects of religious architecture speak more about what culturally we are asking from it, or the roles we assign it. The ubiquitous term ‘spirituality’ is often presented in a simplified fashion where conflicting or confrontational elements are on universal themes in religion. Other popular scholars, such as Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith adopted similar positions. 26  Stephen Prothero, God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter, New York: Harper One, 2010, pp. 2–3. 27  Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 82–83. 28  Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans., John W. Harvey, New York: Galaxy, 1958, pp. 11, 65. First published 1923.

14

Barrie

suppressed in favor of more individual, inspiring, and redemptive content. William James stated that Protestant preoccupations with attaining happiness through personal belief required “blindness and insensibility to opposing facts.”29 The architectural historian Karsten Harries has argued, “Even for those of us who still consider ourselves religious, religion no longer possesses the integrative power that it once had and that may indeed be taken to define authentic religion,” and that contemporary architecture (and understandings of architecture in general) often represents incomplete notions of what architecture traditionally has embodied.30 Fourth, religious architecture is often characterized as unified places that produce dependable states of psychological comfort and transcendence. Their purported unity depends on their use only for sacred purposes, usually with the hushed solemnity one would expect to experience there. However, rarely have sacred places been, or are today, exclusively devoted to religion. The West may assume that Islam is orthodox in a manner that would prevent any nonreligious uses of mosques, but mosques, excepting Friday prayers, can often be quite informal affairs. The Great Mosque in Bursa, Turkey, for example, often serves as a community room, with people sitting and respectfully chatting but not engaging in activities that vaguely suggest devotional practices. According to one scholar, the transepts at the medieval church of St. Paul’s were often little more than convenient lanes like others in the City of London and, “At intervals, injunctions were brought in forbidding trade within the church, the carrying of burdens, ball games and all sorts of sports, but with little success.”31 Fifth, the prejudicing of religious architecture as exclusively sacred also diminishes its often socio-political agendas. Much architectural ink has been spilled over the great Gothic cathedrals, such as Chartres, Reims, and Amiens, which at times have been positioned as ultimate expressions of the sacred. But, in fact they were much more than the descriptions of their space, structure, surface, and light. Often neglected is the fact that high state religious architecture was just as much about political power and social hierarchies, as they were about devotional worship and spiritual epiphanies. Additionally, religious architecture often incorporated complementary symbolic codes, that appealed to both “lay” and “elite” participants, and communicated “low” and “high” content to their audiences.32 29  James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 79. 30  Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998, p. 102. 31  Ann Saunders, St Paul’s Cathedral: 1400 Years at the Heart of London, London: Scala, 2012, p. 12. 32  Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison, Volume One, Monumental Occasions: Reflections on the Eventfulness of

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

15

Sixth, in contrast to monolithic theories and deterministic histories, religious architecture is often a rather contested territory. Lindsay Jones compiled a reception history of competing histories of Chichén Itzá that range from the absurd to the more-or-less plausible. Jones recalls the once accepted theory that Chichén Itzá resulted from the invasion of the peaceful Maya by the bellicose Toltecs, which, as it turns out, was totally false. In fact, most historical theories about Chichén Itzá have proven to be false, prompting Jones to conclude that one of its most remarkable characteristics is its ability to “evoke narrative,” which continues today with dubious New Age evocations of its apocalyptic and eschatological significance.33 2.3 Contextual Themes and Typologies As I have suggested, the world’s religions have much in common, but also distinct differences. This essay is not about religious differences per se, but about the distinguishing characteristics and uses of the architecture of six world religions. To do so, it is useful to contextualize the subject through identifying recurring themes and types in religious architecture. These contextual themes and typologies can serve as the ground upon which the figures of each religion might be more substantively understood, and are as follows. Generally, religious architecture, in all of its diverse forms, served as a means and media to establish dependable places in a mysterious and unpredictable world. It was often positioned as a mediator between humans, an intermediary zone where humans might access the ancestors, suprahuman beings, or gods they sought, revered, or feared and the knowledge they represented. It also served as a communicative agent that expressed the preoccupations, prejudices, values, and aspirations of the culture that created it. Similar to other art forms, its content was received in manner that elicited multiple (and often conflicting) interpretations, often taking on a life of its own that exceeded its original intentions. Religious architecture can also generally be understood as a cultural artifact that expressed dominant cultural norms and imperatives within its social, political, economic, and environmental contexts. Accordingly, it has possessed a specific and particularly potent capacity to reveal and reflect the culture that produced it. Religious architecture, especially in some high state examples, was an active agent designed to engage, affect, and even change one in the manner that the arts have typically aspired to do. The material, spatial, and Religious Architecture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 31–31. 33  Lindsay Jones, “Narrating Chichén Itzá, Storytelling, Disagreement, and Second Naivete at the City of the Sacred Well,” in Thomas Barrie, Julio Bermudez and Phillip Tabb, eds., Architecture, Culture and Spirituality, London: Routledge, 2015, pp. 123–136.

16

Barrie

sequential nature of architecture was often deployed and choreographed as a means to instruct and convince, uplift or depress, encourage or coerce, where, through one’s participation in a physical and discursive manner, meaning was actively constructed. Religious architecture is also a setting for individual and communal rituals that serve to engage one physically and psychically. The ritual in many cases is the hidden text that serves to complete the meaning and significance of the religious setting.34 There is also a taxonomy of types of religious architecture, typically not limited to a specific religion but finding unique expressions within it. First of all, there are historical places closely associated with the initiatory events of a religion. Religions are place-based and time-situated, though typically with varying scales and importance. Indigenous peoples often situate themselves in sacred geographies, their significance established by creation myths that explain their origins and relationship with the world and its suprahuman entities. Historical religions depend on formative events at specific locations. For example, the hearths of the Abrahamic religions, the Semitic region and the Arabian Peninsula, are significant because of place-based histories described in scripture. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre consecrates the setting of the death, entombment, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; Mecca is the hub of the Islamic world that Muhammad established as a center of religious and political power, and in Jewish scriptural history the Temple Mount was where the temples of Jerusalem were built, and destroyed. Second, there are authoritative places where human and divine agency are coterminous. The Vatican in Rome is a place of ecclesiastical and political power and center of the divine authority and hierarchical administration of the Catholic Church. The Hagia Sophia was built by Justinian as the administrative and sacred center of the Eastern church; Canterbury Cathedral was an authoritative seat of British Catholicism (now the “Mother Church” of the Anglican church); and the Potala Palace was the political and religious capital of Tibetan Buddhists, now in exile in Northern India. Third, there are hierophantic places identified as such because of the appearance of divinities or the settings for miracles. Catholicism has many places, such as the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes, evidence of the importance of revelation and miracles to this religion. In the historical centers of Mecca and Medina there are also hierophantic places: Mt. Hira, where Muhammad received the Koran from the angel Fibril (Gabriel), and the Zam Zam Well 34   See Barrie, “The Communicative Agency of Religious Architecture,” in ApostolosCappadona, ed., Religion: Material Religion, pp. 65–66.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

17

revealed to Hagar as she searched for water for her infant child. These and others are ritually incorporated into the pilgrimage to Mecca. Fourth, there are theocentric places where God, or the gods, are believed to dwell. Hindu Temples are sited, proportioned, constructed, and consecrated to ensure that the resident god will dwell there. The medieval cathedral was a place where Christ was believed to be incarnate within its rarified spaces and polychromed light. Chinese Buddhists identify four sacred mountains as the dwelling places of bodhisattvas; Taoists five holy abodes of suprahuman immortals. Fifth, there are cosmological places that replicate or reflect the cosmic order of the world. Hindu Temples serve both cosmogonic and cosmological roles, creating and materializing radiating realms of existence. The great Buddhist temple of Borobudur, a stepped stupa with concentric galleries and steps that lead to its apex, is a three-dimensional mandala that represents Mount Meru, the center of Buddhist cosmology. The medieval cathedral, designed according to, and expressive of, geometry and proportion, was often referred to as the civitas dei, or the City of God. Lastly, there are sacred geographies that include both natural and built environments, often encompassing vast areas, marked by theocentric places, determined according to cosmogonic models, and often linked by pilgrimage paths. The Navaho of the American Southwest consider the Four Corners area as an integrated landscape of landmarks significant to their mythical histories. Historical religions often organize numerous places into a coherent landscape, as in the Christian and Jewish Holy lands. The sacred geography of religious centers and cities in India are often validated by scriptural sources.35 That said, an exclusive focus on comparative typologies of religious architecture can miss important differences. Instead, incorporating distinctions can illustrate the unique beauty of religious systems and expose broader concepts and understandings of religious architecture. It is the interrelationship of a religion, its architectural settings and ritual requirements, and comparative and critical examinations of congruences and differences between religions and their material culture, that are the primary concerns of this essay, to which I now turn.

35  I am indebted to Roger W. Stump for some of the terms and examples in this section. See, Roger W. Stump, The Geography of Religion, Faith, Place, and Space, Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008, pp. 302–304.

18 3

Barrie

Judaism

In the Books of Kings one reads: In the fifth month, and the seventh day of the month—which was the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon—Nebuzaradan, the captain of the bodyguard, a servant of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. And he burned the house of the Lord, and the king’s house and all the houses of Jerusalem; every great house he burned down. And all the army of the Chaldeans, who were with the captain of the guard, broke down the walls around Jerusalem. And the rest of the people who were left in the city and the deserters who had deserted to the king of Babylon, together with the rest of the multitude, Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carried into exile. II Kings 25:8–11

Judaism is a religion defined, in part, through the written word—scripture and commentaries that recall histories of a people and God’s participation in their affairs. The architecture of Judaism begins and, in some respects, ends with the much-referenced temples of Jerusalem. The temples are situated in history when the Jews’ relationship to God was consecrated through rituals and their architectural settings. Their destruction is portrayed as pivotal events initiating cycles of exile and return—themes that appear throughout Jewish scriptures and rituals. The exiles that followed the destruction of the temples recalled and reinforced earlier histories of a placeless people searching for the land promised by their god. With the founding of Jerusalem by King David and the building of the first temple by his son Solomon, the people and their religion became place based with Jerusalem located at the center of their world. The destruction of the first temple followed by the Babylonian exile initiates an ambiguous relationship between religion, ritual, and architecture. The temples of Jerusalem provided the only setting for sacrificial rituals, and materialized the unique relationship between a people and their god. However, after the destruction, of the third, and last, temple, scriptures, texts, and observances play ultimate roles in establishing and symbolizing the religion. In Roman Palestine, men gathered to read and debate scripture, and after the loss of the temples, and ultimately Jerusalem, eventually the synagogue assumes primary importance.36 Synagogue is from the Greek, meaning to bring 36  Synagogues are mentioned numerous times in the New Testament. See also Jack Miles, ed., The Norton Anthology of World Religions, Vol. 2, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015, pp. 247–48.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

19

together, or place of assembly, and traditionally a quorum of ten men is all that is necessary to create a synagogue. But, communal worship is only one part of the religion and not necessarily or consistently the most important. During the Roman diaspora, the study of scriptures, the Jewish people, and even the home, were positioned as holy. In doing so, religious settings became polycentric, shifting from the temple to synagogues, priests to rabbis, sacrifices to worship, and places to a people. Other factors contributed to Judaism’s ambiguous relationship with architecture. First, Jews were often a suppressed, regulated and, at times, persecuted people who, after the destruction of the temples, had no state-supported architecture. The poverty of Jews at times prevented ambitious building programs and, without a central authority, there was no codification of building types and expressions found in some other religions. Second, Judaism stresses orthopraxy more than orthodoxy, thus, its architecture served rituals more than communicated beliefs. Third, because it is hereditary and traditionally endogamous there was little need for an architecture to impress or convert.37 Fourth, for most of its history Judaism was iconoclastic, with no need for an architecture to house the deities and symbolize their attributes. All of which according to one author, “hindered (a) Jewish architectural tradition.”38 However, paradoxically, architecture plays starring roles in Jewish scriptures and texts, which contain voluminous descriptions of architecture unlike those found in any of the other world religions. The Books of Kings, written after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, includes detailed descriptions of its spaces, measures, and materials. The Book of Ezekiel, which dates from the Babylonian exile, prophecies the rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem, which is described in remarkable detail. Also, there is a substantive history of synagogues built throughout the Middle East and Europe. However, it is also a history defined by its losses, especially during the Second World War when entire communities were destroyed. With the dispersal of Jewish cultural and religious centers following the war, new, ambitious architectural programs were established, especially in America. Altogether, Judaic architecture is a complicated and contested subject. It is a religion that is both placed and placeless—static and mobile—and presents unique challenges to understanding and accurately presenting its religious architecture.

37  It should be noted, however, that Hinduism is also hereditary and has a robust architectural history, and Islam, which is also iconoclastic, has a lengthy and distinguished architectural lineage. 38  Carol Herselle Krinsky, The Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1996, p. 20.

20

Barrie

3.1 Frameworks of Judaism There are also significant challenges in summarizing and understanding Judaism in a cogent and unbiased manner. According to one scholar, centuries of negative western, and predominantly Christian, characterizations of Judaism, and Jews, have irrevocably compromised dispassionate descriptions.39 Judaism may be the oldest of the world’s major religions, but the term ‘Old Testament,’ used by Christians to describe the Tanakh, is clearly pejorative. The term Judeo-Christian may be routinely proffered, but it is not a neutral term and, in its historical contexts, the Judeo part is implicitly inferior. One simply cannot ignore the history of prejudices and stereotypes of Judaism. The Torah, the first five books of the Tanakh, which is often described as the ‘Jewish Bible,’ is only one part of Jewish sacred texts, but is important in understanding the crucial relationships intrinsic to the religion. When Moses receives the Ten Commandments from God, as described in Exodus and Deuteronomy, a special covenant with God is established and, when Moses returns and destroys the idols of other gods, so is the exclusivity of this relationship. The Shema, a central prayer in Jewish liturgy, unequivocally states that there is one God and no others. It was the prophets, however, who fully established the monotheism of Judaism. There may not be a pantheon of gods, goddesses, saints, or celestial beings in Judaism, but there is a diverse collection of remarkable leaders and prophets staged across a vast scope of time. Unlike Christianity and Buddhism, the religion is not centered on one personage, or begins with one as in Islam, but instead has consistent themes of humans striving to establish correct relationships with God. Like the other Abrahamic religions, it conceptualizes an omniscient, omnipresent, and singular god, but one that is accessible and requires no intermediaries, as in Christ or Muhammad, or has multiple aspects, as in the Trinity of Christianity. Unlike the regional gods of polytheism, which were often capricious, demanding, and punitive, the singular god of the Jews was compassionate and protective (though not without declarative and proscriptive sides). Jews created a unique alternative to the mysterious gods of antiquity by conceptualizing a god that was accessible (and could even be argued with). God of the early Jews was not anthropomorphic but personified—one that may have been disembodied, but was clearly a presence. Once this was established the relationship with God becomes paramount. The principal texts of Judaism illustrate these emphases. The Tanakh comprises three sections, the laws of the Torah, or The Book of Moses, purportedly given to Moses on Mount Sinai, the Neviim, 39  Alastair Hunter, “Judaism,” in Ridgeon, ed., Major World Religions: From Their Origins to the Present, p. 117.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

21

or Books of the Prophets, those who “speak for God,” and the Ketuvim, in which the Jews’ relationship with God finds consistent expressions. Throughout, language plays a crucial role, beginning with God as a storyteller who, through words, brings the world into being.40 Rabbinic Judaism, the result of the loss of the temples and sacrificial rituals, is scriptural and discursive where the study of scriptures and commentaries are preeminent. Other religions have their histories and myths, but none lend them as much importance as Judaism. Its histories are recounted in detail and play out in time, including prophets who foretell the future. In this context, history enjoys a privileged position as it evidences God’s participation in human affairs, and underlines the importance of participating in and shaping the future by individual and communal efforts. Unlike religions preoccupied with maintaining the cosmic order, Judaism is almost wholly concerned with advancing human culture. To this end, the Talmud, the penultimate Judaic scripture, comprises Rabbinic commentaries and debates on Jewish law, regulations, and observances. Together, the Tanakh and the Talmud are the Duel Torah, or the written and spoken word. Judaism has no concept of original sin. Its themes of loss and exile are explained as outcomes of humans failing to live according to the law and their covenant with God. To live outside of scriptural laws was to sin—to live according to them was to satisfy the binding agreement between God and his people. The special accessibility to God is made possible by two means: observance of the law and study of the scriptures. Professions of belief are unnecessary in a religion that emphasizes deeds over creeds. Its focus on the broad scope of history and God’s participation in a people’s affairs means that ethical actions and human agency, as sanctified by God, are often stressed. The relationships between Jews, their god, and members of society, rather than beliefs or even places, are crucial to understanding Judaic architecture and its ritual settings. 3.2 Architectural Themes The history of Judaic architecture can be neatly (though not completely) divided into two periods. The first is the early (and somewhat mythical) Tabernacle and temples of Jerusalem—the second the synagogue, a building type that first finds definition in the exigencies of communal rituals following the destruction of the First Temple. The Tabernacle and temples of Jerusalem evidence elements, organizations, and ritual practices consistent with high, state religious architecture. Scriptural descriptions of the Tabernacle and the first, or Solomaic, temple of Jerusalem indicate the conventions and preoccupations of 40  Genesis 1:1–33.

22

Barrie

early Jewish architecture. These include required geometric and proportional dimensions and materials, ritual settings, and spatial hierarchies. In particular, the last, or Herodian temple, was organized by sequential and increasingly exclusive spaces. According to Lindsay Jones, much more than Solomon’s Temple, the Herodian Temple displays “an intense correlation of graduated sacrality and segregation according to social status.”41 Its walled compound made unambiguous territorial claims, and demarked thresholds beyond which only Jews could go. Any violation of the rules would result in severe penalties, even death. The Acts of the Apostles recalls how Paul was seized at the temple and threatened with death by a crowd who cried, “Men of Israel help! This is the man who is teaching men everywhere against the people and the law and this place; moreover, he also brought Greeks into the temple, and he has defiled this holy place” (Acts 21:28). In contrast, the liturgical needs and architectural requirements of early synagogues were limited. Scripture and texts often had equal importance, as did ritual and calendric observances that did not depend on specific physical settings for their veracity. Eventually, however, the programmatic and ritual requirements of synagogues are governed by Jewish law and distilled into adaptable typologies. They served three primary activities: to study, to pray, and to reinforce community, and included some elements that recalled the hierarchy of the Jerusalem temples. Early synagogues built outside Jerusalem were typically oriented towards it, with the Ark recess placed on the wall closest to Jerusalem, establishing the directionality and hierarchy of the sanctuary. Throughout the history of the synagogue, liturgical spaces and objects remain consistent, but as it split into three main sects, the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, they were organized or interpreted differently. Orthodox synagogues, for example, require a segregated area for women, typically balcony areas, and position the bimah, a raised platform and table for placing and reading of scrolls of the Torah, in their center. Conservative and Reform synagogues do not separate areas by gender (by varying degrees), and, especially in the latter, the bimah is often incorporated into a raised platform at the Jerusalem side of the space. All synagogues have an eternal light hanging in front of the Ark, recalling the temples of Jerusalem, some a basin of water at its entry, symbolizing their ritual purity.

41  Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison, Volume Two: Hermeneutical Calisthenics, A Morphology of Ritual-Architectural Priorities, pp. 288–89.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

23

3.3 The Tabernacle and Temples of Jerusalem The history of the Jews begins with Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish peoples. In the first book of the Torah, God promises Abraham, “Behold my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations” (Genesis 17:4). In their histories, the Jews were nomads who performed devotional rituals utilizing temporary altars. Their wanderings brought them to Egypt where they are first welcomed and then enslaved. Moses leads then to Sinai, where he receives from God specific instructions for the construction and erection of a temporary sanctuary—the Tabernacle. Exodus includes God’s detailed descriptions of the Tabernacle. “And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst. According to all that I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle, and of all its furniture, so you shall make it” (Exodus 25–27). The Tabernacle comprised a hierarchical organization of spaces inside an enclosure surrounded by an encampment of the tribes of Israel (fig. 1). At its eastern end a forecourt held a sacrificial altar and wash basin, and led to the sanctuary in the west. The sanctuary had two

Figure 1

The Tabernacle, Jan Luyken, Tent camps of the twelve tribes of Israel set up around the tabernacle, 1705 By Rijksmuseum—http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT .146328, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? curid=84747369

24

Barrie

chambers: an outer with a candelabrum and a “Table of the Presence;” and an inner, guarded by cherubim, which was the Holy of Holies and held the Ark of the Covenant, an ornate, wooden box containing the two tablets of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 35–40). The inner chamber, where God appears “in the cloud above the ark cover” (Leviticus 16:2), was only entered by the high priest. Throughout, archetypal elements of a temenos enclosure, thresholds, and hierarchies of sacrality, led to a place where God was present—all organized according to orientation, geometry, and proportion, and completed through ritual. Histories of the temples of Jerusalem typically mention two, the socalled First and Second Temples, but there were actually three. The first, as described in the Books of Kings, was built by Solomon, the second, named Zerubbabel’s Temple, was built after the Jews returned to Jerusalem following the Babylonian exile. Even though the latter stood for five hundred years, it has been considered an inferior temple and often excised from histories. The third was the Herodian Temple, built by King Herod, and the setting for events in the Christian Gospels, including Jesus’s prophesy that it would be destroyed.42 The temples were built on what is now known as the Temple Mount, a rocky acropolis that was the city’s strategic and symbolic center. Jerusalem, of course, is sacred to all of the Abrahamic religions. For Jews, it is the City of David, who installed the Ark of the Covenant and established Jerusalem as the center of the Jewish world. David laments that while he lives in a “house of cedar,” the ark “dwells in a tent” (2 Samuel 7.1–2), but a prophecy told him not to build the temple. The task fell to his son and successor Solomon, who also built the great walls and platform of the Temple Mount. The completed temple with its hierarchy of thresholds, chambers, and inner sanctum reflected archetypal elements of state religious architecture (fig. 2). The Books of Kings include detailed descriptions that are equally nostalgic, reconstructive, and expository. Solomon, to whom the God of the people of Israel gave “wisdom and understanding beyond measure,” built the “house of the Lord” according to God’s precise directions. The temple was a place for God to “dwell,” but unlike other temples of its time, it did not house an image of God, but was a “house for the Name of the Lord” (I Kings 1–6), a disembodied presence impossible and forbidden to represent. Its importance was not established by its size, but its role as the only temple where the rituals of a state religion could be performed. It was made from, and decorated with, precious materials, including the famous bronze columns flanking the entry 42  (Mark 13:1–2). See also, Simon Goldhill, The Temple of Jerusalem, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 9.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

Figure 2

25

Solomon’s Temple Simon Goldhill, The Temple of Jerusalem, Profile Books Ltd, London, 2004

to the vestibule (Ulam in Figure 2). Its increasingly sacred spaces recall the Tabernacle, with the Holy of Holies serving to house the Ark of the Covenant. Only once a year, on Yom Kippur, the High Priest, after elaborate preparations, would enter and utter God’s name. The structure and organization of the temple symbolized the order of God’s statutes. Throughout, specific dimensions govern every aspect of its organization—precise calibrations required by the divine ‘to dwell’ in ‘his

26

Barrie

house.’ “The house which King Solomon built for the Lord was sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high. The vestibule in front of the nave of the house was twenty cubits long, equal to the width of the house, and ten cubits deep in front of the house” (I Kings, 6:2–3). The measures and materials of the nave (Hechal in Figure 2), entered through a pair of doors, and the three levels of side chambers, are also precisely described. The Holy of Holies (Dvir in Figure 2) was a 20-cubit cube, with specifically-dimensioned winged cherubim made from olive wood flanking its entrance. The entire interior was covered in gold, and gold chains stretched across the threshold of the inner sanctum. Solomon installed the Ark and dedicated the building with great humility. “The Lord has set the sun in the heavens, but has said that he would dwell in thick darkness. I have built thee an exalted house, a place for thee to dwell in forever” (I Kings 8:13). The wishes of the deity, in this case through the intermediary of Solomon, were manifested in the Temple of Jerusalem in which religion and political authority were inextricably linked. The larger palaces of Solomon, “made entirely of white stone, and cedar wood, and gold, and silver,”43 were nearby and, as was also prophesized, not only did he grow in wisdom but also in wealth and power. And, as also prophesized, he strays from God. As told by the Romano-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, he had 700 wives and 300 concubines and eventually worshipped their gods.44 Consequently, God “raised up adversity” against him but deferred the destruction of his kingdom until after his death (I Kings 11.14). The Kingdom split into Israel and Judah and in 586 BCE the Babylonians conquered the city and destroyed the temple. The Herodian Period of temple building begins in 37 BCE when Herod became the Roman governor of Jerusalem and gloriously re-built the temple. Whereas the first two temples were modest in size, Herod’s was colossal with elongated entry sequences, including the imposing Royal Stoa on its southern side. Outer and Inner Courts led to the vestibule of the temple, beyond which were two chambers, the Hekla, or holy place, reserved only for Jews, and the Debir, the Holy of Holies, enclosed by a double curtain and only entered by the High Priest. Civil strife and revolt followed Herod’s death in 4 CE, and in 66 CE a Jewish sect called the Zealots restored the city to Jewish rule. This was shortlived and ended in catastrophe when the Romans captured the city after a long siege, destroyed the temple, and exiled its inhabitants—the beginning of the 43  T  he Works of Flavius Josephus, Volume 1, William Whiston, A.M., trans., New York: A.L. Burt Publisher, p. 508. 44  The Works of Flavius Josephus, Volume 1, Whiston, trans., p. 517.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

27

Jewish diaspora. The emperor Hadrian completed the destruction in 135 CE and forbid access to the city by Jews except for one day a year, and only as far as the Western Wall, part of the foundations built by Herod, today the holiest site for Jews and the destination of pilgrimage. The final loss of the temple left Jews without a political, religious, or ritual center. The temples lived on, however, in the texts that describe it, and those that mourn its loss, such as the books of Lamentations and Jeremiah. More so than the original temples, it became a symbol of the Jews’ relationship to God, and of religious ideals and laws and the consequences of straying from them. After the destruction of the temple and exile from Jerusalem, Judaism was forced to redefine itself, a process that took centuries. Throughout, the temple is a spectral presence, even in the description of synagogues as ‘lesser temples.’ 3.4 The Early Synagogue and Ritual Observances The synagogue, at least in part, was an antidote to the loss of the temple. Like the temple, it is a concept as well as a physical setting, symbolizing Jewish identity in the context of the histories and roles of the temple. The synagogue is defined as Jews redefined their religion. God in The Book of Ezekiel asserts “Though I scattered them among the countries yet I have been a sanctuary for them” (Ezekiel 11:16), and many have argued that Jewish devotional practices were first developed during their exile in Babylon. In these early synagogues, the ‘law’ would be read, the bonds of the Jewish community reinforced, and the memory of the Temple of Jerusalem preserved. Rituals that had depended on the temple were distilled and transformed. In The Book of Hosea, one reads “Instead of Bulls we will pay the offering of our lips” (Hosea 14:2). After their expulsion from Jerusalem Jews dispersed throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean basin, building mostly modest synagogues. However, the synagogue at Capernaum, one of a number of third and fourth century synagogues in Galilee, was a substantial building with a colonnaded sanctuary and adjoining peristyle courtyard. The third-century synagogue at Dura-Europos, a Hellenistic city in present-day Syria more known for its Christian house church, subtly transformed part of a residential block. It comprised an atrium, adjoining rooms, and a congregational space with an ark recess on the wall closest to Jerusalem and bench seating on all four sides.45 In contradiction to the prohibition of images, it was distinguished by its extensive, panelized wall

45  There were two phases of the building of the synagogue. See M. Rostovtzeff, Dura-Europos and Its Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938, pp. 104–106.

28

Barrie

paintings of scriptural scenes, including the Temple of Jerusalem, an artistic program that would eventually be supplanted by more aniconic media.46 Many have downplayed strong architectural traditions in Judaism, but this is only partially true. Josefov, the Old Jewish Quarter of Prague that dates from the thirteenth century, includes a number of important synagogues. It was decimated in the Second World War when three quarters of its population died, most in concentration camps. However, today it contains some of the most substantial pre-twentieth century synagogues, chillingly preserved by the Nazis who had plans for an anti-Semitic museum about the people they had exterminated. The Josefov synagogues present a variety of different periods and styles of Judaic architecture. The Old-New Synagogue, which dates from the thirteenth century, is the oldest surviving synagogue in Europe. Originally it was the “new” or “Great Shul,” but as others were built became the “old” or Old-New Synagogue. A popular story was that angels brought its foundation stones from the Temple of Jerusalem (with the provision they be returned when it was rebuilt). In the vestibule, a water basin recalls the lavers of the tabernacle and temples used for ritual cleansing. The sanctuary features a “two-naved hall”,47 where central columns support the Gothic vaulting and reinforce the spatial enclosure of the bimah platform (and, predictably, are said to recall the Temple of Jerusalem). The ark recess is reached by steps, and facing seating rings the sanctuary and centrally-positioned bimah. A separate women’s gallery has narrow openings for viewing the sanctuary. The Pinkas Synagogue, which dates from 1535, was originally a house synagogue. It was named for the original owner, Israel Pinkas, and illustrates the lay tradition of Jewish worship and the history of house synagogues. Today, its arc recess is flanked by the names of the concentration camps where most Czech Jews died. The Spanish Synagogue, competed in 1868, was named for the Moorish style popular in European synagogues. It was the last major synagogue of the Jewish ghetto and demonstrates that Judaic architecture could achieve prominence and mature expression.

46  Andrew Seager, “The Architecture of the Dura and Sardis Synagogues,” in Joseph Gutmann, ed., The Dura-Europos Synagogues: A Re-evaluation (1932–1972), Montana: American Academy of Religion, Society of Biblical Literature, 1973, pp. 83–84. 47  Uri Kaploun, ed., The Synagogue, Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973, p. 85.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

Figure 3

29

Orienburgerstrasse Synagogue, Berlin, 1866, reconstruction by Emile Pierre Joseph De Cauwer Hampel Kunstauktionen, Public Domain, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20772419

3.5 Later Synagogues The Prague synagogues are exceptions—they survived the Second World War, unlike hundreds of synagogues in Europe. The Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, built in 1675, is another exception, a remnant of what once was a significant Sephardic community. After the emancipation of Jews in the eighteenth century there was a profusion of synagogue building in Europe, with over two hundred built in Germany. Because there were no immediate traditions to draw upon, they were stylistically diverse and eclectic. They announced themselves in ways that European synagogues had not before, while also employing revised rituals and architectural language that aimed for assimilation. When the Oranienburgerstrasse Synagogue was completed in Berlin in 1866 it was the largest synagogue in Europe and represented the new acceptance and prominence of the Jewish community in Europe (fig. 3). It was burned in 1933 on the Night of Broken Glass, when synagogues and Jewish quarters throughout Germany were destroyed.

30

Barrie

Like Jewish culture and religion, Judaic architecture found new life and expression in America. The Touro Synagogue in Newport, RI, completed in 1763, is the oldest synagogue in America. It may have been modeled on the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, but its Palladian exterior explicitly reflected local civic and religious buildings.48 Similarly, the Beth Elohim Synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina, completed in 1840, employed Classical architecture. The spatial arrangement of its sanctuary reflects the rituals of Reform Judaism, with the bimah and ark recess placed together at the eastern end of the sanctuary. It is in twentieth-century America, however, that Jewish culture and the synagogue find their architectural voice, as Jews transitioned from immigrants, to a discriminated against minority, to integration and prominence. With assimilation and eventual acceptance as one of America’s major religions, Jewish communities became significant patrons, and promoters, of modern architecture. Congruent with the heterogeneous nature of religious architecture of its time, synagogues displayed a diversity of expressions. Most interpreted the prototypical elements of the synagogue while also satisfying the specific liturgical needs of their Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox communities. Among numerous, distinguished mid-century examples, those by Eric Mendelsohn, a German Jew who emigrated to America in 1941, are perhaps some of the more significant modernist interpretations of the synagogue. Park Synagogue in Cleveland Ohio, completed in 1953, features a complex of buildings to serve the educational, community, and worship requirements of the synagogue, and is centered on a large, domed sanctuary with a prominent bimah platform and ark recess at its eastern end. From Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Shalom Synagogue in Elkin’s Park, Pennsylvania, completed in 1959, to Norman Jaffe’s The Gates of the Grove Synagogue in Easthampton, New York (1987), the modern American synagogue is distinguished by its diversity.

…

Judaic architecture can be understood as satisfying and expressing macro and micro conceptions of sacred space. On one hand, there was a consistent focus on Jerusalem as the center of the Jewish world and the temple as the only setting for formative rituals, including at times eschatological and messianic beliefs in its reestablishment. On the other hand, the dispersed synagogues, and even the sacrality of the Jewish home, were decentralized in concept and practice. During the temple period, and at times following it, architecture plays prominent roles in materializing the religion and accommodating its rituals. 48  Brian de Breffny, The Synagogue, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1978, p. 120.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

31

However, there was also a diminishment of architecture as Jewish observances transcended worship in the synagogue and devotional obligations could be fulfilled anywhere there was a quorum. God was often more present in communal prayer, histories, and culture, then in specific places. According to the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The temple was only in Jerusalem, while the synagogue was in every village. There are fixed times, but no fixed place of prayer.”49 One of the unique aspects of Judaic architecture is that, according to scriptural histories, it begins at its height with the Tabernacle and the temples of Jerusalem. Everything that follows were always ‘lesser temples.’ Synagogues may have obliquely referred to the archetype of the first temples but also had little interest in either replicating or advancing any particular types or symbolic agendas. And even though some synagogues were significant architectural achievements, there is no cathedral or Friday mosque, or nearly any hierarchy of building types. The temples of Jerusalem may have served as models, but the architecture was secondary to their symbolic significance (though not in Christianity, which considered them exemplars). And, because for most of its history Judaism did not have state support, it did not include the social and political agendas often materialized in the architecture of other major religions, nor a history of reforms. In other words, Judaism has a complex relationship with architecture, where study, prayer, and congregational observances have equal, if not more, authority. In the Dual Torah, with its detailed constructions of histories, and the importance of sacred time throughout the liturgical calendar, the synagogue often plays secondary roles. One could argue, generally, that they got their priorities right—the religion is embedded in a people, their histories, communities, and homes, where advancing of knowledge and culture is emphasized and the architecture serves to mark and shelter only the most important elements of communal worship. 4

Christianity

In 1125 CE Bernard, the influential abbot of the Cistercian Abbey at Clairvaux, published his Apologia. Addressed to his friend William of Saint Thierry, it was an unvarnished, though indirect, attack on what Bernard saw as the excesses of Cluniac Benedictine monasteries. Among Bernard’s complaints, “things 49  Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, and Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1963, p. 80.

32

Barrie

of lesser importance” included multicourse meals and lavish clothing—of “greater importance” were the art and architecture of the monasteries, which Bernard characterized as excessive, distracting, and sinful.50 O vanity of vanities, but no more vain than insane! The Church is radiant in its walls and destitute in its poor. It dresses its stones in gold and it abandons its children naked. It serves the eyes of the rich at the expense of the poor. The curious find that which may delight them, but those in need do not find that which would sustain them.51 Ten years later the Abbot Suger, confidant of the French nobility, began the renovations of the Benedictine royal abbey of Saint-Denis near Paris, culminating in the proto-Gothic choir completed in 1144. In his account of his administration of the abbey, Suger, drawing on medieval Neo-Platonic thought, argued that the beauty of the light-filled, polychromed, and richly decorated spaces of Saint-Denis performed anagogical roles in revealing the beauty of God and leading the worshipper to the divine. Delight for the beauty of God and the splendor of the many-colored gems sometimes made me forget about my worldly cares; the devout meditation moved me to reflect on the differences among the holy virtues by directing my attention away from the material to immaterial things. I seemed to see myself as if I were dwelling in some strange region of the earth, partly in the filth of the earth, and partly in the purity of heaven, and that I was capable of being transferred, by the gift of God, from this lower realm to a higher one by anagogical method.52 In these starkly opposing views, two prominent theologians present the roles art and architecture should play (or not) in Christian worship. Their divergence is not unusual. The history of Christianity is one of conflict and contention, 50  This was not simply expository. Under Bernard the Cistercians enacted a number of prohibitions including excessive sculptures, stone towers and colored glass windows. Kenneth John Conant, Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture 800–1200, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1959, p. 225. 51  Conrad Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance:” Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990, pp. 105–106. 52  “De Administratione” (“The Book of Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis: His Accomplishments During His Administration”), in Selected Works of Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, Richard Cusimano and Eric Whitmore, trans., Washington, DC: The Catholic University of American Press, 2018, p. 106.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

33

often conterminous with religious, cultural, and scientific evolutions and revolutions. There were conflicts regarding scriptures and beliefs as the early church defined itself, conflicts with science, secularism, and humanism during the Enlightenment, conflicts with other cultures as Christianity spread through colonialism and missionaries, and conflicts with the plurality and relativity of modernity. In contrast with most of the world’s major religions, Christians have regularly waged theological, philosophical and, at times, military battles about what to believe and how to worship. Paradoxically, since its founding it has also been distinguished by the diversity of its practices and their architectural settings, still very much evident today. On any given Sunday, Christian communities around the world gather in a staggering diversity of spaces—from storefront churches to modern cathedrals; modest parish churches to evangelical mega churches—many with divergent opinions regarding the roles architecture should play, if at all, in establishing identity, communicating beliefs, and facilitating worship. Christianity is a diverse, global religion. Its relatively short but complicated history encompasses multiple sects and periods, each with often distinct symbolic, liturgical, and ritual needs. Its diversity of architectural expressions reflects the changing fortunes, priorities, and power of the religion, and presents unique challenges to dependable scholarship. The voluminous scholarship on Christian architecture, which includes a broad range of positions and perspectives of varying quality, also presents challenges. And, because the architecture often served socio-political and cultural agendas, its more direct religious functions can prove elusive. Lastly, because the West is culturally Christian, establishing a critical distance to study it, and its artifacts, is difficult. 4.1 Frameworks of Christianity Like the other Abrahamic religions, Christianity believes in a single, creator, and enduring God. Unlike them, however, for most Christians God has three aspects, the Trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and the figure for which it is named is worshipped as a god.53 It is a historical religion, based, at least in part, on events that are positioned as factual, most importantly the life, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven of Jesus, and his prophesied return. Christianity emerged from the Judaism of his time—Jesus was a Jew and the Nazarenes one of many Jewish sects—but one whose followers increasingly included gentiles. Christianity also emerged from, and was shaped by, the Roman world. At first it was a persecuted religion, but in the fourth 53  See MT 28:19.

34

Barrie

century it was accepted, and promoted, by the Emperor Constantine, and towards the end of the century Emperor Theodosius made it the state religion. In contrast to most of the major world religions, belief and faith, and professions of them, distinguish Christianity. It is creedal and doctrinal, and for most of its history has stressed orthodoxy over orthopraxy. Reform movements were a logical result, the first being the rise of monasticism in the fourth century, a response to its establishment as a state religion. Similar to Judaism, its scriptures are historical, prophetic, and eschatological, but, in contrast, it is cosmically and organizationally hierarchical. It has had otherworldly aspects and emphases but, more so than many others, is a religion that has been deeply embedded in cultures, politics, and power structures. Since Jesus commanded, “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19), it has been missionary and dedicated to converting the unchurched, whether by choice or the sword. Its European history includes significant militaristic, imperial, and colonial chapters—from the Crusades to conquest and conversions of the Americas. It has often positioned itself as exclusive and superior to other religions, which included, at times, murderous anti-Semitism. It has stressed adherence to beliefs where heresies could be capital crimes, and their punishments ruthlessly pursued. Christian scripture is focused on the Gospels, an unusual collection of accounts by the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that recall, with nuanced differences, the short and consequential life of Jesus and his journey to becoming Christ, the prophesied messiah. Throughout the Gospels, events and Jesus’s teachings defined the core beliefs and sentiments of the nascent religion. It is a religion where sin, and its remedy through trial, suffering, and redemption, plays prominent roles. Jesus died for the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, his Incarnation and sacrifice are evidence of the grace of God given to humans. Through belief in Jesus, one is reborn to eternal life, and one could say that Christianity is obsessed with death and its reconciliation. It is the only major religion where resurrection, of overcoming death, is a core belief (where its opposite, hell, has been a prominent goad for adherence to beliefs). Its eschatological claims have at times positioned life as a trial to prepare for the true home of heaven for those judged worthy, and the eventual Second Coming of Christ where the devout will be resurrected and death defeated. This is the “good news” for which the Gospels are named. Christian beliefs and practices are dependent on Christ who, as an intermediary between humans and God, sin and salvation, is the object of worship, symbol of God’s grace, and model of expected behaviors. Miracles are found in most religions and in Christianity illustrate God’s grace and participation in human affairs. Jesus’s message of love in the Sermon on the Mount (“love

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

35

your enemies and pray for those that persecute you” Matthew 5:44), and selfless behavior in the Golden Rule (“whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” Matthew 7:12), are complemented by later declarations by the apostles of the necessity of obedience to beliefs and fidelity to social conventions (“the wages of sin is death” Romans 6:23). However, one of the first conflicts of the early church, debated at fourth and fifth century councils, concerned differing views regarding the divinity of Christ, and it was because of theological disputes of this type that it eventually split into the Roman and Eastern Churches. Theologians also have their say. Perhaps the most influential was Augustine of Hippo, whose fourth and fifth century Confessions and The City of God presented the struggles of faith, the nature of evil, Original Sin, and the creation of a Christian culture. The most consequential was Martin Luther whose challenges to the authority of the Roman Church led to the Protestant Reformation. Before and after Luther, arguments raged regarding reason versus faith, good versus evil, belief versus service, and doctrine versus experience, which often paralleled cultural and political struggles. Disagreements regarding the authority of the pope led to the religious wars of Europe, and disputes between Protestants resulted in a proliferation of denominations, some of which at first were relentlessly persecuted. Modernity further challenged Christianity, splintering its adherents and impacting its liturgies. Today there are three principal divisions of Christianity: Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism and, within them, numerous sects and monastic orders and, in the case of Protestantism, a plethora of denominations. 4.2 Architectural Themes The scope and breadth of the history of Christian architecture precludes any definitive categorizations. However, it may be productively contextualized by its diversity of symbolic, communicative, socio-political, and ritual functions and their relative emphases at different periods and locales. First, adherents believed the church was a setting where God and humans could be co-joined, and spiritual transformation was possible. Jesus assured his followers, “where two or three are gathering in my name, there I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). The Gospels contain numerous stories of miracles performed by Christ, and in particular healing miracles. The belief in the enduring spirit of Christ positioned him not only in the church but as the church with healing and redemptive potential (in particular, the curative power of relics favored by the Western Church). Second, because events recounted in the Bible have such importance, symbolism, iconography, and narrative art have enjoyed privileged positions in

36

Barrie

Christian art and architecture. It is a religion that can be understood as a font of creative output—painting, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, liturgical and commemorative objects, and music—and architecture where they often all come together. Christianity’s focus on conversions meant that architecture had special roles in announcing the church and communicating its importance, power, beliefs, and cultural hegemony. The communicative capacity of Christian architecture was employed to edify, instruct, convince, and coerce, in visual languages accessible to a broad range of audiences. Third, discrete spaces served Christian rituals and were typically hierarchically organized. In the early church, congregational spaces were only for the baptized, and spatially oriented to the altar where readings and lessons would be shared and the Eucharist celebrated. Sacristies provided back-of-house storage for liturgical objects, baptisteries found numerous expressions including separate occasional buildings, and segregated spaces were reserved for the instruction of the catechumens. The historical orientation of the religion produced an important early building type, the martyria, or tombs for Christian martyrs. Fourth, as in its scriptures, Christian worship plays out in time within the spatially-hierarchical organization of the church. In the Roman Church particularly, themes of sacred and profane, sin and salvation, and the pilgrim’s path of trial and redemption were potently materialized by hierarchicallyorganized spatial sequences and symbolic narratives that led to the portentous space of the sanctuary. Fifth, like the Solomaic Temple, geometry and proportion were at times comprehensively applied. The occult knowledge of mathematics reflected the mystery of God’s creation, and aspired to not only ensure God’s presence, but also, in some cases, embodiment as the church. Sixth, to varying degrees, the church could be cosmological, an internal world where the faithful gathered to vivify scripture through rituals. Longitudinally oriented to the east, the church could be vertical as well, with light a heliophany revealing the presence of God. Lastly, congruent with the historical and commemorative aspects of the religion and its architecture, were its territorial and political roles. Edifices often served to claim places exclusively for the religion, or as centers of religious and political power. 4.3 The Early Church The journey from a minor Jewish sect to the world’s largest religion is part of the story of Christianity. The history of humble house churches leading to one of the world’s most robust architectural and artistic programs, is another. Architecture has played a central role in Christianity, but during the

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

Figure 4

37

Reconstruction, Holy Sepulchre Church, Jerusalem, fourth century CE By Unknown—http://www.oberlin.edu/images/Art335/Art335c .html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index .php?curid=48555113

first centuries of the church, as an illegal, suppressed, and often persecuted religion, it mostly appropriated and transformed domestic models. The muchreferenced church in Dura-Europos, located in the Hellenistic city where the synagogue mentioned earlier was built, and which dates from the third century CE, materialized the nascent ritual needs of the early church. On the ground floor of the two-story atrium house, two rooms were joined to create the sanctuary, with another likely serving as the sacristy. Another room was converted to a baptistery featuring a baldachin font, and was decorated with mosaics, an early example of the incorporation of art in a ritually important architectural space. The atrium most likely served as a classroom for the catechumens, the unbaptized who were forbidden from entering the sacred sanctuaries and participating in the distilled ritual of the Eucharist, which recalled an historical event and required a particular architectural setting.54 The spatial and liturgical organization of Dura-Europos anticipates the hierarchical nature of the Christian church as it developed. However, following the establishment of the ‘New Rome’ of Constantinople by Constantine, the Western and Eastern Churches adopted divergent formal and spatial typologies. In the east the centralized, domed sanctuary, heir to Roman tombs and Christian martyria, eventually became dominant. The most important mausoleum in Christianity is, of course, the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem that dates 54  See Michael Peppard, The World’s Oldest Church: Bible, Art, and Ritual at Dura-Europos, Syria, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016, pp. 16–20, and also, Thomas Barrie, House and Home: Cultural Contexts, Ontological Roles, London: Routledge, 2017, 59–61.

38

Barrie

from the fourth century CE. The original church positioned a domed mausoleum and basilican church on either side of a courtyard enclosing the Rock of Cavalry. The east entrance led to an atrium for catechumens and visitors, followed by the longitudinal basilica with transept and apse, and openings to the Court of Calvary (fig. 4). The hierarchical organization of the church with the domed mausoleum as its goal, lucidly organized most of the elements of the early church. Today, the courtyard has been incorporated into the building, but the church still recalls the domed martyria of early Christian architecture. After Constantine’s acceptance of Christianity, pilgrimage to Jerusalem became an important part of the early church. Today, Jerusalem remains the ultimate goal of Christian pilgrimage, where pilgrims ritually recapitulate Jesus’ journey of suffering, trial, and redemption marked by the Stations of the Cross along the Via Dolorosa, and culminating in the church where the tenth through the fourteenth stations commemorate the settings of Jesus’ crucifixion, entombment, and resurrection. The sepulchre, a small, double-celled stone box set in the middle of a dark, domed space, is indicative of the architecturally unremarkable church but one, as the center of the Christian world and setting for its most significant events, that is perhaps its most historically, symbolically, and ritually significant. A more architecturally mature domed sanctuary is the Hagia Sophia, the Church of Christ as Holy Wisdom of God, built by the Emperor Justinian in Constantinople and dedicated in 537 CE. Justinian had previously built a much smaller domed church, the SS Sergius and Bacchus, also in Constantinople, contentiously referred to as the “Little Hagia Sophia.” Unlike its predecessor, however, the Hagia Sophia, was a sophisticated, though structurally imperfect, masterwork of domed architecture. As the center of the Byzantine world, its immense scale reflected its sacred, liturgical, and political roles, and materialized both ecclesiastical and political power. It was an amalgam of a longitudinal and centralized plan with an atrium, two narthexes, a domed sanctuary surrounded by upper galleries, and apse, axially organized. Light streaming through windows in the dome fell on the shimmering surfaces of mosaics and polished marble, dematerializing its spaces like the mysteries it housed. Justinian inherited a shrinking empire and aspired to restore it to the time of Hadrian with Constantinople as the ecclesiastical and political center of the Byzantine world. A mosaic at the tympanum of the inner door of the south portal shows Justinian presenting a model of the church, and Constantine one of Constantinople, to the Virgin Mary and child Jesus. The message is clear: the church, sanctioned by God, was no longer predominantly a place for the gathering of the devout but the place of God (and his intermediaries), and an analogue of an earthly heaven. The conflation of the religious and political was

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

39

played out in the liturgy of the church. The emperor was positioned above the hierarchy of clergy, and on important days of the Christian calendar performed important roles in processionals and rituals within the cosmological space of the church. 4.4 The Western Church Roman basilican churches, an adaption of Roman public halls, were the favored type of the Western Church. Old St. Peter’s in Rome, built by Constantine in the fourth century CE, coherently organized the elements of the early church. An impressive set of steps ascended to a portico, beyond which was an equally impressive atrium. Opposite, a narthex led to the fiveaisled church with a shallow transept and apse at the east end (fig. 5). The Roman basilica had multiple functions. Most significantly, it was a judicial hall, a place of political power and legal judgment, which the church transformed into a space of ecclesiastical power and religious judgment. Narthex, nave, aisles, altar, and apse were organized along an axial path of increasing sacrality, an organizational type and elements that would remain remarkably stable, but be elaborated upon in the centuries to follow. The apse, formerly where the rulers and judges were empaneled, was now where Christ and his retinue were enthroned. The western medieval world was a confluence of ideas and philosophies with varying degrees of influence on architecture. That said, there are some

Figure 5

Reconstruction, Old Saint Peters, Rome, fourth century CE Public Domain, drawing by H.W. Brewer, 1891

40

Barrie

principal themes that can be useful in understanding high, state, medieval Christian architecture. Of these, the basilican plan organized by means of geometry and proportion, incorporating a symbolic path from sin to salvation, and mediated by structure and light, are predominant. Most cultures with mature building programs have employed methods of geometry and proportion, typically in service of religious and symbolic agendas. Often the ordering systems, and their authority, are presented as divinely sanctioned, or representing the perfection of a divinely-created cosmos. As in the directions to Solomon, God the cosmocrator was also a participant in the ordering of the architecture. A painting from the Bible of St. Louis shows the creator as the architect of the universe holding a mason’s compass, and Augustine in The City of God, insisted that God “has ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.”55 The Medieval Cathedral, particularly the high Gothic, has often been characterized as representing the celestial city described in The Revelation to John, but the temples described in the visions of Ezekiel and the Books of Kings, both positioned as divinely directed, enjoyed equal if not more influence. The consistent and concise use of applied geometry was essential to the ecclesiastical conceptualization and constructional materialization of the architecture. It is well known that many western cathedrals and monasteries were organized and designed by means of arithmetic number series and applied geometry. The masonic guilds possessed ‘secret knowledge’ (and vociferously kept so), of mathematics that had its roots in Greek philosophy, and was viewed as a mystical practice that produced divine orders. Despite its Classical roots, knowledge of the medieval masons was practical, not theoretical, its constructive means utilized generative and applied geometry to produce a series of interrelated proportions. It was typically based on a progressive series, beginning with either the square or the triangle, and there was a famous debate regarding whether Milan Cathedral should be planned according to ad quadratum or ad triangulam (the latter won out). In De Musica Augustine argued that the science of music is mathematical and that musical ratios should be applied to architecture.56 These proportional ratios, part of the re-discovered knowledge of Pythagoras, include 1:1; 1:2, the octave; 2:3, the fifth; and 3:4, the fourth. Together the numbers 1–4 comprise a 55  St. Augustine, City of God, Gerald G. Walsh, S.J., Demetrius B. Zema, S.J., Grace Monahan, O.S.U., Daniel Honan, trans., Vernan J. Bourke, ed., Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1968, p. 260. 56  Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956, pp. 21–22.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

41

number series totaling 10, believed to reflect the harmony of the universe, and to lead the mind to contemplate it. A square ended Cistercian church from the thirteenth-century sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt illustrates the application of musical ratios—the aisle and crossing are 1:1, the width of the nave and the width to the length of the crossing 1:2, the width of the transept to the length of the church 2:3, and the width and length of the choir 3:4. Bernard purportedly loved music and, according to Kenneth Conant, Cistercian architecture was Augustinian in its applications of geometry, proportion, and musical ratios. The church of the Cistercian Abbey at Fontenay in Burgundy, founded in the early twelfth century, reflects Bernardian planning and anticipates the ideal plan of Villard de Honnecourt.57 Cistercians were a silent order, their days occupied with labor, prayer, and music, and their carefully proportioned abbey churches functioned as colossal sounding boards that reverberated the cadence of the sung mass. The Cistercian day was a mathematical structure that precisely determined the monk’s devotional lives, including sung services in the church seven times a day (as described in The Psalms). The ordering of the architecture and orders of the day were in service of the order of the monks. Bernard and Cistercian monastic architecture are often cited as anticipating and catalytic of the high Gothic, but the Gothic and its innovations and unique expressive qualities is equally attributable to the Abbot Suger and the Choir of Saint-Denis. The Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite was a fifth-century theologian whose Neo-Platonic mysticism was to have significant influence on medieval thought regarding light as a transcendental element, and the positioning of the church as a place of transcendence. For Suger, light was a “source and essence of all visual beauty.”58 His innovation was maximizing and choreographing the light of the choir, and it was light, transformed by the multicolored glass windows and reflected off the gems and precious metals of ritual and devotional objects that, in part, defines the mature Medieval Cathedral. It was believed to be the light that leads to the ‘true light’ of Christ who was mysteriously present in the rarified atmosphere of the church. It was anagogical, or able to lead devotees from the mundane to the divine, from the sensible to the intelligible, or, in Platonic terms, from ‘becoming’ to ‘being.’ Geometry and light may have been significant themes in Medieval Cathedrals and monasteries, but it is the path where their symbolic agendas were synthesized and experienced in their totality. English cathedrals in particular featured elongated paths and spatial sequences that accommodated the 57  Conant, Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture, p. 227. 58  von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral, p. 11.

42

Figure 6

Barrie

Abbey Church of Sainte-Madeleine, Vézelay, France, twelfth century CE Photo by Thomas Barrie

processionals important to its liturgy, and led from the west front and narthex to the sanctuary, ambulatory, and crypt. Winchester Cathedral, for example, is over 550 feet long. However, it is the French cathedrals where the symbolic narratives arguably achieved their most mature expressions. The twelfth-century Abbey Church of Sainte-Madeleine in Vézelay was an important pilgrimage and political center where a lengthy devotional and processional path led from the west front to the narthex, nave, and sanctuary over the crypt purported to hold the relics of Mary Magdalene (fig. 6). Christ in the Gospel of John states, “I am the way and the truth; no one comes to the Father except by me” ( John 14:6), and the Medieval Church provided a signposted, symbol-laden way to Christ who it represented, materialized, and embodied. Sainte-Madeleine crowned a prominent acropolis and its path included the approach to, and passage through, the town to its western forecourt. E. Baldwin Smith proposed the “City-Gate Concept” to explain the west front of the Western Medieval Church as an amalgam of symbols of power that were derived from the gateways of Roman provincial capitals where godlike rulers appeared to their subjects.59 The central tympanum of Sainte-Madeleine’s west front depicted a popular Romanesque theme of Christ on the Day of 59  E . Baldwin Smith, Architectural Symbolism of Imperial Rome and the Middle Ages, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1956, p. 11.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

43

Judgement when resurrection or eternal damnation would be determined. (Today, it is an inferior nineteenth-century reproduction.) Initiated by the tympanum, Sainte-Madeleine provided sophisticated spatial sequences and symbolic narratives that replicated the pilgrimage path of trial and redemption, and were ambulated by pilgrims, processionals or retinues as a mimesis of Jesus’ path to apotheosis. Its axial path led from the west, the place of death, to the east, the place of the rising sun and Son of God where one could be joined with God through Jesus Christ. Christ in the Gospel of John promised “I am the door, if anyone enters by me he will be saved” ( John 10:9), and inside the narthex a tympanum shows Christ in Glory, his spirit radiating outward and attracting believers from all over the world. In the nave, column capitals depict a variety of Biblical stories and morality themes, a didactic and exhortative proto-Biblia Pauperum along the path, which achieves its goal in the sanctuary, crypt, and surrounding chapels. In the medieval world, beauty was perceived as the splendor veritatis, the “radiance of truth,”60 and, similar to medieval alchemical practices, the portentous atmosphere of the church was believed to have the capacity to transform the penitent from lower to higher forms, from damned to saved.

…

Even though it is tempting to assume that the predominant experience of a place such as Sainte-Madeleine would have been the reception of its contentsaturated imagery, interpretations of the church as a largely belief-driven place are more a product of contemporary prejudices. The religious life of the medieval world was much more integrated, with the church, as the center of urban medieval life, housing numerous complementary functions. It often served as a town square or hall, providing meeting places for administrators, merchants, and lovers alike, and even places for commerce. (Apparently, at one time wine sellers set up shop in the nave of Chartres, before being banished to a corner of the crypt.) The often-boisterous activities without and within the church necessitated places with a degree of privacy and sanctity, thus its religious community observed its daily, monthly, and yearly rituals within the cloistered preserve of the sanctuary. The bare, stone floors of the cathedral offered voluminous space for the laity and pilgrims, but little in the way of either comfort or participation. 60  von Simson, p. xvii. According to Wim Swaan, the cathedral was an “earthly embodiment of the Divine Jerusalem” that represented the “splendor veritatis” of “divine truth.” Wim Swaan, The Gothic Cathedral, New York: Park Lane, 1985, p. 51.

44

Barrie

The history of Christian architecture can be similarly understood, as complicated, often contested, and open to multiple interpretations. From an Eliadian perspective, the Hagia Sophia, for example, was a cosmology, or model of the cosmos, a templum sacralized by the sacred time of the Christian calendar and its associated rituals. As such, it performed symbolic roles of establishing the center of the Byzantine world and conjoining humans and God by means of rituals performed by the intermediaries of the emperor and priesthood within the rarified spaces of the church. From the perspective of the Jonathan Z. Smith school, however, “the language of ‘center’ is predominantly political and only secondarily cosmological,”61 suggesting that the church was primarily situated within the political geography of the ‘New Rome’ and Byzantium. The Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Abbey Church of Sainte-Madeleine served the ecclesiastical and political structures that created them. They symbolically and ritually performed within these contexts, where the symbolic content and effects of the architecture served liturgical functions and religious beliefs. The architecture was a scripted, erudite language of explicit and nuanced, lay and elite, content that was multivalent and receptive to numerous interpretations. The carefully choreographed spaces were in service of binding together the congregants through shared beliefs and rituals, and mediating symbolic connections to an enduring and accessible God though Christ. As high state architecture, they would be expected to do so. As such, each is distinct regarding their social and political agendas and, even though they present important aspects, should not be construed as representative of Christian architecture as a whole. New or transformed themes in subsequent periods and different denominations and locations emerge from conflicts and responses within and outside Christianity. In the Italian Renaissance, churches such as San Lorenzo in Florence may have employed a geometric program similar to Cistercian abbey churches, but did so for very different reasons. Leon Battista Alberti’s west façade of Santa Maria Novella, also in Florence, was distinctly humanist in its rational ordering, in contrast to the medieval basilica behind it. In early Protestant architecture, the basilican plan is retained but the lectern assumes a prominent position relative to the sanctuary, congruent with the importance of scripture to support individual faith. The 19th century Liturgical Movement challenged the spatial hierarchies of churches and Rudolf Schwarz’s influential The Church Incarnate, The Sacred Function of Christian Architecture (first published 1923), argued for more inclusive worship spaces. However, it wasn’t until the Second Vatican Council’s 1964 “Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy” that changes to the 61  Jonathan Z. Smith, Map is not Territory, p. 17.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

45

rituals of the Catholic Church became official, which consequently led to significant changes in church architecture. Each age, it is apparent, finds its own interpretation and architectural expression of the symbols and rituals of Christianity. 5

Islam

God’s first recitation to Muhammad ends with the invocation “Prostrate yourself and come nearer” (Surah 96.19). Prostration is the primary expression of Islam, which means ‘submission,’ and is the essence of Islamic prayer. Muhammad purportedly said, “Wherever you pray, that place is a mosque,” and the Arabic word for mosque, masjid, simply means “place of prostration.” Praying in the direction of Mecca is a secondary requirement and so the essential mosque is a place of prostration correctly oriented. Everything else is superfluous. But, what exuberant superfluousness! The mosque in time came to incorporate a vast array of religious, civic, and political functions, congruent with the theocratic cultures within which it developed. As Islam spread throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean Basin and to India and Asia, it encountered a diversity of architectural traditions, which it appropriated, adapted, and transformed. The iconoclasm of Islam may have prohibited religious imagery, but did not inhibit one of the most mature decorative programs in the history of architecture. And, for a religion with limited requirements for its spaces of worship, it managed to excel at creating structurally and spatially innovative mosques, from columned halls to arguably the height of Islamic architecture, the Ottoman domed mosque. These introductory statements are not meant to be declarative, but descriptive of the scope of the subject. Like other ‘non-western’ architectural traditions, Islamic architecture has been subject to many misunderstandings, beginning with the religion itself. Islam shares lineages with the other Abrahamic religions, and accepts the Jewish and Christian Bibles as prophetic, but has proven to be challenging for the conventional West to understand. There is the legacy of nineteenth-century orientalism, which characterized Islam and its material culture as an exotic and inferior other.62 This extended to the truncated architectural chauvinism of this time and its often ex cathedra patronizing pronouncements. Immediately suspect is the term ‘Islamic architecture’ to describe a diverse, extensive history that included numerous building types and styles. This general term betrays the generalizations the architecture of Islamic cultures has 62  See Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

46

Barrie

been subject to, most egregiously Eurocentric attributions of its innovations to western sources, or explications of its architecture according to western terms and prejudices. Further challenging dependable scholarship is the dearth of indigenous historical accounts or, more significantly, books on architectural conventions and theory. One simply does not find counterparts to Vitruvius or Palladio in the Islamic world.63 Further compounding these challenges is the lack, relative to other religions, of dependable, and diverse, western scholarship. There are, thankfully, some exceptions, including Robert Hillenbrand who stated, “The mosque lies at the heart of Islamic architecture.”64 Accordingly, I will limit the term ‘Islamic architecture’ to mosques and mosque complexes, and their religious, cultural, and socio-political contexts. 5.1 Frameworks of Islam Islam is the youngest of the world’s major religions—Hinduism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism pre-date its formative period in the seventh and eighth centuries CE. And yet, it is the world’s second largest religion and its principal spheres of influence stretch from the Middle East to South East Asia, including some of the most populous areas of the world. Its beginnings, however, gave little clue to its success at gaining converts or its future architectural accomplishments. It was founded by the Prophet Muhammad who Muslims believe received a direct recitation from God, the Seal of the Prophets or final and definitive directives that completed and superseded the prophetic traditions of Judaism and Christianity. This final word is the Koran (Qurʾan), within which Muhammad is positioned as “the warner,” alerting all to the promises of this final testament and the risks of ignoring it.65 Like the other Abrahamic religions, Islam is monotheistic. Allah is the one and supreme creator and administrator of the world, but is unknowable except through Muhammad, who is loved as the chosen Prophet of God, but is not worshipped. He is an historical personage portrayed in the Hadith (collections of writings on his life), as a model of behavior, piety, and leadership. However, his beginnings, like the religion itself, were inauspicious. Muhammad ibn Abdullah (the son of Abdullah) was born into a minor clan of the ruling tribe of Mecca in 570 AD. Orphaned at a young age and raised by an uncle, there was little to indicate his future leadership. It was a time and setting, however, that 63  Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 12. 64  Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning, p. 5. 65  In Surah 48:8 God tells Muhammad to go forth as a “witness and as a bearer of good news and warnings.”

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

47

desperately needed to change and a leader to effect it. The largely nomadic tribes of the Arabian Peninsula were often in conflict, lawlessness was rampant, social equity non-existent, and the local polytheistic religions corrupt. Muhammad stood outside of this culture and, after marriage to a wealthy widow, periodically meditated in a cave on Mount Hira, outside of Mecca, where around 610 CE he received the first of the ‘calls’ to be the ‘Prophet.’ For the next 23 years the Word of God was recited to him by the archangel Jibril. At first, he was a reluctant prophet, fearing he was either an ecstatic “poet or a man possessed.”66 He confided this to his wife, who accepted his prophecy and became the first convert. Initially, there were few other converts, but eventually he became not only a religious leader but also a political one, centered at first in the city of Medina. He saw himself as a religious and political reformer, and when Mecca fell to his armies and political skills, he rededicated the ancient cult shrine of the Kabah to Allah. He died in 632 CE, and before the turn of the century his followers had conquered much of the Middle East and Mediterranean Basin. The Koran, believed to be the verbatim Word of God, is not historical or mystical, but direct regarding God’s omnipotence and compassion, and specific about how to live a devout life. Islam stresses orthopraxy and historically has been more concerned with laws of behavior than scriptural analysis or theological debates. There are no hierarchies of saints or angels, no priesthood or monastic tradition, but instead institutions of the uluma, religious leaders who administer the law. Consequently, it has often produced theocratic states governed by all-encompassing laws (shariʾah). Like Christianity, it is a missionary religion, and its scripture is direct in promising heaven for the devout and eternal hell for the kafir, the “ungrateful” unbelievers. It insists on its superiority to other religions, but has a history of tolerance in the regions it conquered, in accordance with the Koranic statement, “There is no compulsion in religion” (Surah 2.258), and the Constitution of Medina that granted rights to all citizens. Central to the religion are the Five Pillars. The first is the shahada, the attestation that God is one and his Prophet is Muhammad. Salat, the second, is the requirement to pray five times a day, at dawn, midday, late afternoon, sunset, and at the end of the day (the times of which are movable throughout the year). The third is zakat, the requirement for charity in the form of a percentage of one’s annual worth. Ramadan, the month-long sunrise to sundown fast that commemorates the first recitation of the Koran to Muhammad, is the 66  From a Hadith, quoted in John Alden Williams, ed., Islam, New York: George Braziller, 1962, p. 61.

48

Barrie

Fourth Pillar. The last is the hajj, the mandated, once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca for those who are able. The struggle of adherents to fulfil these requirements and expectations is jihad, though at times it has been used to describe religious war. It is a remarkably unified religion, but does have two main sects—the much larger Sunnis, and the Shi’i who split over their insistence that primogeniture determine religious leadership beginning with a dispute regarding who should succeed Muhammad. Islam also has a mystical branch, the Sufis, known for their ascetic and somatic practices and, especially to the West, the Persian poet Rumi. Islam is a global religion that is centered on the city of Mecca. Around the world each mosque points in the direction of this hub like the spokes of a geocosmic wheel. In the center of the courtyard of the al-Masjid al Haram, The Great Mosque of Mecca, is the Kabah. It is small, cubic building, with an embedded, black stone believed to have been received by Jibril and draped in a black cloth stitched with Koranic verses, which pilgrims ritually circumambulate seven times in a counter-clockwise direction. Elsewhere in the mosque, and surrounding areas of Mecca and Medina, pilgrims ritually commemorate mythical, scriptural, and historical events, including a stone in the mosque courtyard that marks where Abraham laid the foundation of the Kabah. “We made the House (the Kabah) a resort and a sanctuary for mankind saying, ‘Make the place where Abraham stood a house for worship’” (Surah 2.126). 5.2 Architectural Themes Similar to other world religions with robust architectural histories it is impossible to apply universally-applicable themes to the history of mosques and mosque complexes. However, by focusing on historically significant, high state examples, they may be broadly situated within predominant aspects of the religion they served. These include the continuities and contrasts of its organizational, typological, symbolic, functional, socio-political, and ritual contexts. When Muhammad founded Islam, its architectural implications were undefined. Except for the prescribed direction of prayer (originally toward Jerusalem but reoriented by Muhammad to Mecca), there were little ritual requirements, and no architectural ones. It has often been cited that Muhammad’s house in Medina, which he built for his family after escaping the increasingly hostile Mecca, served as the first sanctuary and prototypical mosque. Given the history of palace-temples and, more specifically, the appropriation of the domestic in early Christian and Jewish worship spaces, this is a plausible theory. The house no longer exists having been replaced by a successive number of mosques, but has been described as a simple domicile comprising nine small rooms that fronted a large, walled courtyard. The size of the courtyard, which

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

49

was considerably larger than any domestic needs, along with the purported austerity of the Prophet, suggests its use as a congregational space. A prototypical quibla and simple columned shelter satisfied its ritual and communal needs, and established a nascent rendition of the religious and political attributes of the mosque, and Islamic culture. The mosque as it developed and matured came to include a number of elements that served its ritual functions. Many were occasional and even superfluous as the Five Pillars do not require communal prayer (though eventually Friday noon was designated as such). Throughout its history it displays both unity and diversity, in part attributable to the dearth of liturgical requirements. Instead, the mosque generally incorporated multifunctional spaces to accommodate a range of formal and informal uses. Often intrinsic to theocratic cultures, mosque complexes subsumed many complementary uses under its religious mission. In addition to religious uses, mosque complexes could also include educational and civic uses such as religious schools, libraries, hospitals, hostels, soup kitchens, bath houses, tombs, toilets, and gardens, in varying combinations. Mosques were formally and spatially hierarchical, but did not emphasize degrees of sacrality or serve processionals (though in high state mosques its organizations could facilitate the often-grand entrances of the political elite to Friday prayers). Spaces were generally multifunctional, though some were exclusive such as separate women’s areas and the lodges of rulers. In domed mosques, there was often a vertical hierarchy of base, transitional middle, and dome. They could also be multidirectional, with axial orientations toward Mecca counterpoised with the transverse demands of communal prayer where, during Friday prayers, men lined up shoulder-to-shoulder facing the quibla wall. Similar to Judaism and Christianity, Islamic communal prayer is largely an interior event, and mosques typically suppressed their exteriors in favor of often profusely decorated interiors. This exterior deference has been attributed to the Prophet Muhammad’s injunctions regarding ostentatious architecture, but is also consistent with conventions of urban buildings in Islamic cities. Of course, this was not always the case, regional differences and the inventiveness of architects to push boundaries could produce compelling decorative programs (as in some Persian examples), or formal compositions (as in the mature Ottoman). Richly decorated interiors were also not always the case, but when they were could display an astonishing variety of representational, geometric, and epigraphic elements. Because of the iconoclasm of Islam, architects and artisans were challenged to decorate surfaces and communicate symbolic content

50

Barrie

through a limited palette of decoration. In many examples, they triumphantly rose to the challenge with a profusion of banded masonry, elegant columns and capitals, stalactite surfaces, richly colored painting and multi-hued mosaics and tiles, and calligraphy. Geometry and proportion often organized the decorative programs, or constituted an element itself. All of this, paired with elegantly crafted doors, liturgical elements, screens, carpets, and other furnishings, could produce spaces that were subdued in their unity but also exuberant in their expressions. Robert Hillenbrand has suggested that mosques recalled the harsh desert environments of Islam’s homeland while also symbolizing a refuge from them. In his construct, the voluminous, open courtyards that held ablution fountains signified a desert oasis and the prayer halls fecund gardens.67 Thick-walled mosques typically admitted ambient light through deep openings to create subdued interiors where colors and hues had maximum impact. The surfaces often directly represented plants and flowers, incorporated geometric forms and patterns, and included textual calligraphy, but also dematerialized as reflective surfaces shimmered in the cool light. The preference for repetitive patterns, often at cascading scales, could also produce a multiplicity that was challenging to comprehend as a whole. Lastly, many have proposed two principal types of mosques: the columned or hypostyle halls of ‘Open Plans,’ and centralized, domed, ‘Closed Plan’ mosques. These imperfect but convenient typologies can aid in contextualizing their potential architectural lineages and subsequent developments and elaborations. Plausible Roman and Byzantine influences have also been cited in the structural and spatial organizations of mosques, though deductive conclusions or worse, patronizing attributions regarding Islamic architecture as versions of western architecture, have been largely discredited. 5.3 Columned Halls An early, important mosque is the Great Mosque of Damascus, which was completed in 715 CE during the pivotal Umayyad Dynasty. Damascus was the center of their rule and the Great Mosque was built during a period of remarkable expansion of the empire. Built on a site formerly a Roman temple, then a Christian church, it is the oldest surviving major mosque. It featured a triple aisled, cross-axial columned hall, fronted by a large courtyard, and incorporated many of the elements of typical mosques. These included the mihrab, typically a shallow apse in the quibla that served to reinforce the mosque’s orientation, the minbar, a freestanding, narrow, stepped pulpit of sorts for the 67  Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture, Form, Function and Meaning, p. 22.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

51

imam’s Friday address, a dikka, a raised platform found in large mosques where muezzin conveyed the imam’s message for those who could not see him, and a maqsura, the screened lodge for rulers. Its arcaded courtyard announced the public nature of the mosque while also providing additional prayer spaces. It was entered through a towered gateway and included a centrally-located ablution pool for ritual washing before prayer. Three towers, one of which is from an earlier building, were early minarets from which the call to prayer was sung. The columned hall mosque has numerous regional iterations while preserving its basic organization. The Aqsa Mosque, located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (al-Quds), was begun under the Umayyads, and was rebuilt many times. Aqsa means “faraway sanctuary,” a reference to the miraculous Night Journey when Muhammad was guided by Jibril to Jerusalem. It commemorated this important event, as did the nearby Dome of the Rock and, similar to the Great Mosque of Damascus, served to claim a place that had a long history as a sacred center. It is also a columned hall with a raised central aisle that terminates at a domed space in front of the mihrab. Its plain exterior leads to a more decorative interior that is axially-oriented toward Mecca and also crossaxially expanded to accommodate communal prayer. The Great Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, was competed in 847 CE during the Abbasid Dynasty, which was centered in Baghdad. Originally its columned hall was one of the largest in the world, now only parts of its walls and a unique spiral minaret survive. The ninth-century Great Mosque of Qairawon in Tunisia was an early and important example of North African mosques. It features an axially-oriented courtyard that leads to a columned hall featuring a central aisle with domes at either end. Arguably the most sophisticated of the early, columned halls is the Great Mosque of Cordoba, begun in the eighth century, where a courtyard leads to an expansive, multidirectional field of columns and arches bathed in sallow light from above, and a remarkable polygonal, domed mihrab. Its grandeur was irrevocably marred by the crudely inserted sixteenthcentury Chapel of the Canons.68 Regional iterations of the columned hall are more apparent in eastern mosques. The Friday Mosque of Isfahan is an eloquent expression of the Persian four-iwan plan. Its original columned hall was rebuilt and enlarged numerous times, and currently features a central courtyard fronted by four 68  When Charles V, who had approved its construction, first saw it he famously expressed his regret. “If I had known what you wished to do, you would not have done it, because what you are carrying out there is to be found elsewhere, and what you had formerly does not exist anywhere else in the world.” Quoted in K.A.C. Creswell, A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture, Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1988, p. 293.

52

Barrie

richly decorated iwan recesses. The Friday Mosque in Delhi dates from India’s Mughal period and was Shah Jahan’s Royal Mosque for the new capital. Here a massive platform rises above the surrounding streets within which is a walled courtyard with a large ablution tank and a seven bay, columned prayer hall. Lastly, the sixteenth-century Great Mosque of Xi’an, the ancient Chinese capital, illustrates the broad geographic reach of Islam, and its curious mix of courtyard palace plan, trabeated wooden construction, and Islamic functions, the capacity of mosque architecture to incorporate regional traditions. 5.4 Domed Mosques It is not surprising that domed sanctuaries became a favored type of mosque architecture as there is a long tradition of domed buildings, especially tombs, in the architecture of Islamic cultures. The domed mausolea perhaps reach their zenith in Mughal India. At the sixteenth century Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi, a ‘nine-fold plan’ tomb69 capped with a central dome majestically rises above an iwan arcaded platform (fig. 7). Persian influences are clear in the surrounding quartered gardens that evoke pleasure and paradise gardens. These influences are also apparent at what is possibly the world’s most famous tomb, the Taj Mahal in Agra, built by Shah Jahan to commemorate his beloved wife

Figure 7

Humayun’s Tomb, New Delhi, India, sixteenth century CE Photo by Thomas Barrie

69  See Ebba Koch, Mughal Architecture: An Outline of Its History and Development (1526– 1858), Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1991, p. 45.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

Figure 8

53

Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, seventh century CE Photo by Thomas Barrie

Mumtaz Mahal and completed in 1654 CE. Similar to its Delhi predecessor, the tomb also corresponds to a nine-square plan and rises majestically from a massive platform, and is part of a complex of supporting buildings and gardens. A graceful, bulbous dome caps its intricately detailed, polygonal, marble exterior of surfaces and iwans. Its corners are decisively marked by minarets signifying it as a tomb-mosque congruent with its status. Even though commemorative buildings are not a strong tradition in Islam, a notable example can be found in the seventh-century Dome of the Rock at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (fig. 8). When Jerusalem fell to Muslims in 638 CE, the Temple Mount was renamed Haram el-Sherif (“Noble Sanctuary”), and the Dome of the Rock occupies Mount Moriah, believed to have been the location

54

Barrie

of the temples of Jerusalem. Its centralized, domed space encloses the “Rock of Abraham,” which commemorates the place where God tested Abraham. It is also believed that it was where Muhammad, after his Night Journey, communed with Moses, Abraham, Jesus, and other prophets and then journeyed to hell and the levels of heaven. Its centrally-domed space surrounded by ambulatories recalls Roman mauseolea and Christian martyria, but it is distinguished by an octagonal plan governed by the geometry of two overlaid squares.70 Its refined geometry and proportion, and extraordinary decoration, also distinguish it from the earlier Church of the Holy Sepulchre (that it is often compared to), which features a dome of almost identical diameter. Also unlike its Christian neighbor, the Dome of the Rock’s exterior is exuberantly decorated and capped with a magnificent gilded dome. Its interior, circumscribed by a double ambulatory, is richly polychromed with floral motifs in mother of pearl mosaics, and the hemispherical dome evocatively depicts the paradise garden of the heavens Muhammad is believed to have visited. The domed centralized mosque reached its ultimate expressions in Ottoman architecture, especially in the works of Sinan, who was court architect for a number of sultans during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His office was associated with over 500 building projects, including bridges, bath houses, aqueducts, caravanserai and, most significantly, imperial mosque complexes. He has been contentiously referred to as the ‘Turkish Michelangelo’ though, at least in the West, much more is known about his Renaissance contemporaries. This appellation also ignores the confluence of Italian and Ottoman architecture in Sinan’s time—there were documented exchanges between Istanbul and Venice, and building traditions were equally regional and local with itinerant craftsmen often comprising the workforces of masons and other trades. The architecture of the Ottoman Empire can be best understood through its mosques and mosque complexes, which were refined over centuries and reached their height in the sixteenth century. It was an architecture formally and spatially centered on domed spaces whose architectural lineage included Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic precedents of arches and domes, what Gulru Necipoglu terms the “shared Romano-Byzantine architectural heritage of the eastern Mediterranean basin.”71 Byzantine influences are most often cited and, in particular, the Hagia Sophia, but, even though there may be a recognizable continuity from the Byzantine to the Ottoman, there are also clear distinctions. In the Byzantine, structural and spatial clarity was subservient to the 70  Creswell, A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture, pp. 21–22. 71  Gulru Necipoglu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 13.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

55

symbolic agendas of its scenographic spaces—in the Ottoman they are refined and integrated. The Byzantine church aspired to create a dematerialized space of mystery, the Ottoman mosque one of elucidative and symbolic clarity.72 Early Anatolian mosques were columned halls but eventually regional traditions almost exclusively adopted domed spaces. The Great Mosque of Bursa, which dates from the late fourteenth century, is part of the lineage from columned halls to centralized domed spaces. Here, twenty domes are supported by twelve piers to create a space equally centered on an interior fountain and oriented to the quibla and mihrab. The Uc Serefeli Mosque in Edirne is another transitional work, where a central dome rests on a squat hexagonal baldachin with two flanking domes on each side. These early, tentative beginnings eventually led to the accomplished Ottoman mosque complex, especially in the hands of Sinan. Its distinguishing characteristics include an emphasis on austere formal compositions of exterior facades, spatial and structural clarity in which a unified composition of domes, half domes, buttresses, and minarets culminates in a centralized dome, and expansive and integrated interior spatial compositions. This was achieved through structure, geometry, and light, and a highly articulate language of decoration in its interior spaces. Friday mosques were embedded in their urban contexts, providing an ordered environment with a range of services, and included verdant gardens in cities that often had little in the way of green spaces. Sinan’s mature works are distinguished by their lucid and nuanced expressions of form, structure, geometry, space, surface, architectural elements, and furnishings. His extensive catalog of mosque complexes reveals a variety of organizational and structural typologies in service of theocratic, socio-political, and religious symbolic agendas.73 An early work was the Sehzade complex in Istanbul, completed in 1548, its pyramidal profile inscribed by a centralized dome, weight towers, and half and corner domes. Anticipating Sinan’s mature works, the geometry of squares determined the plan of courtyard and mosque, and its dome confidently rises in tiers from a square base. Built in honor of the Sultan Suleyman’s son, the complex included a range of civic and religious functions and incorporated Sehzade’s domed tomb in the garden on the Mecca side of the quibla. 72  According to Robert Hillenbrand, “Where the Byzantine church suggests, its Ottoman successors display.” Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Art and Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1999, p. 264. See also, Thomas Barrie, The Sacred In-between: The Mediating Roles of Architecture, London: Routledge, 2010, p. 178. 73  Dogan Kuban presents a typology of “modular spatial development” of Sinan’s mosques. Dogan Kuban, Sinan’s Art and Selimiye, Istanbul: The Economic and Social History Foundation, 1997, p. 50.

56

Figure 9

Barrie

Selimiye Mosque, Edirne, Sinan, 1573 Collection of Thomas Barrie. Photo by Aras Neftçi

The iconoclasm of Islam was more than compensated for by the layers of symbolism that communicated a diverse range of content. Ottoman mosques were coded by means of the number of minarets and sanctioned materials to indicate the status of its patrons, underlining the stratification of a culture that dictated modes of dress and architectural conventions of houses according to trade and social standing. Mosque complexes comprised a network of the sacred and secular that illustrate the theocratic unity of religion and state. The Suleymaniye Mosque Complex in Istanbul, completed 1557, was also commissioned by Suleyman. Like Sehzade it was an urban complex and included a library, hospital, hostel, soup kitchen, schools, and baths. Constantinople was founded as the ‘New Rome’ with seven hills that recalled the imperial capital, and the Suleymaniye’s dominant dome and four minarets commanded a prominent one above the Golden Horn. However, it was the Selimiye in the western Thracian capital of Edirne, completed in 1573, that was Sinan’s most mature and accomplished work. Commissioned by the Sultan Selim II, it formally commands its hilltop site with a prominent dome supported by buttresses, weight towers, and domes visually inscribed by four, surprisingly tall, thin minarets. Geometry and proportion govern the organization of the complex, most particularly a progressive series of interlocked squares. The prayer hall is surmounted by a dome

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

57

that effortlessly rises from an octagonal base, where galleries and the sultan’s maqsura are subtly integrated. An unusual mihrab apse provides an axial counterpoint to the mosque’s insistent centrality that is both assertive and recessive. The equally-unusual dikka, its square plan corresponding to a base module of the complex’s plan, occupies the middle of the space, reinforcing the nested geometry of the mosque (fig. 9). It all gets reconciled, and completed, when men assemble for Friday prayers, their unified prostrations taking place in a remarkably unified space. The Selimiye is a culminating work of a mature architect, and culture, that illustrates the multifarious material, symbolic, and ritual aspects of mosque architecture. Throughout, its refined decoration is limited to architectural elements, epigraphic content, and floral decoration. It is a space that is delimited and limitless, a coalescing and also expanding universe where unity and multiplicity achieve an energetic balance. Its geometric, material, and decorative elements seemingly contract and expand to infinity, a resplendent cosmogram signifying God’s occluded nature. More directly, it is also the paradise garden promised in the Koran, its subdued light creating tableaus that recall a cool oasis centered on a fountain under the dikka, and surrounded by the floral designs of its tile work and decorative elements. At the center of the dome Arabic calligraphy declares, “It is God who keeps the heavens and the earth from falling. Should they fall, none could hold them back but Him. Gracious is God and forgiving” (Surah 35:4), ringed by the many names of God and his laws as revealed by His Prophet.74

…

Appropriating and advancing the works and settings of rival religious cultures to assert dominance and superiority is an old story, but one well told in pertinent examples of mosque architecture. The results, especially in the accomplished works of Sinan, were unique materializations that demand analyses predominantly based on the merits of the works themselves in their particular historical, religious, and socio-political contexts. The Selimiye is clearly organized hierarchically, but not in service of processions or progressively exclusive domains. It may have been the product of a theocratic state and incorporated socio-political, scriptural, and exhortative symbolic content, but this was subservient to its aniconic expressions of the immensity and unknowability of God. 74  See, Barrie, The Sacred In-between, pp. 197–204.

58

Barrie

For a religion that self-consciously strove for an unambiguous unity of beliefs and behaviors, the meanings and functions of mosques were often remarkably nuanced. Examples could express both unity and diversity—the structural logic of columned halls dissolving into multiplicity and multi-directionality; the lucid amalgamation of domes in the Ottoman fragmenting into expanding immensity. Skillful applications of geometry and proportion in mature works governed the whole at a variety of scales, from plan and section, to the intricacies of pattern. Its multiplicity of imagery, subdued light, and interlocked and integrated structure and geometry dematerialized the spaces while simultaneously individual elements asserted themselves. Exteriors could be subdued and expressive, an articulate amalgam of structure, form, surface, and pattern. All were in service of an essential demand—to submit one’s individual self to the unity and omniscience of God. The ultimate goal was tawhid, the unity of God. As stated in the Koran, “God is One, the eternal God. He begot none, nor was he begotten. None is equal to Him” (Surah 112.1–4). 6

Hinduism

In a relief panel at the Dashavatara Temple, Deogarh, Madhya Pradesh, Vishnu is shown asleep, floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean and supported by Ananta, the world snake of unending time. Underneath, the five youthful Pandava brothers, heroes of the Mahabharata, stand ready to do battle. Vishnu is the world dreamer. His wife Laksmi massages his right leg, stimulating his dream of a world that is vast, complex, and paradoxical, like many dreams are (fig. 10). In Vishnu’s dream the world is limitless with unimaginable time contexts in which ages arise and pass away. The present age is the Kali Yuga, in which delusion regarding what is real, and what is not, rules, and that will decline to a catastrophic end, as all ages must. A lotus hovers over Vishnu and on its corolla is Brahma, the lord of light who illuminates the world. To Brahma’s left is Shiva, the destroyer of illusions; on his right Indra, who maintains the illusionary world, riding on the white elephant Airavata.75 Here themes are materialized that help to explicate Hinduism, and its architecture: the illusionary nature of the world; the congruence of opposites where the creative and the destructive are often paired; vast, even limitless, scales; and complexity and multiplicity. One of the world’s oldest religions, Hinduism has a long and complicated history. Like Judaism, it is a hereditary religion deeply embedded in its culture. The history of the Indian subcontinent is vast and complex, but also 75  Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974, pp. 7–8.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

59

Figure 10 Panel: Vishnu Temple, Deogarth, sixth century CE Photo by Arnold Betten—Own work (Original text: eigenes Foto (Dia)), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index .php?curid=83556266

distinguished by the uniqueness of its culture within a well-defined environmental setting. Like other cultures and geographies, the history of the Indian subcontinent is one of waves of conquests, immigrants, influences, and assimilations. Up until recently, histories of the early cultures of India described the pivotal invasion of light-skinned, Indo-European language speaking peoples who called themselves Aryans, who conquered the darker-skinned indigenous peoples and established hierarchical social structures supported by religious texts and practices. It was used to explain the caste system of social hierarchy and even to justify the British Raj. Today, these histories are not so unified or universally accepted. Instead, the history of the Indian subcontinent, like most histories, is multifaceted.

60

Barrie

Hinduism’s proliferation of gods (one text cites 330 million), and its long and complex religious, social, and political history, can present a confusing and inscrutable subject. Western perspectives and histories can often obscure rather than illuminate. Nineteenth-century historians and missionaries often characterized Hinduism as a corrupt, superstitious, polytheistic, and irrelevant religion. Nineteenth-century western architectural historians were little better. The respected British architectural historian Bannister Fletcher compartmentalized Indian architecture as non-rational, feminine, and decorative, then dismissed it under the category of “Non-historical Styles.”76 He stated without apology, “The grandeur of their imposing mass produces an impression of majestic beauty, but the effect depends almost wholly on elaboration of surface ornament, rather than an abstract beauty of form, in strong contrast to Greek architecture.”77 At their worst, attitudes like these reflect a distasteful orientalism and cultural chauvinism where western architecture is portrayed as rational and intellectual in contrast with inferior, irrational, and shallow Indian architecture. But, we also have to be cautious of unbridled enthusiasm and characterizations of consistency, potency, meaning, and perfection where, perhaps, reality is a little more complex. During the 1960s and 70s many westerners traveled to India and returned with often-idealized versions of its religious practices and, in some cases, its architecture. Generalizing or essentializing a culture and its artifacts risks diminishing it, and our capacity to genuinely learn from it, almost as much as if we dismissed it altogether. What is more productive is a critical stance where general themes and repeating patterns can aid in unveiling commonalities while also providing contexts for differences, a “critical holism” as argued by the scholar of Indian architecture, Adam Hardy.78 6.1 Frameworks of Hinduism Some have claimed that Hinduism is a term applied to a range of related but distinct religious practices, which did not achieve any degree of cohesion until around the fourth or fifth century CE. Hindu and Hinduism are western terms derived from the naming of the Indus River Valley, and its peoples, by early invaders. Its earliest texts are the Vedas, which date from the first and second millennium BCE. What is referred to as the Vedic Religion was centered on 76  Sir Bannister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, Fifteenth Edition, London: BT Batsford Ltd., 1950, p. 888. First published 1896. 77  Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, p. 893. 78  Adam Hardy, The Temple Architecture of India, Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 2007, p. 19.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

61

sacrificial rites performed by a hereditary group of priests called the Brahmins. Agni was the important fire god and rituals were performed to satisfy him and maintain the order and beneficence of the cosmos. Hinduism today can be understood as monotheistic, polytheistic, and monistic. It is a remarkably diverse, non-dogmatic, and polycentric religious tradition with no central authority. Brahman is the absolute, disincarnate, and all-encompassing god, with all others manifestations of this unity. Its pantheon of gods is expansive, but can be simplified by recognizing three principal manifestations of Brahman, and their feminine counterparts (which assumed importance during the Gupta period): Shiva is paired with Parvati; Vishnu with Laksmi; and Brahma with Sarasvati. Most worship and temples are dedicated to either Shiva or Vishnu, and very few to Brahma. The Abrahamic religions have their mystical branches, the Gnostics of Christianity, the Sufis of Islam, and the Kabbalah of Judaism. Hinduism, on the other hand, could be broadly characterized as fundamentally mystical. But, unlike the Abrahamic religions, it is also very systematic. Hinduism is predominantly theist, where ‘manifestation’ is emphasized over ‘proclamation,’ orthopraxy over orthodoxy, and the gods are not distant or historical, but local and accessible. The sacred literature of Hinduism comprises a voluminous collection of ritual prescriptions, introspective practices, epics, and mythical histories. They include the earliest Vedic texts—the Rg, Sama, Yajur and Atharva Vedas, that focused on rituals, the Brahmanas, or “Priestly Books,” and the Aranyakas, the “Forest Books.” The Vedas also include the Upanishads, philosophical texts compiled at the beginning of the sixth century BCE during the so-called axial age, which also produced Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, the Greek philosophers and the Hebrew Prophets. Mythical epics include the Puranas, ancient cosmogonic stories of the gods, the Ramayana, the life of Rama, and the Mahabharata, vast accounts of war and philosophy. Included in the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad Gita, arguably the most popular of Hindu literature, which is narrated by the most loved of Hindu deities, Krishna (who is an incarnation of Vishnu), and illustrates the intrinsic relationships between humans and the gods. A central theme of the Upanishads is that of maya, a veil separating one from ultimate truth and the divine. Bound by the limits of ego, humans are circumscribed by their limited perception and intellect in a manner that recalls Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (which was written at roughly the same time). Hinduism does not reject or condemn these conditions but insists that they can be transcended. The path of inner exploration and spiritual development is perhaps best illustrated by sadhus, renunciants who have retired from the preliminary stages of life—student, householder, and forest dweller—to

62

Barrie

wholly devote themselves to liberation from the delusions that lead to karmic rebirth. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali describe the asanas, or postures, which are the beginnings of spiritual practices, and that are practiced at yoga studios today, though in a largely secular manner. The process is progressive, the goal union with the divine, where the veils fall away, separation is dissolved, and one is released from the karmic cycle. It is an inward path leading to the eternal self within, the atman, which is not limited to body, space, or time, and is singular and also intrinsic to a vast, unchanging, divine reality. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna states: Only that yogi Whose joy is inward Inward his peace And his vision inward Shall come to Brahman And know Nirvana. In modern day India and its diaspora communities, however, few follow the four stages of life. Bhakti devotional worship of the deity(ies) is predominant and can be observed at Hindu temples in India and worldwide. 6.2 Architectural Themes As a cultural artifact, Hindu architecture typically served to materialize, communicate, and advance particular religious positions, perspectives, and values. Consequently, some predominant distinguishing themes of Hinduism have implicit and explicit architectural implications. Even though one-to-one corollaries are often undependable, the following broadly-defined themes of the religion can serve to circumscribe and contextualize themes in temple architecture. First of all, the contemplative literature of Hinduism defines, and seeks to reconcile, relationships between part and whole, singular and multiple, individual and the world. In the popular Thirteenth Khanda of the Chandogya Upanishad, salt dissolved in a vessel of water illustrates the interdependence of the singular and the universal. It concludes, “That art thou,” or the self is also Brahman. Hindu literature, with its multitude of deities and vast cosmologies, is also distinguished by its multifarious, limitless, cosmic, and timeless scales. Concurrently, its depth is revealed through numerous complementary components comprising a comprehensive system of philosophy and rituals. Within these constructs are often hierarchies of progressive systems of thought and

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

63

practices that lead to advancing stages of development. Consistent with this is the multiplicity and complexity of proliferating and interrelated elements and even congruencies of opposites, where the singular and the multiple are coterminous. Emanation is also a consistent theme, where ages and gods arise and proliferate while the births and deaths of karmic cycles stretch into infinity. Paradoxically, there is also directness, where the explicit orthopraxy of rituals or detailed systematic practices with clearly marked ‘paths’ to the ‘center,’ describe inner journeys to outer connections. There is no evidence of temples, per se, during the Vedic period. However, with the consolidation of Vedic practices in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, and the rise of kingship and the urbanization of the cities of kingdoms, ritual sites were consecrated by temples. In the earliest extant examples fundamental architectural organizations and elements are established. Early Hindu temples appropriated organizations and building techniques of Buddhist architecture. Sanchi, in central India, an important Buddhist monastic center, includes the Gupta Era Temple 17, where a mandapa, a columned hall, and garbhagriha, an inner sanctum, find early expression. At the Gupta period Bhitargaon Temple, Uttar Pradesh, the essential components of worship hall and inner sanctum were elaborated upon with the addition of a shikhara, a tapering, vertical superstructure over the garbhagriha that at later temples became an elaborate tableaux of sculptures. 6.3 Early Temples Bhitargaon Temple was constructed in brick, but some of the most significant early examples were rock-cut shrines, as were early Buddhist temples and monasteries in India. The largest rock-cut structure in the world is the eighthcentury CE Kailasanatha Temple at Ellora in Maharashtra, which is part of a complex of Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu cave sanctuaries. Here solid rock was cut and hollowed to reveal a free-standing temple flanked by rock-cut cave sanctuaries. Dedicated to Shiva, it includes a raised gateway, gopuram, Nandi (Shiva’s bull) pavilion, mandapa, and garbhagriha capped by a four-tiered shikhara (fig. 11). The Gupta Period Shiva Temple on the island of Elephanta near Mumbai, is a sixth-century CE rock-cut temple. Its quartered plan has three entrances, all of which lead to the columned mandapa, and its quartered Linga Shrine. Exceptional relief sculptural panels featuring Shiva appear throughout the temple. Eventually rock-cut architecture transforms into constructions of stone and other materials, while often retaining many of the features of the former. An important early temple is the sixth-century CE Dashavatara Temple, Deogarh. All that remains is a simple garbhagriha with a modest shikhara. It sits on a

64

Barrie

Figure 11 Kailashnatha Temple, Ellora, eighth century CE Photo by Ganesh Subramaniam—Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72714719

plinth, its plan corresponding to a nine-square mandala, and was originally surrounded by lesser shrines at its corners, further illustrating the principal elements of the Hindu temple that would be elaborated on in the following centuries. It also featured exceptional relief sculptures, including the panel mentioned earlier, indicating the future importance of sculptural programs in the Hindu temple. As the free-standing temple matured it became increasingly complex, without ever losing its essential elements and characteristics. In time, the sculptural programs included a pantheon of lesser gods, celestial beings, and mythical beasts. Some temples also included scenes of erotic love, depictions of the panoply of life, all of which were considered sacred. 6.4 The Dravida and Nagara The Medieval Period, commonly but not consistently dated 500 to 1500 CE, is the classic age of Hindu temple architecture during which two main traditions, or languages, emerge in the sixth and seventh centuries: the southern Dravida and the northern Nagara. The Dravida is distinguished by an elaboration of the shikhara, which is typically trapezoidal and the dominant formal element of the complex. The Nagara is distinguished by the convex, curvilinear form of the shikhara, which some have suggested recalls a mountain peak. In both traditions, the garbhagriha is square, but in the Nagara its exterior plan bursts

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

65

Figure 12 Brihadishvara Temple, Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, eleventh century CE Photo by Sakthibalan—Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons .wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73252203

Figure 13 Kandariya Mahadeva Temple, Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh, eleventh century CE Photo by Bhajish Bharathan—Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72271619

66

Barrie

out with a series of extensions. Like many lineages of religious architecture, the temple architecture recalls primordial roots—in addition to its rock-cut lineage some have argued that some examples or variations recreate in stone domestic wooden architecture.79 The eleventh-century Brihadishvara Temple of Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, dedicated to Shiva, was built by the Chola monarch Rajaraja, and features an imposing, multi-tiered trapezoidal shikhara. An important Dravida temple, it includes an open columned mandapa that leads to two columned halls, and culminates in a square garbhagriha surrounded by an ambulatory (fig. 12). The temple precinct is a walled enclosure planned according to two adjacent squares (where the garbhagriha is centered in one), and includes numerous small shrines. The eleventh-century Kandariya Mahadeva Temple, Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh, was one of over eighty temples built in the Chandela Dynasty capital. It is an axial and stratified organization of plinth, base, and progressively higher towers over halls that culminate in a tiered, tapered shikhara capped by a finial, a compelling example of the mature Nagara (fig. 13). Throughout, aedicules burst outward and are filled with sculptures, including detailed scenes of erotic love. These two temples are expressive examples of the southern and northern temple languages, but also of the cultural and political agendas of those who built them. The feudal decentralization of kingdoms during the Medieval Period produced numerous urban centers of temple building, and regional variations of architectural languages.80 They depended on the patronage of kings and were often funded by tributes from conquered areas. The Brihadishvara Temple of Thanjavur, which celebrated one of the king’s victories, was supplied by materials, craftsmen, and attendants, including, purportedly, 400 ‘dancing girls,’ from subject cities. As such, royal temples were as much expressions of political power and cultural hegemony, as they were of religious devotion. They were also materializations of the special relationship between the king and the divine, upon which his authority depended. Some have suggested that temples associated with kingship employed palace-temple imagery where the gods reside in a celestial palace much like rulers an earthly one.81 According to Adam Harvey, “Monumental temples are bound up with the institution of kingship. A king was a mediator between the human and divine worlds, and royal temples were a special case of royal giving (dana), bringing prosperity to the community and religious merit to the giver.”82 .

79  See Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Essays in Early Indian Architecture, New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1992, pp. 1–3, 120. 80  Hardy, The Temple Architecture of India, p. 31. 81  Hardy, op. cit., pp. 39 and 17, respectively. 82  Hardy, op. cit., p. 28.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

67

Formal, Organizational, and Symbolic Elements of the Mature Hindu Temple The broadly defined languages of the southern and northern traditions, and their numerous historical and regional variations, present a diversity of examples over long periods of time. However, many can be said to share certain formal, organizational, and symbolic elements, which may aid in understanding some predominant themes. Of these, organizations of enclosure, hierarchical spatial sequences, and circumambulating paths; complexity and multiplicity of formal elements; geometry and proportion; and, the cave, mountain, and axis, are predominant. Built by the Ganga rulers of Orissa towards the end of the eleventh century CE, the Lingaraja Temple is one of over one hundred extent temples in Bhubaneshvara, and arguably its most significant. Here one can observe the fundamental elements and organizations of the mature Hindu temple. The temple precinct is circumscribed by walls that establish the sacred precinct. An entry gateway initiates a spatial sequence that leads to a series of pillared halls and the garbhagriha. The imposing, multi-tiered shikhara underlines the formal hierarchy of the complex, and is capped by a finial. Within the temple precinct multiple shrines and circumambulatory paths are centripetal to the temple. It is a symbol-posted way where spaces are axially and hierarchically organized, with increasing levels of sacrality as one moves from light to the darkness of the inner sanctum. However, it is also cellular and polycentric and its spaces subservient to its surfaces, where part to whole relationships oscillate and “symbol drenched doorways” establish boundaries and also continuity along the path.83 Much like the Dream of Vishnu, the Hindu temple can also be understood as a representation of the vast and complex cosmos, of which it is a part. The systematic and progressive construct of Hindu practices and the sequential and hierarchical emanations of the gods, also suggest corollaries with the complexity and multiplicity of the temple. This is accomplished by a number of formal and compositional means: visual movement from singular to multiple; the bursting of formal boundaries and interpenetration; progressive multiplication and fragmentation of surfaces; and, formal and surface staggering and dynamics. The shikhara of the Kandariya Mahedeva Temple, Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh, displays a virtuosity of these formal elements where singular aedicules multiply in a manner that formally and visually suggests outward and inward oscillations of an emanating and coalescing universe. According to Stella Kramrisch, “The Hindu temple is a synthesis of many symbols. By their superimposition, repetition, proliferation and amalgamation, its total meaning 6.5

83  Hardy, op. cit., p. 97.

68

Barrie

is found ever anew.”84 Others have suggested that it is more cinegraphic than formal or static, where myths and epics are often ‘narrated’ over time by frames of scenographic sculptures. In Hinduism, the world is constantly coming into being and degrading—a vast, cosmic dance delicately balanced by Vishnu and Shiva. Similar to priests, the temple performs mediating roles, reflecting the order of the world while also maintaining that order. One of the world’s oldest building traditions, Indian architecture often employed geometry and proportion in service of cultural and religious agendas. The Purusha Sukta of the Rg Veda, poetically describes how the gods create and sacrifice Purusha, the primordial, cosmic man and, in turn, create the world. When they divided Purusa, how many portions did they make? What do they call his mouth, his arms? What do they call his thighs and feet? The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rajanya made. His thighs became the Vaisya, from his feet the Sudra was produced. The moon was gendered from his mind, and from his eye the sun had birth; Indra and Agni from his mouth were born, and Vayu from his breath. Forth from his navel came mid-air; the sky was fashioned from his head; Earth from his feet, and from his ear the regions. Thus they formed the worlds. The purusha mandala often shows Purusha superimposed on a gridded square, and reflected the ordering and order of the cosmos. The Vastu-shastas, “construction treatises” developed in the tenth and eleventh centuries, describe methods for the design and construction of temples to align with these orders. It has often been suggested that the purusha mandala was comprehensively applied to create temples. However, logical determinism has never defined Hindu architecture, and it is doubtful that a single system was exclusively applied. Instead, progressive proportions were most likely created by applied geometry, where the purusha mandala and Vastu-shastas provided textural and astrological contexts, grids planning methods, gnomic siting methods progressive geometries of circles and squares, and modules the complexity of forms and elevations. Temples are commonly designated vamana, or “well measured,” and it is believed that whether a deity dwells there (or not) depends on strict adherence to proportioning systems. 84  Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple, Vol. 1, Delhi, Varanasi, Patna: Motilal Banarsidass, 1976, p. 166.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

69

In many ways, site selection, groundbreaking, and building rituals were equally important to the creation of a viable temple. The circle and square, often apparent in the siting and layout of temples, were traditionally constructed using a gnomon, a vertical shaft set in the ground. As the sun tracks from east to west the shadow of the gnomon will twice touch the circumference of a circle drawn around it, and a line struck between these points will establish a precise east-west direction essential to temple orientation. Then, a series of circles, at first using the original radius, establish the north and south directions, and ultimately a progressive series of intersection points from which proportionally-related squares can be generated.85 Consequently, astronomy and astrology have roles to play in aligning the temple with its cosmological contexts. George Michell proposed that the temple represents a cosmogony, or birth of the universe, and a cosmology, or form of the universe, and serves to mediate between humans and gods.86 Many have analyzed Hindu temples according to geometry and proportion. For example, according to Hardy and Stierlin, the thirteenth century CE Laksmi-Narasimha Temple, Bhadravati, Karnataka, was planned according to progressive circles that emanate from the center of the garbhagriha. At the Brihadishvara Temple, Tanjavur, progressive squares define the temple precinct, gateways, temple, and building heights. The height of the shikhara is one half the transverse width of the precinct and twice the width of its base, and the heights of its two gateways are also proportionally related to the whole.87 The ultimate destination of Hindu devotional practice is the inner sanctum of the garbagriha, a dark, introverted, simplified, enclosed (and in some cases even inaccessible), space that represents the inner journey to the god(s). The garbhagriha is also known as the ‘womb chamber,’ the absolute center that is a beginning and an end—radiating outward and connected inward. It has also been equated with a primordial cave inside a sacred mountain with its vertical axis co-joining worlds. For some, the mountain peak symbolism of the shikhara positions the temple as a recapitulation of the pilgrimage to Mount Meru, the symbolic emanatory center of the Hindu world. According to Michell, “The temple becomes an architectural facsimile of the sacred places of the gods”88

85  Hardy, op. cit., pp. 137–38. 86  Michell, The Hindu Temple An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977, pp. 71–72. 87  Henri Stirlin, India, Lausanne, FR: Benedikt Taschen, p. 87, and Hardy, following the analysis of Pierre Pichard, Thanjavur Brihadishvara, An Architectural Study, Delhi: IGNCA and Ecole Francaise de l’Extreme Orient, 1995, p. 105. 88  Michell, The Hindu Temple, p. 69.

70

Barrie

The Hindu temple is a setting for worship and also an object of worship. Priests perform daily and seasonal rituals that serve to bring humans and god(s) into contact. In the ritually-dynamic setting of the temple, the gods are temporary residents and the priests are responsible for maintaining their presence. Their choreographed rituals include purification of themselves and the shrine, including the symbolic bathing and dressing of the deities. At prescribed times each day the priests call, welcome, feed, and entertain the deities—bells are rung, food offered, butter lamps waved, and mantras chanted. Individuals also perform devotions, including darsana, the beholding of the deity, puja, offerings to the deity, and circumambulating the temple to visit the shrines inside the precinct. And, even though Hinduism does not require communal worship, during festivals and other special times, worshippers will celebrate together. The Brahma Temple in the holy city of Pushkar, Rajasthan, is a rare temple dedicated to this god. It is located near a sacred lake surrounded by temples and bathing ghats, and paired with a temple dedicated to his counterpart Sarasvati, the goddess of learning and patron saint of married women. The small Brahma temple includes typical elements of the Hindu temple—walls enclose the precinct, which is reached by steep steps and a gateway; a courtyard and shrines to secondary deities; and a paired columned hall and sanctum, capped with a shikhara in a hierarchically prominent position. Worshippers circumambulate the temple in the auspicious clockwise direction and perform darsana and puja outside the inner sanctum. Puskar is an important pilgrimage city and the Sarasvati Temple, located on the summit of a nearby peak, an important destination for women, who pray for their families and long lives for their husbands. It is a holy mountain with a steep pilgrimage path to its summit. The path begins with a shrine to Durga and rises steeply to the summit and the compact temple. Pilgrims make their way to a gateway, courtyard, and temple, where bells are rung and devotions performed for the goddess and her son. Over the garbhagriha is a white shikhara, capped by a finial, its form recalling the cave and mountain, its axis suggesting the connections of worlds, where the temple and its priests act as intermediaries and the lifting of the veil of ignorance is propitious.89

…

One could argue that the prototypical elements of the Hindu temple correspond with a universal typology of sacred places. It is clearly a place apart, positioned as a liminal place of connection where the formal language of 89  See Barrie, The Sacred In-between, pp. 52–53.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

71

the temple represents a cosmic mountain and its orientation an axis mundi. Similarly, ambulation through the spatial sequences and symbolic narratives of the temple could be equated with a spiritual journey congruent with many examples of religious architecture. Worshippers process from the exterior replete with an exuberance of imagery to, in many cases, the much plainer garbhagriha where only the deity is present, a process of attaining higher states of consciousness or deepened contact with the divine. The siting of temples in auspicious locations also suggests a journey to a sacred center. The sacred geography of India includes tirthas, places, often consecrated by temples, and sacred cities, where ‘crossing over’ to the divine and release from the world is most propitious. The Hindu temple has also been described as a “threedimensional model of the Hindu cosmos.”90 In this context it could also be understood as textual, where mythic tales, such as the paradise described in the Puranas, with all of its sensual delights and presence of the divine, are materialized, or as symbols of psychic or cosmic wholeness—an archetypal cosmology or cosmogony. But, to end there would be to assume more similarities with western religious architecture then differences, of which there are a number of notable ones. First of all, in the context of ritual, the Hindu temple is not primarily a congregational space as in the architecture of the Abrahamic religions. Its use is much more episodic and individual, with priests performing rituals more on behalf of adherents than for them. They are decentered as well as centered, with multiple shrines surrounding the main temple requiring separate devotions. For example, even though the Lingaraja Temple in Bhubaneshvara is axially organized, its four mandapas create multiple centers and ritual settings. Similarly, temples, sacred cities, and tirthas comprise a decentered sacred geography, “as vast and complex as the whole of the subcontinent.”91 Hindu temples often perform as civic spaces with multiple activities occurring at the same time. But, most importantly, are the architectural, differences, particularly expressions of emanation, multiplicity, and fragmentation, where parts to the whole are fused in a manner that the whole is difficult to perceive and the individual parts fleeting in appearance. Shikharas, in particular, contain numerous “mini-temples” that depict the “composite nature of the Hindu cosmos.”92 There is often a conjunction of opposites in dynamic balance; microcosm and macrocosm, singular and multiple, unified and fragmented, fusing 90  F rancis D.K. Ching, Mark Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash, A Global History of Architecture, Second Edition, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2011, p. 245. 91  Diana L. Eck, India: A Sacred Geography, New York: Harmony Books, 2012, p. 2. 92  Hardy, op. cit.

72

Barrie

and unfolding, horizontal and vertical, light and dark, and a world that is emanating outward while also coalescing inward. All of which present compelling evidence of the relationship between Indian cultural and religious beliefs in an enduring atman, and the multiplicity of the world where distinctions between the singular and multiple, the present and the timeless, the individual and the cosmos, and even the sacred and the profane, are indistinct. 7

Taoism

Taoism, mostly known in the West through the enigmatic Tao Te Ching, is a religion indigenous to China. Its earliest history is distinguished by traditions of eremitic ascetics who retired to mountain hermitages for spiritual edification, and sacred mountains and sacred personages were often closely associated. Originally, mountains were places where alchemistic practices using native plants and minerals were developed in pursuit of eternal life. Later, the incorporation of the Tao Te Ching, purportedly written by Lao-tzu, the adoption of spiritual beings, and development of metaphysical systems, produced the Taoism known today. Many have argued that Taoism and, in particular, venerated Taoist masters, substantively established the cultural, political, and religious importance of mountains in China. In Taoism, mountains were the dwellings of the gods but also where humans seeking divinity could spiritually productively dwell. The T’ang scholar-official Wang Wei wrote, Midway through life I set my heart on Truth And I have come to the end of my days by the Southern Hills; When the mood takes me I stroll out alone, My pleasure shared by none. I walk up where the streams rise, Sit watching as the clouds drift up to the sky, And meeting with an old man in the woods Talk and laugh with him, forgetting to return.93 Mountains as portentous settings for transcendence have figured prominently in western European and eastern religious, philosophical, and literary texts. In the West, mountains and mountainous geographies were often believed to be 93  Yang Xianyi and Glasys Yang, eds., Poetry and Prose of the T’ang and Song, Beijing: Panda Books, 1984, p. 11.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

73

the homes of the gods, such as Mount Olympus, or the place where the divine might be encountered, as at Mount Sinai. They could also be settings for sacred events, such as Mount Ararat, Mount Tabor, and Muhammad’s sanctuary on Mount Hira. At times, strategic promontories became sacred settings, as found at the Athenian Acropolis and Mount Moriah. There is also the muchreferenced attribution that some religious architecture, such as Sumerian ziggurats and the dynastic pyramids of Egypt, was a recreation of sacred mountains. These, and other examples, have often led scholars of religious architecture to conclude that mountains where uniformly believed to be sacred places.94 However, the history of venerating mountains is far from unified, especially in the West. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, Europeans generally considered mountains to be, at least, valueless for human production and advancement, at most, dangerous and threatening.95 The English theologian Thomas Burnet, in The Sacred Theory of the Earth, described the Alps as disordered and dangerous. “There is nothing in Nature more shapeless and ill-figured than an Old Rock or a Mountain.”96 However, in the mid-eighteenth century, the value of climbing mountains and traditions of mountaineering first appeared. Edmund Burke’s short essay on the energizing and ennobling effects of places of grandeur and danger contributed to the fascination with mountains,97 as did Romantic writers such as William Wordsworth who presented the experience of the beauty of wild landscapes as spiritually productive. However, perhaps more influential was the positioning of mountain expeditions as scientific explorations that promised new knowledge on the geologic history and composition of the earth. Later, adventurous expeditions to the highest peaks, and the personal value of wilderness experiences, resulted in the positive position mountains occupy in contemporary western culture. 94  Mircea Eliade equated mountains in religious history with singular sanctuaries reserved for the gods, conceived as the center and, in some cases, navel of the world, where the conjunction of earth and heaven was portentous. Mircea Eliade, “Sacred Architecture and Symbolism,” in Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, ed., Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts, New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1992, pp. 110–111. 95  According to Robert Macfarlane, “Mountains, nature’s toughest productions, were not only agriculturally intractable, they were also aesthetically repellent; it was felt that their irregular and gargantuan outlines upset the natural spirit-level of the mind.” Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination, London: Granta Books, 2003, pp. 14–15. 96  Quoted in Edwin Bernbaum, Sacred Mountains of the World, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1997, p. 121. 97  Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1757.

74

Barrie

In China, one finds a different history regarding cultural and religious attributions, beliefs, and writings on mountains and, in particular, their sacred qualities. According to James Robson, “Throughout Chinese history, the religious, cultural, and political landscapes have accorded mountains—both real and imagined—a major role.”98 However, as Robson also observes, Chinese culture at one time considered mountains to be fearful places with wild, threatening landscapes inhabited by dangerous animals and demons, which required travelers to protect themselves with talismans and amulets.99 The Shan hai jing (“Classic of Mountains and Seas”), an early literary source of beliefs about mountains, included descriptions of fantastical beasts and sacrifices to the mountain gods. The Shu Ching, an ancient historical text, recounts the visits by the legendary third-century ruler Shun to the four peaks that marked his realm.100 Emperors, who were responsible for maintaining the balance of humans and nature, regularly performed rituals to this end, and assumed responsibility when they failed. However, mountains were also often depicted as religiously propitious settings.101 For Taoists, mountain landscapes were the abodes of sages and immortals, life-giving sources of water and earth vapors, and places where elixirs of immortality could be created from herbs and minerals. Confucius presented the positive qualities of the stability of mountains in the Analects as follows: “The Master said, The wise man delights in Water, the Good man delights in mountains. For the wise move; but the Good stay still. The wise are happy; the Good secure.”102 When nobles and literati from the court of the Northern capital Luoyang removed to the Yangtze River basin to escape the barbarian occupation, mountains were depicted as stable, beautiful, and beneficent. During the T’ang Period, scholar-officials often retreated to the mountains to escape the stifling bureaucracy of the court, and for philosophical and spiritual motivations. 98  James Robson, Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue) in Medieval China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009, p. 17. 99  Robson, Power of Place, p. 17. 100  Clae Waltham, Shu Ching: Book of History, A Modernized Edition of the Translation by James Legge, Chicago: Hans Regency Company, 1971, pp. 13–14. 101   Wei-Cheng Lin argues, “In ancient China, mountains were places of power, full of potencies and occult potentialities, and throughout China’s history, it was a fundamental belief that mountains were breathing and moving, possessing animated and living forces according to none but the spiritual.” Wei-Cheng Lin, Building a Sacred Mountain: The Buddhist Architecture of China’s Mount Wutai, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014, p. 51. 102  Arthur Waley, ed., The Analects of Confucius, New York: Vintage Books, 1938, 6.21, p. 120.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

75

Perhaps equally significant, Chinese art during particular periods was distinguished by its preoccupations with mountainous landscapes. During the Sung, recognized as the apogee of Chinese landscape painting, literary traditions of spiritually beneficent mountain landscapes found ultimate expression by the brush. Unlike the realism of nineteenth-century western landscapes, Chinese artists did not aim for reproduction but instead sought to capture the essence of mountains in general.103 There were a variety of subjects, a popular one depicted a solitary sage and his simple dwelling, set in a mountainous landscape. 7.1 Frameworks of Taoism Formative Taoism emerges from indigenous shamanistic practices, which included contacting spirits, interpreting dreams, reading omens, celestial divination, healing, and evoking beneficent events such as rain. However, as it developed as a practice and eventually organized religion, it was distinguished because it sought harmony with earth spirits instead of assimilating them through shamanistic powers. Chuang-tzu, a central figure in philosophical Taoism, metaphorically relegated shamanism to a lower status in the parable of meetings between the sage Hu-tsu and a local shaman with prophetic powers who is so baffled by the Taoist master’s life energies that at their last meeting he flees in fear.104 The Classical Period of Taoism was during the social and political upheaval and warfare of the eighth through third centuries BCE, which also produced some of China’s most influential philosophers, including Lao-tzu and Confucius. In part, Taoism provided an alternative philosophy to Confucianism, where the highest path was retreating from the state, not serving it, and a harmonious society resulted from individuals living in harmony with the Tao, especially at spiritually propitious settings of remote hermitages in the mountains. During the Warring States Period, where the value of government, and the duty of participating in it, was questioned, becoming a recluse gained popularity. According to Eva Wong, “Hermits became the symbol of personal integrity, and their lifestyle an expression of individual freedom.”105 103  According to Kiyohiko Munikata, understanding the paintings “rests in the way the artists meaningfully synthesized the specific aspects of the particular mountains with the general concept of ‘mountain.’” Kiyohiko Munakata, Sacred Mountains in Chinese Art, Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991, p. 112. 104  Chuang Tsu, Inner Chapters, Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, trans., New York: Vintage Books, 1974, pp. 154–57. 105  Eva Wong, The Shambhala Guide to Taoism, Boston & London: Shambhala Publications, 1997, p. 29.

76

Barrie

Even though Taoism can be appropriately designated a religion, its diverse philosophies and practices should not be equated with the Abrahamic religions. As many have pointed out, Chinese religion is distinguished by its syncretic nature, and its disinterest in the absolutism of western religions. Taoist deities, including revered ancestors, are not worshipped as gods, but honored for what they represent and the spiritual development they attained. Individual spiritual practices and petitionary rituals aim to align with the power and energies of the cosmos, not to contact an omnipotent god. Even though the agency of human action is present in both, the central Taoist concept of Wu-wei, nonaction, or flowing with the currents of the Tao, distinguishes Taoist philosophy and practices. The Tao Te Ching describes a sage as one who: goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking. The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease, Creating, yet not possessing, Working, yet not taking credit. Work is done, then forgotten. Therefore it lasts forever.106 In Taoism, esoteric orientations regarding oscillations between humans and the multiplicity of nature found unique expression and maturation. The divine, and its power, is present in each individual, the cosmos, and their interplay. Its profusion of sects, deities, and practices evidence an amalgamation of a range of religious and indigenous traditions, and a religious history that did not include notions of heresy and apostates but instead assimilated multifarious beliefs and approaches, and proliferated accordingly. It was during the first six centuries of the Common Era that Taoism transformed into a defined, and often state-supported, religion. During this time a hierarchical pantheon of immortals, spirits, and sages was established, and conventional devotional and petitionary practices created for them. Mystical and instrumental practices were codified, what is termed ‘inner’ and ‘outer alchemy,’ to support the transformation of mind and body with the goal of immortality. Eventually, meditative and movement based practices to achieve spiritual immortality were favored over the outer alchemy that sought mineral and herbal elixirs to achieve immortality of the body. Taoism also incorporated elements of Buddhism and Confucianism, resulting in a pantheon of celestial lords, emperors, empresses, kings, immortals, and spirits, with monasteries and temples to 106  Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, trans., New York: Vintage Books, 1972, Two, (unnumbered book).

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

77

serve them. Today, Taoism is a secular religion, with a vast pantheon of Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian deities, from venerated Lao-tzu to the popular Jade Emperor, who was one of the Three Pure Ones, the Eight Immortals and the Monkey King. All of which are essential contexts to understanding the architectural settings created for it. 7.2 Architectural Themes Taoism may be distinguished by its literary and artistic output, and its prejudicing of individual practices and pursuits of spiritual enlightenment, but it also produced significant monastic architecture. Beginning in the fifth century CE, monasteries were established in remote locations for the training of adepts in esoteric practices. Livia Kahn argues that three main sources influenced the early monasteries: longstanding eremitic practices of hermit ascetics; the communal living of previous adepts known as the Celestial Masters; and the monastic organizations of Buddhism.107 During periods when it enjoyed political and cultural support, monasteries and monastic communities were established throughout China. Subsequently, some locations and monasteries were designated as particularly important. The ‘Five Sacred Peaks,’ which were identified during the late Zhou and early Han Periods, achieved notable and lasting significance, but were not the only grouping of sacred mountains.108 Indeed, Taoism created a sacred geography that stretched across China, which also included ten major and thirty-six ‘cavern heavens,’ and seventy-two ‘blessed lands,’ which were believed to be interlinked. Unlike western geographic identifications of specific, distinct places, these were not singular peaks or monasteries, but mountainous geographies organized by a system of sacred mountains and architectural settings. There are a number of complementary aspects of Taoism that illustrate and explicate its architecture. The first is that during its formative period Taoism was predominantly an individual and geographically diffuse religion. Taoism may have enjoyed significant state support at times during its long history, but it was its numerous personages of sages and immortals, including the enigmatic Lao-tzu (who may or may not have been a historical figure), that more significantly contributed to its longevity. Deeply embedded in indigenous beliefs of agrarian peoples, it never developed the religious hierarchies and political 107  Livia Kahn, Monastic Life in Medieval Daoism: A Cross-cultural Perspective, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003, p. 40. 108  Taishan, in the eastern Shandong Province, Hengshan, in the northern Shanxi Province, Huashan, in the western Shaanxi Province, Hengshan, in the southern Hunan Province, and Songshan, in the central Henan Province.

78

Barrie

hegemony of western religions. Second, Taoism has no beliefs in a singular, omnipotent world creator, especially one established by scriptural histories and located hierarchically in the heavens. Third, congruent with its mystical and idiosyncratic nature, its goals of spiritual maturation and immortality have not been substantively associated with sacred centers. Even though mountains may have been propitious settings, they could be largely undifferentiated as to suggest that sacrality, and spiritual epiphanies, could occur anywhere. The decentered, non-hierarchical aspects of Taoism, however, did not prevent its temples and monasteries from developing distinguishing characteristics and organizations. In addition to traditional hermitages, they typically included lengthy approach paths, interconnected courtyards entered by prominent gateways, and a variety of shrines dedicated to deities associated with the site and its settings. That said, Taoist monastic architecture is not sectarian in nature. It is difficult to distinguish Taoist abbeys from Buddhist monasteries, Confucian temples, and imperial palaces. Instead, for the most part its organizations were governed by Chinese timber frame building practices and domestic organizations. Consequently, as one scholar has observed, “an examination of representative halls through the history of Taoism in China shows extraordinary similarity to imperial, Confucian, or Buddhist architecture of comparable status.”109 Names and epigraphic medallions can sometimes aid in identification, but they can also be ambiguous in definition. Taoist temples and abbeys do not announce themselves through overt signage, symbols, form, or other communicative means. Once one enters a particular temple the Taoist rituals performed there may be evident, but these same rituals may also be performed in other settings, such as traditional grottos. Further challenging consistent themes in Taoist architecture is the fact that most architecture from its long history has been lost, with the most significant extant examples dating from the Ming Dynasty or later. The most dependable context for deciphering specific sites, and the comparative analysis of different abbeys and temples, are their organizations. Consistent with palace architecture, they are typically axially organized and include approach paths, gateways, and courtyards, with main temples located linearly along a center axis, with support buildings flanking each side. Occasional and support buildings: image halls, halls for ritual observances, a library for Taoist scriptures, a lecture hall, guest quarters, and gardens, and a variety of objects for ritual functions such as braziers for the burning of incense, are found at most monasteries.

109  Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, “Taoist Architecture,” in Stephen Little with Shawn Eichman, eds., Taoism and the Arts of China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, p. 57.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

79

Even temples on steeply sloped mountainous sites often correspond to these organizations. 7.3 Wudangshan, Hubei Province Wudangshan (Wudang Mountain), in west-central Hubei Province, may not be one of the Taoist Five Sacred Peaks, but it has long been identified as one of the more important. It was where the monastic martial art of Tai-chi ch’uan is believed to have been invented, and during the Ming Dynasty it became known as the ‘Great Peak’ that was superior to all others. Taishan, in Shandong Province, is arguably the most historically significant Taoist site, but Wudangshan is particularly illustrative of Taoist sacred geographies. Its numerous and often cloud-sheathed peaks have long been identified as a sacred setting rich in medicinal plants and minerals. One source states that it was a place of Taoist practices since the Zhou Dynasty, another that it has been an important Taoist mountain since the Sung Dynasty.110 However, the time of its most ambitious building programs was during the Ming Dynasty reign of Emperor Ch’eng-tsu. The emperor believed that its principal deity, Chen-wu, had aided in his attainment of the throne, and beginning in 1412 he initiated an ambitious building program. Over the next six years numerous temples, monasteries, and other buildings were built on the slopes and summits of its peaks, and Taoist priests appointed to maintain its sites and rituals. Since the time of Emperor Ch’eng-tsu, Wudangshan has been almost exclusively identified with Chen-wu, the “Perfect Warrior” known as a protector who could subdue demons and heal diseases. Chen-wu had long been a widespread, cultic deity. However, the Pei-yu Chi (“Journey to the North”), published during the late Ming Dynasty, popularized the myth of his transformation to an immortal. Accounts describe how he was born a prince and entered Wudangshan as a youth, where he practiced for forty-two years before ascending to the celestial realm and being awarded his title by the Jade Emperor. The remarkable building program of Ch’eng-tsu created a sacred geography that includes valley temples, escarpments (temples built on the slopes of mountains), grottos (rock cut temples), and bridges and pavilions, linked by a sixty-kilometer (approximately 37 mile), pilgrimage path named the Celestial Way that begins in a valley that had numerous monasteries. The ultimate destination is the Golden Summit, also known as the Peak of the Heavenly Pillar, 110  Nan Shunxun and Beverly Foit-Albert, R.A., Ph.D., China’s Sacred Sites (Honesdale, PA: Himalayan Institute Press, 2007), p. 174, and John Lanerwey, “The Pilgrimage to Wu-tang Shan,” in Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yü, eds., Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, p. 296.

80

Barrie

Figure 14 Golden Summit, Wudangshan, Hubei Province, Ming Dynasty Photo by Thomas Barrie

a conical escarpment encircled by the Purple Forbidden Wall (fig. 14). From the Palace of Perfect Harmony and the Southern Heavenly Gate at the base of the summit, steep steps, called the Nine-bend Staircase, or Nine Consecutive Flights of Steps, ascend to the Golden Hall perched on its 1612-meter (approximately 5,288 foot) peak, the tallest of the Wudang Mountains. The Golden Hall, built in the early fifteenth century CE, is of modest size, most likely due to the small building area of the summit, but compensates by elaborate details rendered in cast bronze that replicate traditional bracketed timber construction. Inside is a statue of Chen-wu, flanked by a number of attendants. Here pilgrims would perform devotions and, at an adjacent building, have their futures divined and receive pilgrim stamps.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

81

Figure 15 Fuzhen Palace, Wudangshan, Hubei Province, Ming Dynasty Photo by Thomas Barrie

The winding and vertiginous path that ascends to the base of the Golden Summit passes many other temples perilously built on steep slopes. Its final section begins partway up the mountain near to the South Escarpment, also known as the Escarpment of Purple Clouds, where, according to legend, Chen-wu achieved immortality and ascended to heaven. Like many of Wudangshan’s temples, it suffered numerous catastrophic fires. Today only a small number of buildings remain, though their precarious perches on the steep slopes are nonetheless impressive. These include the Palace of Perfect

82

Barrie

Felicity and its renowned “dragon-head stone,” which juts out into the void. A practice was for pilgrims to dangerously venture to its end to offer incense, which, along with ecstatic suicides at the adjacent Ascension Terrace, was banned during the Ming Dynasty. An important temple located on the lower slopes of the mountain is the Ming Dynasty Fuzhen Palace. Its name means “Returning to the Truth,” and it is also known as the Prince Slope, a reference to the once prince Chen-wu. As retold in the Pei-yu Chi, at one time the prince grew discouraged by his progress and left to return to the world. As he descended the mountain he came across an old woman creating a needle from an iron bar. Her labors and responses to his questions so moved the prince that he returned to the Fuzhen Palace to continue his practice. Here, steps lead to an entry gate, beyond which is the Nine Curves of the Yellow River Wall, an allusion to the nine curves of the Yellow River and its symbolism of the journey and challenges of life111 (fig. 15). The serpentine, walled path leads to the Second Heavenly Gate, which in turn opens to the first of two courtyards, axially aligned ninety-degrees from the path. Its palace-style organization culminates in the Prince’s Hall. Also on the lower slopes is the important Purple Empyrean Palace, where it was believed Chen-wu perfected his skills in subduing demons. Built by the Emperor Ch’eng-tsu, this major monastery is a typical example of palacecourtyard organizations that negotiate steep slopes and culminate in traditional walled courts focused on the main temple. One of the largest of extant Wudangshan temples, its path begins at a gatehouse, ascends by flanking stela pavilions and, after another steep set of steps, passes through a gateway hall to enter the main courtyard. The Purple Empyrean Hall, raised on a massive terraced platform, is reached by a center stairway (fig. 16). Throughout, consistent with Taoist temples generally, the architecture is not specifically sectarian, but instead appropriates conventional organizational and constructive means to create its sanctuaries. Most important, even though specific temples may be singular settings associated with specific mythical events and dedicated to particular devotional rituals, sometimes by different Taoist sects, it is only together that the temples, monasteries, and landscape created the sacred realm. Wudangshan became a popular pilgrimage destination during the Ming Dynasty. According to one sixteenth-century official, “Who in heaven and within the seas is not aware of the existence of this mountain? There is not a day in the month that there are no pilgrims coming to pay respects.”112 It remains a pilgrimage destination today for individuals and pilgrimage 111  Shunxun and Foit-Albert, China’s Sacred Sites, p. 177. 112  Lanerwey, “The Pilgrimage to Wu-tang Shan,” in Naquin and Yü, eds., Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, p. 310.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

83

Figure 16 Purple Empyrean Palace, Wudangshan, Hubei Province, Ming Dynasty Photo by Thomas Barrie

associations who come, as they did in the past, for a variety of reasons. Most, it can be assumed, have prosaic needs—to request, or give thanks for, cures to illnesses, or petition for children or success in life. Even though busses and a cable car ferry pilgrims and tourists to points on the mountain, steep paths, lengthy stairways, gateways, and courtyards still must be walked to get to the

84

Barrie

summit. Contemporary Chinese culture is certainly different from the Ming Dynasty, but the body still experiences slopes, thresholds, and passages, and the Golden Hall still has pilgrims offering incense and prayers to Chen-wu. Even though people come for different reasons—tourists, tour groups, hikers, pilgrims, Tai-chi ch’uan students, and academics—all experience the height and center of the Golden Summit, and gaze at sensuous ribbons of surrounding mountains that, one can safely assume, provide distant vistas much like pilgrims in previous times would have seen. Today, Wudangshan still performs as a sacred geography, an environmental and material presence that has endured while Chinese culture has significantly changed. Singular peaks or individual temples and monasteries do not function as separate sacred locales. Instead, the entire geography of peaks, ridges, and valleys constitute a sacred realm, albeit one with heterogeneous representations and uses. Included are villages, palaces, martial arts academies, and the contemporary additions of tourist hotels, hiking trails, cable cars, and other twenty-first-century attractions. And, even though its principal temples are dedicated to Chen-wu, pilgrims also perform heterogeneous rituals to a syncretic pantheon of immortals, folk gods, sages, emperors, and Buddhist bodhisattvas. The patronage of the Emperor Ch’eng-tsu may suggest political appropriation of its sacred places, but its diffusion of multiple centers also indicates cosmological orientations. An etymological root of the Chinese word for mountain is “diffusion,” revealing distinct cultural and religious conceptions regarding intrinsic qualities of sacred places. However, Wudengshan has two features that distinguish it from other Taoist mountains: it is primarily associated with one deity and was purpose built by a devoted emperor over a very short period of time. This suggests another interpretation, and one that corresponds with other global sacred sites. The Celestial Way can be understood as a pilgrimage path to a sacred center, and also a symbolic narrative that recalls the journey of the prince to immortality. A statement at its main gateway in the valley portends a journey to “the Dark Peak that governs the world,” and along its path monasteries and temples commemorate stages of the prince’s spiritual journey, including the Needle-sharpening Well where the prince’s ‘return to the truth’ was prompted by his meeting with the old woman (who was actually a deity). Throughout, a legible narrative sequentially unfolds, punctuated by the setting of his ascension, and culminating in his heavenly home at the Purple Palace in the Purple Forbidden City. According to John Lanerwey, “It is a mountain whose god ruled over the unruly world of the sprits much as the emperor ruled over China and who lived, like him, in a Forbidden City.”113 113  Lanerwey, op. cit., p. 323.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

…

85

Recalling Chuang-tzu’s parable of “three in the morning,” it is prudent to recognize that the cosmological and political aspects of sacred mountains were interrelated. When you wrack your brain trying to unify things without knowing that they are already one, it is called ‘three in the morning.’ What do I mean by ‘three in the morning?’ A man who kept monkeys said to them, ‘You get three acorns in the morning and four in the evening.’ This made them all very angry. So he said, ‘How about four in the morning and three in the evening?’—and the monkeys were happy. The number of acorns was the same, but the different arrangement resulted in anger or pleasure. This is what I am talking about. Therefore the sage harmonizes right with wrong and rests in the balance of nature. This is called taking both sides at once.114 The reverence for mountains and their association with sacrality and spiritual development distinguish Chinese culture and are reflected in language. The Taoist term for immortal beings, hsien, comprises two pictograms, a man and a mountain, and shan, which originally meant “mountain,” also came to mean “monastery.” In contrast to the western sacred mountains cited earlier, Chinese examples were primarily associated with famous spiritual personages, and visaversa, a multi-centered reciprocity of place and geographical network. That said, it would be a mistake to dismiss the cultural-political roles sacred mountains played in Chinese history where often reverence for mountains included territorial and political agendas. Rulers ritually traveled to sacred mountains for reverential and political motivations, and the feng and shan sacrifices performed at Taoist sacred mountains date from the first emperors. The legendary Emperor Shun’s visits to mountains to present offerings can be viewed as a means to assert authority over his dominion. Mountains eventually became an imperial sacred geography that also represented boundaries of the nation and offered protection from outside threats. These, and other aspects of Chinese mountain temples generally, and Wudangshan specifically, suggest unique aspects of sacred places and religious architecture, and the value of challenging predominant presumptions and incorporating distinctions and differences in culturally and religiously complicated subjects.

114   Chuang Tsu, Inner Chapters, Feng and English, trans., p. 30.

86 8

Barrie

Buddhism

Similar to Christianity and Islam, Buddhism begins with a historical figure. Siddhartha Gautama was born in the mid-sixth century BCE, in present-day Nepal. Similar to Christ, Buddha is an honorific name, which means “the awakened one.” His given name, Siddhartha, means “accomplishment of goal,” and he is also often referred to as the Sakyamuni (“Sage of the Sakyas”) Buddha, a reference to his royal lineage. His birth and life are often recounted mythically. On the full moon his mother, Queen Maya, gave birth in the paradisiacal Lumbini Gardens. He was miraculously born from her side and, because of the merits of previous lives, entered the world radiant, his body marked by auspicious signs. His father was a regional king and desired his son to succeed him. When a sage of the court told him his son would either be a worldly leader or a religious one, he was determined to ensure his succession by surrounding him with the pleasures of the world. Siddhartha married a beautiful princess and they lived in palaces that provided all of the world’s sensual pleasures. After his son was born, however, he became dissatisfied and desired to visit places outside his palaces. It was during the journeys that followed, the Great Going Forth, that the gods produced the Four Passing Sights of an old man, a sick person, a corpse, and a mendicant monk, representing old age, sickness and death, and the means to overcome rebirth. Seeing these, the future Buddha resolved to search for enlightenment and, leaving the palace at night, began a six-year spiritual journey that included guidance from teachers, and many of the spiritual practices of his time. However, it was only when he meditated under the Bodhi Tree near Gaya that he pierced the veil of maya and achieved enlightenment. He gave his first address to five ascetics at the Deer Park in Sarnath, which established the ‘middle way’ between indulgence and denial, a finding from the severe austerities he had practiced. His former disciples were at first skeptical, but soon became the first sangha, or community of Buddhists, and which grew in the Buddha’s lifetime to a large order of monks and, eventually, nuns. The Buddha led the new religion until his death, following which two primary schools of thought and practice, and numerous sects, eventually emerge, though its sectarian distinctions have been overly emphasized in the West. Theravada is located principally in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia and is more orthodox with its emphasis on the historical Buddha, the principal texts of Buddhism recorded during the Buddha’s life, and monasticism as the means to enlightenment. Mahayana, found mostly in Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan, is more heterogeneous, with numerous deities and enlightened beings, and voluminous texts that describe vast cosmologies, and multiple paths to enlightenment.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

87

8.1 Frameworks of Buddhism In his first address, the Buddha laid out the Four Noble Truths, which are: life is ‘suffering’ (Dukkha: deficient, incomplete, or unbalanced), because of ‘delusion’ (Tanha: ignorant, egocentric desire), that can be overcome by ‘enlightenment’ (Nirvana: seeing the world ‘correctly’), and which can be attained by means of the Eightfold Path, a map of perspectives and practices including the ethical (right speech, action and livelihood), religious (right knowledge, concentration and effort), and individual (right views and intentions). Similar to some aspects of Hindu thought, Buddhism is psychological and esoteric, but also practical and systematic, with often detailed, hierarchical paths to inner and outer development, the goal of which is enlightenment. Philosophically it is related to the schools of thought that produced the Upanishads and, as in Shiva’s descriptions of contemplative yogic practices in the Bhagavaad Gita, it has a consistent emphasis on individual effort. It is also cosmological, as in the Mahayana’s vast, diverse, and complex metaphysics, cosmologies, dimensions, and past, present, and future Buddhas, deities and bodhisattvas, and the Tantric Buddhism of Vajrayana. However, despite its sectarian diversity, Buddhism is grounded in the Three Refuges, the Buddha, Buddhist texts, and the community of Buddhists, or the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Buddhism emerges during a time when India was transforming into more urban states, and shramanas, or ascetics, renounced the materialism of their age to pursue a variety of spiritual practices. It was, at least in part, a challenge to, and reformation of, Vedic practices of the time and their social and religious hierarchies. Even though eventually images of the Buddha are created for devotional practices, there was no need for priests to act as intermediaries. Instead, early Buddhist practices emphasized inner explorations modeled on the life of its founder, the goal of which was nirvana, or seeing clearly the nature of self and reality. Buddhism is neither monotheistic nor theistic, but instead emphasizes orthopraxy to overcome delusion, as summarized in the Fourth Noble Truth. Despite its aniconic beginnings, suspicion of language, and admonitions about possessions, the breadth and variety of Buddhist literature and art has few rivals. The number and length of Buddhist texts is so large and diverse as to preclude any dependable summary in an essay of this scope. It is perhaps better to simply state that for Theravada Buddhism there is one principal series of texts, the Pali Canon (named for a language of the Buddha’s time.) Theravada orthodoxy claims that these texts contain the original words of the Buddha recorded during his lifetime and set down at the First Buddhist Council shortly after his death, but it is more likely that it was redacted and added to at later points. It comprises three “baskets” (sections): the Discourses, sermons of the Buddha; the Disciplines, rules for monks and nuns, and; the Inner Doctrine,

88

Barrie

explications of theology and orthopraxy. The texts that Mahayana Buddhists accept as authoritative comprise a profuse and diverse literature that far exceeds the Pali Canon in length and subject. They include some of the most popular and loved: The Heart Sutra and the Lotus Sutra, which date from Buddhism’s formative time in India. Since its beginnings over 2500 years ago, Buddhism has been a major religious and cultural force in Asia. Similar to other major religions, the breadth and depth of Buddhism, and Buddhist architecture, presents significant challenges to cogent and dispassionate scholarship. It has also been subject to inaccurate and selective western scholarship and cultural appropriation. For example, the esoteric, aesthetic, and martial Zen Buddhism of Japan has been broadly appropriated in the West in ways incompatible with its philosophies and practices. Similarly, western interpretations of Japanese architecture include twentieth-century European architects who focused on its spatial, material, and constructive systems in service of modernist agendas. Early modernists such as Bruno Taut and Frank Lloyd Wright were deeply influenced by its purported modularity, geometry, open planning, lack of ornament, and authentic materiality, but often at the expense of broader cultural and religious considerations. Heinrich Engel, the author of The Japanese House: A Tradition for Contemporary Architecture, may have suggested that Japanese architecture should be understood as culturally distinct, but he could at times be essentializing and compromised by western cultural prejudices. In contrast, other important examples of Buddhist architecture, such as its long history on the Korean peninsula, have been neglected, with a dearth of scholarship available to non-native readers. 8.2 Architectural Themes As in the architecture of other major religions, the history of Buddhist architecture is voluminous and difficult to summarize and categorize. However, particular themes, lineages, elements, and organizations can be identified that can assist in contextualizing specific examples. These include: the stupa as an early symbolic and ritual element, and its lineages in stupa temples and pagodas; early cave sanctuaries with specific spaces to serve the ritual, devotional, and practical functions of monasteries; appropriations of indigenous secular building types for sacred purposes; a range of planning and architectonic ordering systems; and the symbolic content and ritual uses of temples and monastic settings. The earliest Buddhist architecture develops from what originally were wandering, mendicant monks who eschewed idolatry and had little interest in architecture. As described in an early text: “So the Bikkhus dwelt now here,

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

89

now there—in the woods, at the foot of trees on hillsides, in grottos, in mountain caves, in cemeteries, in forests, in open plains, and in heaps of straw.”115 However, the privations of the rainy season and the practicality and benefits to the sangha of living communally, were the impetus for the first building programs of monasteries. Eventually, specific monastic buildings developed to serve the Triple Refuges: settings for religious practices and devotional rituals; buildings to store scriptures; and congregational halls for study, meditation, and sleeping. As monastic architecture matured, compounds included additional occasional buildings, as well as enclosures, gateways, and path sequences. Emerging from the building traditions of India, early Buddhist architecture often included auspicious and cosmological orientations, geometric measuring, proportioning, and symbolic organizing systems, and a diverse range of overt and generalized sculptural and scenographic elements. As it migrated to other cultures, these elements adopted and translated local practices resulting in unique interpretations and materializations. 8.3 Early Buddhist Architecture of Stupa and Cave The history of Buddhist architecture in India stretches for approximately one thousand years. Early examples had a particular focus on aniconic reliquaries as devotional objects and ritual settings. The stupa reliquary came embody diverse symbolic content—from the Buddha and his enlightenment to cosmic diagrams. The stupas and monastic complex at Sanchi in north-central India, dates from the third century BCE. It was founded by King Asoka, a third-century Mauryan ruler who was an important early promulgator of the religion. He is credited with spreading Buddhism, in part by erecting thousands of expository pillars throughout the empire, including one at Sanchi. Located on a prominent hill near an important trade route, Sanchi was part of an early monastic center that included at least three significant stupas. It anticipated the future importance of trade routes and local patronage that Buddhist monasteries came to depend on. The Great Stupa, or Stupa #1, dates from the second century BCE. Even though it was not the first, or even most significant Indian stupa, it is the most restored. It is distinguished by a 36-meter (approximately 118’) diameter hemi-spherical stone dome, which was originally plastered, with a solid core that included relics and other materials arranged geometrically. It is encircled by two stone balustrades and crowned by a three-tiered parasol with its own balustrade. 115  From the Pali Canon. Quoted in, H. Sarkar, Studies in Early Buddhist Architecture of India, Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1966, p. 8.

90

Barrie

The Great Stupa also features four richly carved toranas (gateways), which are aligned with the cardinal points. They symbolized the spread of Buddhism to the four quarters, and also had narrative functions—the east torana, for example, depicted important events in the Buddha’s life and King Asoka’s visit to Bodhi Gaya. The main entrance was from the south where a torana and Asokian pillar marked the threshold to the stupa, and led to stairs to the upper balustrade, where pilgrims circumambulated the stupa in an auspicious clockwise direction, mirroring the movement of the sun. Some have argued that the stupa form recalls ancient tumuli or germination mounds, symbolically representing a reciprocity of life and death, or that the hemispherical form of the stupa symbolized the dome of the sky and the cosmos, or even an emanatory cosmic egg.116 The stupa assumes an important position in early Buddhist monastic sites, some of which, like later Hindu sites, were carved from solid rock. At the voluminous rock-cut Cave 8 at Karli in west-central India, which dates from the second century CE, a stupa prominently occupies the rear of the hall, its hierarchical position reinforced by stone colonnades that mark the circumambulatory path. Beginning at the same time, rock-cut temples were carved out of a horseshoe-shaped escarpment on the Wanghora River at Ajanta (fig. 17). An important monastic center and pilgrimage destination that eventually enjoyed the patronage of the Gupta Kings, Ajanta evidences the ritual and artistic agendas of early Buddhist architecture. In time, prayer halls, dormitories, and image and congregational spaces were created. The caves included stone stupas, some of which incorporated images of the Buddha, but also a diverse program of colorful surface decoration and iconic paintings, anticipating the rich artistic traditions of Buddhism and the eventual replacement of the aniconic stupa with statues of the Buddha. As Buddhism spread throughout southeast Asia, the symbolism of the stupa eventually transforms into a distinct temple type, of which the ambitious building programs of the Pagan Empire in present day Myanmar include many significant examples. The Shwezigon Paya (“Stupa”), in Pagan, is a solid stupa, with exterior galleries that contain a series of didactic panels that pictorially describe Buddhist scripture and myths. The eleventh and twelfth century CE Ananda Temple, also in Pagan, is a terraced stupa but its exterior galleries cannot be accessed. Instead a series of interior passages contain narrative panels. Arguably, the apogee of the stupa temple was at the earlier Borobudur, one of a number of important Buddhist monuments on the island of Java, which dates 116  Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, pp. 228–30.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

91

Figure 17 Rock-cut Temples, Ajanta, second century CE Photo by Vasukrishnan—Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons. wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72652490

Figure 18 Northwest view, Borobudur, Java, eighth and ninth centuries CE Photo by Gunawan Kartapranata—Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4838861

from the eighth and ninth centuries CE. Rising to a height of approximately one-hundred feet, Borobudur includes a series of concentric square galleries and circular terraces capped by a central stupa (fig. 18).

92

Barrie

At Borobudur, pilgrims ritually circumambulated its image-laden galleries and open terraces to the stupa at its apex, symbolizing the Buddhist spiritual path to enlightenment. Aligned with the cardinal points, its main approach is from the east where guardian lions flank the entrance. The four galleries are lined with stone relief panels, serially communicating Buddhist myths, histories, and concepts. The first terrace includes panels, two on each side, that scenographically narrate the life of the Sakyamuni Buddha, and requiring four circuits to completely ‘read’ its ‘texts.’ Throughout the complex there is a profusion of images, including Buddha figures that gaze outward from the exterior surfaces of the galleries. At the open, circular, upper terraces, seventytwo figures occupy latticed-stone stupas, each with a specific hand position, or mudra, which symbolize different aspects of Buddhist doctrines and practices. The central stupa, however, is solid but, according to some, had included a figure of the unborn, non-dual, primordial Buddha, or was always empty as a symbol of Mahayana formlessness.117 Borobudur may recall the stupa form but, perhaps more significantly, materializes the mandala, the iconic and narrative paintings and cosmic diagrams of the multiple worlds of Mahayana Buddhism. Often peopled by numerous deities, they served as aids for spiritual edification and meditative devices, where devotees symbolically journeyed along circumambulatory paths to a sacred center. Throughout Borobudur, vast cosmological symbolisms are paired with the individual path taken by pilgrims who symbolically rise through levels of realization—a holy mountain, three-dimensional mandala and sign-posted way of devotion, edification, and enlightenment.118 8.4 China: Stupa and Pagoda As Buddhism spread to China, Korea, and Japan, there is a lineage of diffusion, translation, and transformation of the stupa form and its symbolism. In China, the pagoda emerges from its Indian predecessors, but also an established history of watch towers. Similar to Indian stupas, the Chinese pagoda served multiple symbolic roles: as a reliquary, a symbol of the Buddha, and a representation of the multi-leveled cosmos of Mahayana Buddhism and its numerous Buddhas and bodhisattvas. An important early building type, it was to find its most mature expression in Japan, though eventually the image hall 117  J ohn M. Lundquist, The Temple: Meeting Place of Heaven and Earth, London: Thames and Hudson, 1993, p. 18, and Robert E. Fisher, Buddhist Art and Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1993, p. 199. 118  See, Thomas Barrie, Spiritual Path, Sacred Place, Myth, Ritual and Meaning in Architecture, Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1996, pp. 119–125.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

93

and Buddha statues supplant it. Chinese wooden temple architecture also established early types and details of monastic buildings, which were to have significant influence on Korean and Japanese architecture. The Great Wild Goose Pagoda, which dates from the seventh and eighth centuries CE, occupied a prominent, axial position in the Temple of Great Benevolence in the T’ang Dynasty capital of Chang’an (Xi’an). Built of brick on a quartered plan, today it features seven tiers that recall aspects of the stupa temple, and culminates in a finial, making eight levels in all and symbolizing the eightfold path outlined in the Buddha’s first dharma lesson. Buddhist missionaries traveling the Silk Route arrived in China during the first century CE. Early monastic centers were established along this important trade route, including the expansive monastic and devotional center at Mogao. Here, approximately 500 image halls, congregational spaces, and meditation cells were carved from soft rock escarpments. As at Karli and Ajanta, the meditation hall and cell accommodated the introspective and individual emphasis of Buddhism.119 In China, there was a further expansion of Buddhist concepts, scriptures, and practices. Its non-dogmatic nature resulted in remarkable assimilations of native Taoism and, to a lesser degree, Confucianism, “one of the greatest instances of cross-cultural transmission and conversion in world history.”120 As it spread, matured, and at times enjoyed significant state support, Chinese Buddhist architecture developed distinct temple and monastic architecture, especially in the geographies of sacred mountains where important centers were located. 8.5 Chinese Buddhist Sacred Mountains Buddhism, an imported religion that previously did not include mountains as intrinsic to its cosmology, adopted and adapted the mountain hermitages and monastic settings of Taoist examples. Buddhism is predominantly a displaced religious construct, where spiritual wisdom and enlightenment are possible anywhere. Even though Chinese Buddhism comprised ‘locative’ elements in its designation of Four Famous Buddhist Mountains, these principally denoted sacred geographies. The expression to “open a mountain” meant to found a monastery, and to “enter the mountains” was to embark on a spiritual quest.121 These generalized terms suggest more cosmological than objective attitudes 119  There is famous story of Bodhidharma, the 28th Zen patriarch (and the first Chinese one), who purportedly spent nine years meditating alone in a solitary cave cell at Shao-lin Monastery. 120  John L. Esposito, Darrell J. Fasching, Todd, Lewis, eds., World Religions Today, Third Edition, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009., p. 411. 121  Bernbaum, Sacred Mountains of the World, p. 28.

94

Barrie

Figure 19 Sacred Valley and Chorten of Tayuan Temple, Wutaishan, Shanxi Province Photo by Thomas Barrie

regarding place and the sacred, and more fluid positions regarding distinctions between the sacred and the profane. Mountains, and the sacred geographies of mountainous areas, were more generally positioned as propitious settings for cultivating Buddhist communities and manifesting the dharma, and where the Mahayana promise of universal enlightenment was portentous. Wutaishan is one of the Four Famous Buddhist Mountains. At one time, there were over 200 monasteries located on the slopes, valleys, and peaks of

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

95

this mountainous region near the terminus of the Silk Road. Today, approximately fifty monasteries remain, most clustered in the valley and centered on Lingjiu Hill (fig. 19). The prominent Tayuan Temple features a distinctive stupa (chorten) named the Great White Pagoda, which pilgrims circumambulate while spinning prayer wheels. The complex includes a striking Sakyamuni (Buddha) hall, and its courtyard organization culminates in an unusual sutra library that features a thirty-three-tiered rotating bookcase at its center. Just as the Chinese transformed the stupa into the pagoda, they also transformed the monastery. Prototypical monastic organizations were adaptions and transformations of palace architecture where walled compounds included a hierarchy of gateways, courtyards, and buildings. The conflation of royal residences and religious architecture as expressions of political and ecclesiastical power is not unique to China, but found particular, identifiable expressions in monastic architecture. Additionally, distinctive wooden trabeated construction with dominant roofs achieved a remarkable maturity in China. Arguably the most important monastery in Wutaishan is Xiantong, founded in the first century CE. Here an extensive courtyard-palace organization of gateways, temples, courtyards, and monastic buildings create an elongated path and ritual sequence on its terraced site. Today, as at its height in the seventh and eighth centuries, Wutaishan is a pilgrimage destination for devout Buddhists, especially Tibetans who have long historical roots there. The ninth-century Japanese monk Ennin made a famous pilgrimage to Wutaishan and recounted that when the main temple was first glimpsed, “We bowed to the ground and worshipped it from afar, and our tears rained down involuntarily.”122 Today worship is more prosaic, often dominated by students who pray to its resident deity Manjusri, the bodhisattva of infinite wisdom. Even though Wutaishan suffered periods of suppression, it has endured as a potent example of a sacred geography. Singular peaks or individual temples and monasteries may function as separate, sacred locales, but the entire geography of peaks, ridges, and valleys constitutes a sacred realm. 8.6 The Monastic Architecture of Korea and Japan As it spread over major trades routes to China, Korea, and Japan, Mahayana Buddhism effectively melded with or incorporated local religions. Its syncretic nature resulted in expansive scriptures and a proliferation of Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and celestial beings that, in time, came to constitute a vast and 122  E  dwin O. Reischauer, trans., Ennin’s Diary, The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law, New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1955, p. 226. See also, Lin, Building a Sacred Mountain, The Buddhist Architecture of China’s Mount Wutai, pp. 158–59.

96

Barrie

multilayered cosmos. The translations and transformations of the elements and organizations of monastic architecture as Buddhism migrated to new cultural settings also produced new interpretations of symbolism and ritual use. Indeed, a significant part of the history of Japan and Korea is how they assimilated, adapted, and transformed the foreign influences of Buddhism, including Chinese culture and architecture. Korea and Japan are ancient cultures with long histories of mature building programs. Their monastic architecture may be productively understood as expressive of the adaptations of Mahayana Buddhism in the context of the indigenous religions of Korean Shamanism and Japanese Shinto, both of which remain culturally significant. There are particular congruencies in Japan, where Shinto had established specific building types, styles, and compound organizations. Buddhism arrived in Korea from China in the fourth century CE, and flourished during the Unified Silla Dynasty (late seventh to early tenth centuries CE), a time of consistent state support and ambitious building programs at many monasteries. Buddhism and its state support continued to expand until the Joseon Dynasty (late fourteenth to early twentieth centuries) when Neo-Confucianism replaced it as the state religion and monasteries were suppressed and many closed. Buddhism arrived in Japan from Korea in the sixth century CE and, similar to Korea, enjoyed long periods of state support until the Mejii Period (mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries), when monasteries suffered many of the same fates. Both countries produced significant Buddhist architecture, most of which was centered on monasteries, where the pagoda finds early and ultimate expression before being supplanted by the image hall, and palace-courtyard organizations found unique translations and expressions. Korean monasteries are distinguished by their remote, mountainside locations where walled compounds comprise a series of terraced courtyards axially organized according to palace-courtyard models. Typically, they face south and are located on the banks of rivers, conventions consistent with Feng-shui (Pungsu-jiri, or “wind and water,” in Korean), the Chinese geomantic system for the auspicious siting of buildings and cities. Shifting path segments traverse their sites resulting in often elongated path sequences and symbolic narratives, where evocatively named gateways mark thresholds to a series of courtyards. Three of the most historically and architecturally significant Korean monasteries are the Three Jewels (named for the Three Refuges): Tongdo-sa is dedicated to the Buddha, Haein-sa to the dharma, and Songwang-sa to the sangha. Tongdo-sa was founded in the mid-seventh century CE. Built on a mountainside slope, it comprises a series of paths, gateways, and courtyards that lead to the main temple, the Hero (Sakyamuni) Hall. The path sequence begins with bridges across a river, and the One Pillar Gate, a typical element of Korean

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

97

Figure 20 Haein-sa Monastery, ninth century CE, main temple building with sutra library beyond Collection of Thomas Barrie. Photo by Shim

monasteries that symbolizes the unity of the dharma and the ‘one-vehicle’ of Buddhism.123 The Four Guardians Gate, another typical component, is named for the four Hindu-derived deities it enshrines, each guarding a cardinal direction. Three terraced courtyards follow, each with image halls and buildings serving the devotional, educational, and monastic functions of the monastery. The third courtyard includes the unique Hero Hall that unusually does not include statues but instead overlooks a stupa believed to contain relics of the Sakyamuni Buddha. It also incorporates a large lecture hall, and various image, devotional, and occasional buildings. Beyond, and separate from the main monastery, is a seminary for meditation monks. Haein-Sa, begun in the early ninth century CE, is similarly terraced on a mountainside slope. An elongated entry path passes through the One Pillar and Four Guardians gateways and a series of courtyards. Its main image hall is dedicated to the Vairocana Buddha, the Buddha of Cosmic Truth, appropriate for a monastery dedicated to the dharma (fig. 20). Just up the hillside from the main hall is the sutra library, a common feature in Korean monasteries, but distinguished because it holds over 80,000 wooden printing blocks of the Korean Pali Canon. The sutra library includes 108 columns, and there are 108 123  Heo Gyun, Timothy V. Atkinson, trans., Korean Temple Motifs: Beautiful Symbols of the Buddhist Faith, Korea: Dolbegae Publishers, 2000, p. 277.

98

Barrie

steps in all along the main monastery path, each symbolizing the 108 defilements monks strive to overcome. Similar to many temples, Songwang-sa is built on a river in a forested, mountainous area, and reached by a poetic bridge. Korean monks generally choose to either dedicate themselves to studying the scriptures or to meditation, and Songwang-sa clearly serves the latter with its mediation halls, dormitories, and other sequestered support buildings located behind the main temple. Korean monasteries present a hierarchical path sequence and also a multicentered cosmogram, producing multiple scales, uses, and interpretations. They include temples that serve the devotional practices of laymen (including shamanistic gods), colleges for the study of Buddhism and Buddhist scriptures, and cloistered compounds for meditation monks. Many are believed to have been planned according to multi-centered and progressive mandala patterns, which often feature a palace holding the Buddha at their center. The bridges that typically initiate the spatial and ritual process, signify a portentous place where ‘crossing over’ to enlightenment is possible. Gateways communicate Buddhist principles, such as the Non-duality gateways, named to recall the Mahayana emphasis on the reciprocity between self and other, monks and sangha, individual and cosmos.124 In Japan, early monasteries reflected monastic models imported from China and Korea, but found distinct Japanese expressions. Horyu-ji was begun in the early seventh century in the ancient capital of Nara, an early, important political and Buddhist center. After a devastating fire, the monastery was re-built, and today features the oldest wooden buildings in the world. It is a complex of walled compounds, including East and West Precincts. The latter is entered through a prominent southern gateway, which leads to a walled courtyard where a one-hundred-foot-high pagoda is paired with the Central Hall. The Central Hall is an early example of an image hall and contains statues of the Buddha and bodhisattvas. An assembly hall, a sutra pavilion, and a bell pavilion—the latter marking the hours of the monastic day—serve the ritual and functional programs of the monastery. As in Korea, Zen Buddhism found fertile ground in Japan where it enjoyed long periods of state patronage. It was especially favored by the military aristocracy during the Medieval Period (thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, CE). Many were attracted to its discipline and austerity, and during the Muromachi Period (early fourteenth to late sixteenth centuries CE), some of the most important monastic architecture was built. Daitoku-ji, located in Kyoto and founded 1319, was one of the most important medieval monasteries and is now 124  Barrie, The Sacred In-between: The Mediating Roles of Architecture, p. 125.

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

99

a significant cultural institution and tourist destination. The first Zen Buddhist monasteries are purported to have begun in China when a Zen master retired to the mountains to devote himself to solitary spiritual practice, and was subsequently joined by acolytes who built huts near the master’s simple hermitage. Tongdo-sa was founded as a mountain hermitage by Master Chajang, and Daitoku-ji similarly by Daito-Kokushi on the southern side of the mountains that auspiciously surround Kyoto. Daitoku-ji was at times much more extensive than it is today. It burned in the mid-fourteenth century, and suffered neglect under the Meiji Period. Today, the monastery is a walled, south-facing, compound that holds historically-significant main temple buildings and numerous sub-temples. The axial alignments of the main temple buildings reflect Chinese models, but also Japanese precedents, such as the seventh-century CE Shitenno-ji in Osaka. The Messenger and Mountain gateway buildings lead to an image hall with an ambulatory around a statue of the Sakyamuni Buddha. The bell tower, sutra library, and bathhouse are located to the east, and the dharma, or lecture, hall and the abbot’s residence with its acclaimed rock and gravel garden, to the north. Some have suggested that the main temples at Daitoku-ji are planned according to a mandala pattern, with the Mountain Gate symbolizing the gateway to a sacred mountain and center of a mandala.125 At the twice-monthly Dawn Ceremony, monks in colorful silk robes circumambulate clockwise around the altar of the image hall following a mandala pattern on its floor.126 However, Daitoku-ji may be most known for its sub-temples, a particular Japanese variation of the typical monastic plan where each has its own abbot and sangha and buildings to serve them. Koto-in, Daisen-in, Ryogen-in and Zuiho-in sub-temples, for example, feature mature medieval wooden architecture and remarkable contemplative gardens. They also include elongated entry paths, where a series of gateways and paths recapitulate the mythical pilgrimage to the prototypical monastery, and also symbolize the hermit-scholar’s retreat celebrated in Taoist and Zen art and literature.127 The Abbot’s quarters are named hojo, or one jo (tatami) square, recalling a prototypical four-and-a half mat teahouse, and also the mythical space where the legendary Buddhist

125  Dr. Jon Covell and Abbot Yamada Sobin, Zen at Daitoku-ji, Kyoto: Kodansha International Ltd., 1974, p. 15. 126  Covell and Sobin, p. 17. See also, Barrie, The Sacred In-between, p. 112. 127  Mitchell Bring and Josse Wayembergh, Japanese Gardens, Design and Meaning, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981, p. 152. See also, Barrie, Spiritual Path, Sacred Place, p. 191, and Barrie, House and Home: Cultural Contexts, Ontological Roles, pp. 49–52.

100

Barrie

sage Vimalakirti was said to have accommodated thousands of disciples. The pathways, buildings, and gardens of sub-temples reflect the heterogeneous nature of Japanese Zen Buddhism and its architecture, while also symbolizing individual and collective paths and the promise of enlightenment for those who follow them.

…

The Korean and Japanese monastic examples evidence a sophisticated amalgam of overt and generalized symbols for a range of audiences. At Tongdo-sa, the first courtyard includes devotional halls for the petitionary rituals of laymen, while the upper courtyards convey more literate and esoteric content and serve its monastic community. Its palace courtyard organization is of Chinese origin while its multiple realms correspond to a mandala pattern with the Hero Hall and stupa at the center. Overall, the processional and ritual paths and symbolic narratives are perhaps the most sophisticated, where diverse representational media are incorporated in service of communicating the individual, communal, and multidimensional aspects of Mahayana Buddhism. The heterogeneous nature of Korean and Japanese monastic architecture is consistent with the history of Buddhist architecture. The Buddha taught to the level of each student, adapting his teachings according to their ability to understand. His “skillful means” (upaya-kaushalya), is a central Buddhist concept, and bodhisattvas were celebrated for their skills in guiding adepts to the ultimate truth of enlightenment through relative means. Similarly, as Buddhism encountered other cultures, it adapted and expanded according to its contexts, resulting in a remarkable diversity of scriptures, schools of thought, and practices. Buddhism never had a central authority, or a religionspecific building typology. Consequently, its architecture was free to adopt and transform existing building types and organizations. From stupas and cave monasteries, to pagoda temples, sacred geographies, and diverse interpretations of palace-courtyard monastic layouts, the syncretic nature of Buddhism produced an architecture that was often an amalgam of influences, where the practical, symbolic, and ritual demands of the Three Refuges found distinct expressions. 9

Coda

The six religions evidence both congruent and complementary world views, doctrines, and ritual practices. While their architecture can share certain themes and typologies, it can also have substantive symbolic and ritual

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

101

differences. For example, contrary to the sacrality of the church in Christianity, the mosque is not considered sacred per se, but only acquires a type of sacredness due to its ritual use over time. It is a place of emptiness where adherents submit to an unknowable and omnipresent God in settings subservient to the ultimate center of Mecca. In Hindu temples, the gods must be evoked through specific settings and rituals; in the synagogue God and Jerusalem are mostly remembered; and in Buddhist and Taoist temples deities are primarily ‘worshipped’ for what they represent. Many religious spaces may be oriented toward their most sacred area, but its uses can be dramatically varied: Christians value their altars, Muslims don’t have any use for them—Hindus have bells, butter lamps, and offerings to wake, please, and feed the gods, Buddhists drums, clackers, bells and other instruments for chanting. In Christian and Hindu sanctuaries, there is typically a hierarchy of increasingly sacred spaces—in Islam and Buddhism less so. All religious architecture communicates in particular ways, but some are more talkative than others. Muslim and Christian examples can incorporate direct exhortative and coercive content (but by different means); Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist examples expansive cosmogonic and cosmological symbolism. Japanese Zen Buddhist temples and their Koan-like gardens are quite recondite—Hindu temples and Byzantine churches garrulous. Protestant churches have the Bible do most of the talking—in synagogues, the Torah. This essay has focused on the interrelationship of differences and similarities in the architecture of the world’s major religions. Its thematic approach has emphasized formative periods often at the expense of later, historicallysignificant examples. A further study could expand each section to incorporate more examples; a specialized study might focus on particular themes, aspects, or time periods. Throughout, diverse and nuanced understandings have been sought beyond the confines of historical, sectarian, organizational, or stylistic categories, which may suggest avenues for future studies of religious architecture.

Acknowledgements

Over many years my field research has been made possible through the generosity of many, for which I remain grateful. The research for the Chinese Buddhist and Taoist temples was supported by a grant from the Key Laboratory of New Technology for Construction of Cities in Mountain Area, Chongqing University. Sincere thanks to Professor Di Feng for her research collaboration and support. Lastly, a special thanks to my wife Lisa for her careful reading of the final manuscript.

102

Barrie

Cited Works General

Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane, ed., Eliade, Mircea, 1992. Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company). Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane, ed., 2016. Religion: Material Religion (Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference, USA). Armstrong, Karen, 1994. A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Alfred A. Knoft). Barrie, Thomas, 2017. House and Home: Cultural Contexts, Ontological Roles (London: Routledge). Barrie, Thomas, 2010. The Sacred In-between: The Mediating Roles of Architecture (London: Routledge). Barrie, Thomas, 1996. Spiritual Path, Sacred Place: Myth, Ritual and Meaning in Architecture (Boston and London: Shambhala Publications). Barrie, Thomas, Bermudez, Julio, and Tabb, Phillip, eds., 2015. Architecture, Culture and Spirituality (London: Routledge). Bergmann, Sigurd, ed., 2009. Theology in Built Environments: Exploring Religion, Architecture and Design (New Brunswick, USA: Transaction Publishers). Bernbaum, Edwin, 1997. Sacred Mountains of the World (Berkeley: The University of California Press). Campbell, Joseph, 1974. The Mythic Image (Princeton, NJ: The Princeton University Press). Ching, Francis D.K., Jarzombek, Mark, and Prakash, Vikramaditya, 2011. A Global History of Architecture, Second Edition (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.). Davies, J.G., 1982. Temples, Churches and Mosques: A Guide to the Appreciation of Religious Architecture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Durkheim, Emile, Karen E. Fields, trans., 1995. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: The Free Press). Esposito, John L., Fasching, Darrell J., Lewis, Todd, eds., 2009. World Religions Today, Third Edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). Fletcher, Sir Bannister, 1950. A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, Fifteenth Edition (London: BT Batsford Ltd.). Geertz, Clifford, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Lessa, William A. and Vogt, Evon Z., eds., 1973. Reader in Comparative Religion, An Anthropological Approach (New York: Harper and Row Publishers). Harries, Karsten, 1998. The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press). Hitchens, Christopher, 2007. God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, Hachette Book Group, USA).

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

103

Holub, Robert C., 1984. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen). Huxley, Aldous, 2009. The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics), First published 1945. James, William, 1985. The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Jones, Lindsay, 2000. The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture, Experience, Interpreta­ tion, Comparison, Volume One: Monumental Occasions, Reflections on the Eventfulness of Religious Architecture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Jones, Lindsay, 2000. The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpreta­ tion, Comparison, Volume Two: Hermeneutical Calisthenics, A Morphology of RitualArchitectural Priorities (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press). Kieckhefer, Richard, 2004. Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley, (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kilde, Jeanne Halgren, 2008. Sacred Power, Sacred Space: An Introduction to Christian Architecture and Worship, (New York: Oxford University Press). Kostof, Spiro, 1985. A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lethaby, William, R., 1994. Architecture, Mysticism & Myth (Solos Press), First published 1891. Macfarlane, Robert, 2003. Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (London: Granta Books). Miles, Jack, ed., 2015. The Norton Anthology of World Religions (New York: W.W. Norton & Company). Norberg-Schulz, Christian, 1980. Meaning in Western Architecture (New York: Rizzoli International Publications). Norberg-Schulz, Christian, 1979. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli International Publications). Otto, Rudolf, Harvey, John W., trans., 1958. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (New York: Galaxy). Plate, S. Brent, ed., 2015. Key Terms in Material Religion (London: Bloomsbury). Pohl, Karl-Hienz, ed., 1999. Chinese Thought in a Global Context: A Dialogue Between Chinese and Western Philosophical Approaches, (Leiden: Brill). Prothero, Stephen, 2010. God is Not One, The Eight Rival Religions that Rule the Wold and Why Their Differences Matter (New York: Harper One). Ricœur, Paul, Pellauer, David, trans., Wallace, Mark I., ed., 1995. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). Ridgeon, Lloyd, ed., 2003. Major World Religions: From Their Origins to the Present (London: RoutledgeCurzon). Said, Edward W., 1979. Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books).

104

Barrie

Saunders, Ann, 2012. St Paul’s Cathedral: 1400 Years at the Heart of London (London: Scala). Scarry, Elaine, 1999. On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Smith, Jonathan Z., 1978. Map Is Not Territory, Studies in the History of Religions (Leiden: Brill). Smith, Jonathan Z., 1987. To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Stump, Roger W., 2008. The Geography of Religion, Faith, Place, and Space (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.). Tilley, Chris, Keane, Webb, Kuchler, Susanne, Rowlands, Mike, and Spyer, Patricia, 2006. Handbook of Material Culture (Los Angeles: Sage). Tuan, Yi-Fu, 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: Univer­ sity of Minnesota Press). Turner, Harold W., 1979. From Temple to Meeting House: The Phenomenology and Theology of Places of Worship (The Hague: Mouton Publishers). Tweed, Thomas A., 2006. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Judaism

de Breffny, Brian, 1978. The Synagogue (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.). Goldhill, Simon, 2004. The Temple of Jerusalem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Gutmann, Joseph, ed., 1973. The Dura-Europos Synagogues: A Re-evaluation (1932–1972) (Montana: American Academy of Religion, Society of Biblical Literature). Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 1963. The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, and Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America). Kaploun, Uri, ed., 1973. The Synagogue (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America). Krinsky, Carol Herselle, 1996. The Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc.). Rostovtzeff, M., 2009. Dura-Europos and Its Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Whiston, William A.M., trans., The Works of Flavius Josephus, Volume 1 (New York: A.L. Burt Publisher).

Christianity

Augustine, St., Bourke, Vernan J., ed., Walsh, Gerald, Zema, Demetrius, B., S.J., Monahan, Grace, O.S.U., Honan, Daniel, J., trans., 1968. The City of God (Garden City, NY: Image Books).

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

105

Augustine, St., Bourke, Vernan J., Taliaferro, Robert Catesby, trans., “De Musica,” in Dressler, Hermigild, O.F.M., ed., 2002. The Fathers of the Church, A New Translation, Vol. 4 (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press). Conant, Kenneth John, 1959. Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture 800–1200 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd.). Cusimano, Richard and Whitmore, Eric, trans., 2018. Selected Works of Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of American Press). Peppard, Michael, 2016. The World’s Oldest Church: Bible, Art, and Ritual at Dura-Europos, Syria (New Haven: Yale University Press). Rudolph, Conrad, 1990. The “Things of Greater Importance:” Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Schwarz, Rudolf, Harris, Cynthia, trans., 1958. The Church Incarnate: The Sacred Function of Christian Architecture (Chicago: H. Regnery Co.). Smith, E. Baldwin, 1956. Architectural Symbolism of Imperial Rome and the Middle Ages (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press). Swaan, Wim, 1984. The Gothic Cathedral (New York: Park Lane). von Simson, Otto, 1956. The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Islam

Creswell, K.A.C., 1988. A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture (Aldershot: Scholar Press). Hillenbrand, Robert, 1994. Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press). Hillenbrand, Robert, 1999. Islamic Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson). Koch, Ebba, 1991. Mughal Architecture: An Outline of Its History and Development (1526– 1858) (Munich: Prestel-Verlag). Kuban, Dogan, 1994, Sinan’s Art and Selimiye (Istanbul: The Economic and Social History Foundation). Necipoglu, Gulru, 2005. The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Williams, John Alden, ed., 1962. Islam (New York: George Braziller).

Hinduism

Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 1992. Essays in Early Indian Architecture (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts). Eck, Diana L., 2012. India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Harmony Books). Hardy, Adam, 2007. The Temple Architecture of India (Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons).

106

Barrie

Kramrisch, Stella, 1976. The Hindu Temple, Vol. 1 (Delhi, Varanasi, Patna: Motilal Banarsidass). Michell, George, 1977. The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Pichard, Pierre, 1995. Thanjavur Brihadishvara, An Architectural Study (Delhi: IGNCA and Ecole Francaise de l’Extreme Orient). Stierlin, Henri, ed., India (Lausanne, FR: Benedikt Taschen).

Taoism

Chuang Tsu, Inner Chapters, Feng, Gia-Fu and English, Jane, trans., 1974. (New York: Vintage Books). Kahn, Livia, 2003. Monastic Life in Medieval Daoism: A Cross-cultural Perspective (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press). Lanerwey, John, “The Pilgrimage to Wu-tang Shan,” in Naquin, Susan and Yü, Chün-fang eds., 1992. Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China (Berkeley: University of California Press). Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, Feng, Gia-Fu and English, Jane, trans., 1972. (New York: Vintage Books). Little, Stephen with Eichman, Shawn eds., 2000. Taoism and the Arts of China (Berkeley: University of California Press). Munakata, Kiyohiko, 1991. Sacred Mountains in Chinese Art (Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press). Robson, James, 2009. Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue) in Medieval China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center). Shunxun, Nan and Foit-Albert, Beverly R.A., Ph.D., 2007. China’s Sacred Sites (Honesdale, PA: Himalayan Institute Press). Waley, Arthur, ed., 1938. The Analects of Confucius (New York: Vintage Books). Waltham, Clae, 1971. Shu Ching: Book of History, A Modernized Edition of the Translation by James Legge (Chicago: Hans Regency Company). Wong, Eva, 1997. The Shambhala Guide to Taoism (Boston & London: Shambhala Publications). Xianyi, Yang and Yang, Gladys, trans., 1984. Poetry and Prose of the Tang and Song (Beijing: Panda Books).

Buddhism

Bring, Mitchell and Wayembergh, Josse, 1981. Japanese Gardens, Design and Meaning (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company). Covell, Dr. Jon and Sobin, Abbot Yamada, 1974. Zen at Daitoku-ji (Kyoto: Kodansha International Ltd.).

Architecture of the World ’ s Major Religions

107

Engel, Heinrich, 1964. The Japanese House: A Tradition for Contemporary Architecture (Rutland, Vermont, Charles E. Tuttle). Fisher, Robert E., 1993. Buddhist Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson). Gyun, Heo, Atkinson, Timothy V. trans., 2000. Korean Temple Motifs: Beautiful Symbols of the Buddhist Faith (Korea: Dolbegae Publishers). Lin, Wei-Cheng, 2014. Building a Sacred Mountain: The Buddhist Architecture of China’s Mount Wutai (Seattle: University of Washington Press). Lundquist, John M., 1993. The Temple: Meeting Place of Heaven and Earth (London: Thames and Hudson). Reischauer, Edwin O., trans., 1955. Ennin’s Diary, The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law (New York: The Ronald Press Company). Sarkar, H., 1966. Studies in Early Buddhist Architecture of India (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal).