Charles Correa. Charles Correa

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      Sri Yantra

      The Public, the Private and the Sacred

      I

      We live in a world of manifest phenomena. Yet, since the beginning of time, man has intuitively sensed the existence of another world: a non-manifest world whose presence underlies—and makes endurable—the one he experiences every day. The principal vehicles through which we explore and communicate our notions of this non-manifest world are religion, philosophy and the arts. Like these, architecture too is generated by mythic beliefs, expressing the presence of a reality more profound than the manifest world in which it exists.

      In India, these beliefs are all-pervading. They surface everywhere since they are not confined to formal art and philosophy but thrive in popular incarnations as well. Thus, in the overcrowded centre of a commercial metropolis like Bombay, every twenty feet or so we might find a sacred gesture—a rangoli (a pattern of coloured powder) on a doorstep, a yantra (a geometric depiction of cosmic order) painted on a wall, shrine or temple.

      These gestures are a crucial and inte gral part of the spaces we inhabit. Al though there is much discussion among social theorists, architects, planners and others, about the public and private realms that constitute our habitat, there is hardly any attention paid to this, the sacred, realm.

      Yet, when we look at human society across history and around the planet, the sacred is perhaps the most important realm of all, for it expresses the invisible passions that move us. Consider, for instance, the various countries of Europe. Do we not find Italy (which, like India, is filled with sacred gestures) the most compelling? When we arrive in France, the Catholic religion and the Latin culture are similar, but the gestures are less frequent. France is more secular, so it does not move us quite as much. When we get to Switzerland, we hardly find any sacred gestures at all. Is this why Switzerland can never be as riveting, as evocative, as Italy? The chocolates are delicious, the scenery is beautiful, but it is not quite the same. To the Japanese, Mount Fuji is sacred; to the Swiss, Mont Blanc is just a very high mountain. This difference is of decisive importance to their architecture, and to their lives.

      In Japan, indeed, the public, the private and the sacred realms all hold together like a troika, to give strength and stability to society. Almost every visitor comments on the changing face of Japan; how then does Japanese society, living on the cutting-edge of new technology, remain stable? Perhaps because most of the rapid changes we observe are in the public realm. For the vast majority of Japanese, the private and the sacred realms have remained quite intact (as a visit to the shrines at Kamakura or Nara will confirm—every few metres there are sacred gestures: the stones placed in the moss beneath a tree, the white paper prayers fluttering in the wind, the students practising the solemn ritualistic choreography of Zen archery).

      So also with India. The British, through their massive intervention in the fields of law, administration, transport and communication, initiated a great many changes in the public realm. The other two realms stayed untouched, so the essential values of Indian society remained stable—not just for the rural masses but for urban dwellers as well. (If in doubt, glance at the matrimonial ads in any of our newspapers!)

      Of course, by sacred, one does not mean only the religious but the primordial as well. Religion is perhaps the most facile path to the world of the non-manifest, but it is not the only one. In fact, as Europe has increasingly distanced itself from religion over the last two centuries, the primordial has become a fecund source of the mythic. This is why Picasso and Matisse in their paintings, Stravinsky in his music, and Le Corbusier in his architecture, intuitively searched out the primitive. They wanted to find the sacred.

      Another fertile breeding ground of the sacred is nature. There is something intrinsically awesome in mountain ranges like the Himalayas, and in great seas and oceans, that triggers the metaphysical in us, and turns our thoughts towards the non-manifest. Certainly, the love of the English for their landscape and their sensitivity to it (perhaps harking back to the tree worship of the Druids?) is arguably one of the most mythic and sacred of their values. And in Scandinavia, the wellspring of the metaphysical is not only landscape (e.g., the fjords of Norway, the northern lights of Lapland) but also climate—hence the dark winters of Sweden reflected in the brooding films of Ingmar Bergman, with their epic struggles of good and evil. So also for us here in India, the word ‘aakash’ conveys much more than just ‘sky’. To walk on a seashore in the evening, or to cross a desert and arrive at a house built around a courtyard, is an extraordinary experience. At such a moment, subtle responses are set off in our minds, responses conditioned by thousands of generations of life on this planet. Perhaps they are the half-forgotten memories of a primordial landscape, of a paradise lost. In any event these spaces, open to the sky, condition our perceptions very powerfully, bringing a sense of the ineffable into our lives. Thus, while the symbol of education in North America is the little red school house, in India—as in most of Asia—it is the guru sitting under a tree. Not only is this image of the Lord Buddha under the peepal tree more sensible than the idea of sitting inside a stuffy room, it is also far more conducive to enlightenment.

      In Hinduism, another source of the sacred is the ecstasy of physical union. This has always been central to Tantric philosophy. In Sri Yantra, the greatest of all the geometric depictions of cosmic order used as aids for meditation, this ecstasy is depicted as the interpenetrations of nine triangles, four facing upward and five downward, together symbolizing the union of Shiva and Shakti and representing the creative energy that created the manifest world. In this century, these ancient sources of the non-manifest were reincarnated in the novels of D.H. Lawrence, who through sex, through nature, through the primordial, strove to rediscover the sacred in the midst of an industrialized society.

      All these sources of the non-manifest are also present in Hinduism, which can be described as a general theory incorporating in a pluralistic fashion a great number of subsystems, including animism and nature worship. Thus, to the Hindu, there is not only a sacred geometry (e.g., the mandalas, which we will examine presently) but a sacred geography as well, consisting of mountains, lakes, the confluence of rivers. Each of these makes the presence of the sacred vivid within the context of our everyday lives.

      It is the main purport of this essay that this sacred realm is of fundamental importance to any understanding of traditional Indian architecture—and, by extension, to the rest of our built environment. The sacred is neither public nor private, though it qualifies both immeasurably by engaging the mythic dimensions inherent in the non-manifest.

      II

      Mankind has always been fascinated with the invisible, the unknown, the unknowable. Perhaps, as the economist E.F. Schumacher has pointed out, this reflects the hierarchy we experience in the very process of living, as we move along the natural progression from stone to plant to animal to human being. Stones are, by our definition, no more than the material they comprise (if there is a secret life of stones, we are unaware of it). Plants, consist of physical materials, with a new entity added—life!—and the journey towards the invisible has begun. Animals consist of materials, plus life, plus motivation. With humankind, there is yet another entity—self-awareness—which puts us in the world of the unseen. For everything essential in our fellow human beings—their thoughts, emotions, aspirations, fantasies—are invisible to us. These ‘invisibilia’ are of infinitely greater power and significance than the visibilia of everyday life.

      Vastu-purush-mandalas

      64 squares

      81 squares

      Man, СКАЧАТЬ