The Body of God
I am… at bottom ignorant of all this and even somewhat fearful…. But so is the way and the spirit of story-telling which I embody that all it tells of, it pretends to have experienced and to be at home in it.
—Thomas Mann, The Holy Sinner
This study began at Smith College in 1979 when Marylin Martin Rhie, in the Department of Art, and I, in the Department of Religion, decided to teach a course on “Hindu Gods in Text and Image.” We planned to correlate specific religious sculptures and buildings in India with texts, matching them chronologically as closely as possible to see what would emerge. For the Pallava period in the south (ca. 400–900), Rhie suggested we look at two relatively untouched temples in the Pallava capital of Kanchipuram.
One temple is the “Temple of Rajasimha, the Lord” (rajasimheshvara koyil), commonly known today as the Kailasanatha Temple. Its builder, Narasimhavarman Rajasimha, who ruled ca. 680–720, was a devotee of Shiva, had been consecrated as a Maheshvara, and followed the path of Shaiva Siddhanta. His magnificent temple is dated ca. 720. The other temple, built by Nandivarman Pallavamalla (ca. 731–796), is the “Emperor’s Vishnu-house,” which in Tamil is paramecchuravinnagaram and in Sanskrit is vishnugriha. This elegant temple is known today as the Vaikuntha Perumal Temple, and on stylistic grounds Rhie dates it to ca. 770–775.
Since I had been working on Tamil poems composed in the eighth and ninth centuries by the Bhagavata poet-saints known as Alvars, I opted for Pallavamalla’s “Emperor’s Vishnu-house.” I searched through the canon of Alvar poems known as the “Four Thousand Divine Stanzas” (nalayira-divya-prabandha) to find a poem written about it. I found only one, by a poet who “signs” his name as Kalikanri, but is better known as Tirumangai Alvar. The poem appears in his large anthology called Periya Tirumoli (2.9). Tirumangai composed the poem sometime between the completion of the Vishnu-house ca. 770 and Nandivarman’s death in 795–796, perhaps ca. 790. He wrote other poems about Nandivarman’s liturgical acts, and in this one portrays him as still on the throne after an already lengthy reign. In the sixty-first year of his rule (792–793), Nandivarman responded to Tirumangai’s repeated requests and gave land to sixteen Brahmins to form a village.1 Perhaps the poet thanked him with this poem. We shall discuss Tirumangai further in chapter 3.
The poem is untitled and consists of ten four-line stanzas, nine of which follow a thematic pattern divided between two pairs of lines. The tenth stanza inverts the pattern; it is the stanza in which the poet “signs” his name and records the beneficial results of reciting it devoutly (the phala shruti). It was this thematic pattern that immediately caught my attention: God is the subject of the first two lines, and Nandivarman as God’s servant is the subject of the second two lines. This closely resembles the architectural arrangement of the Vishnu-house the poem celebrates.
The Emperor’s Vishnu-house is not huge by later temple standards, but is impressive (Figure I.1). In contrast to Rajasimha’s open courtyard surrounding a mountainous palace for his Master, Nandivarman built his Master’s residence as a three-dimensional mandala one enters and moves through. The tall prakara wall establishing the mandala’s boundaries is about eighty-seven feet north to south and about one hundred eight feet west to east (Figure I.2). The west-facing vimana palace enclosed by it is about forty-seven feet square at the base. This square is the mandala’s center. At first it appears distorted because the major portion of its western side extends westward to form a porch.2 When this porch is conceptually collapsed back into the western side, however, the center as a square emerges clearly.
FIGURE I.1. The Paramecchuravinnagaram in 1909. From Rea 1909.
FIGURE I.2. Ground plan of Vishnu-house mandala within prakara wall, and added mandapa. Revised from Rea 1909 and Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture, edited by Michael W. Meister and coordinated by M. A. Dhaky; part 1: South India: Lower Dravidadesa (200 B.C.–A.D. 1324), vol. 1, Text (New Delhi and Philadelphia: American Institute of Indian Studies and University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), figure 45, p. 69.
A mandala may be drawn on a flat surface and erased afterward. Examples are the kolam, an ornamental figure drawn with powder each morning at the entrance of homes, and the mandala similarly drawn on an altar to serve as the residence of devas during rituals prescribed by the agamas. But a mandala can also be a permanent three-dimensional structure like the Emperor’s Vishnu-house. A devotee can walk around it, walk into it, and walk up and down it.
Devotees in Nandivarman’s day who knew the Bhagavata Purana would recognize this scripture in the fifty-six sculpted panels on the vimana and its porch. Originally the Vishnu-house was painted, and one can only imagine today how dazzling it must have been, for it was meant to transform the consciousness of devout and learned viewers. It was designed and painted to seize their six senses of touch, taste, sight, hearing, smell, and thought, and then focus them on Deva or God, who is the subject of every spoken word and material form.
The only entrance into the Emperor’s Vishnu-house mandala is through the western gateway of the enclosing prakara wall. Once inside, viewers stand inside a compact and bounded realm where the perspective is at all times partial, shifting, and intimate. The Emperor’s Vishnu-house is the entire mandala arena defined by the enclosing prakara, but God is believed to live at its center. He does so in two ways: the vimana palace is His body; and He lives inside the vimana as three black stone icons. God’s body as palace has three stories (tritala-vimana) (Figure I.3). On each story there is a sanctum (garbhagriha) housing God’s body as icon in a specific posture. In the bottom floor sanctum He sits. In the middle floor sanctum He reclines. In the top floor sanctum He stands. These three iconic bodies and postures dwelling inside a palace that itself is a body alerts us to the fact that we are probing a realm of mystery. The Emperor’s Vishnu-house is composed of stones, and these stones address Bhagavatas of considerable learning and sophistication in the capital of a powerful empire, which by this time has had its hand in Southeast Asian commerce and politics for generations. How these stones address the wealthy and sophisticated Bhagavatas of the Pallava capital and court, some of whom may have spent time in Sumatra, Java, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, is the subject of this study. But this realm’s mystery will remain a vision (darshana) words cannot encompass or explain, because it is the perception of God.
FIGURE I.3. Three sanctums on three floors facing west. Based on Rea 1909.
In the ground plan of the Vaikuntha Perumal Temple arena shown in Figure I.2, the original Parameccuravinnagaram Mandala is enclosed by the thickly shaded boundary depicting the prakara wall. A hall (mandapa) and a porch (ardhamandapa) have been added as an entrance leading to the prakara’s gateway on the western side. Inside the prakara is a covered walkway running along all four sides, which displays the history of the entire Pallava Dynasty. Next to it at a lower level is a drainage moat that surrounds the vimana palace to capture rainwater falling from it (Figure I.4). Steps on the bridge leading from the covered walkway to the vimana’s porch descend into it so that when it is dry devotees may use it as a pathway for circumambulating the base of the vimana. If the moat were plugged, however, this drainage would be like a moat surrounding a palace, or an ocean surrounding a mountain. The latter appears to be its original meaning. At the center stands the vimana’s square base; the central portion of the western side has been pulled to the west to form a porch (Figure I.2).
FIGURE I.4. Moat facing northeast with vimana to the left, covered walkway to the right, and bridge on the eastern side without descending steps. Source unidentified.
The mandala of the Emperor’s Vishnu-house thus falls into two parts divided by the drainage pathway, moat, or “ocean.” The three-story palace stands at the center as God’s body with fifty-six sculpted panels on its exterior surface. The enclosing prakara walkway portrays ruling Pallavas facing God’s body as His servants; most prominently displayed is Nandivarman. Tirumangai’s poem follows a similar thematic structure. The first two lines of each stanza focus on the iconic presence of God residing in the Vishnu-house, and the second two lines focus on Nandivarman as His servant. Both building and poem draw attention first to deity and then to ruler, and this bipartite structure is new in the eighth century.
Nandivarman’s predecessor Rajasimha built the “Shore Temple” at Mamallapuram and had small panels carved inside its prakara, but they are badly worn, few in number, and difficult to interpret. The sequence of historical panels Nandivarman carved, however, is unprecedented in the vitality of its details, and in its function as a visual record of a dynasty’s history. Similarly, none of Tirumangai’s many other poems gives such a balanced attention to deity and ruler, or to historical details found in written records of the time. This striking parallelism of temple and poem gives rise to the questions that produced this study: Did Tirumangai record the organization of the Emperor’s Vishnu-house in the structure of his poem? If so, did he record its meanings as intended by its designers? Does his poem verbally reproduce the Paramecchuravinnagaram we now know as the Vaikuntha Perumal Temple?
Once asked, these questions would not go away. Marylin Rhie and I taught the course together a few times and I came back to the questions as time allowed. Initially, the most intriguing and problematic aspect of the temple’s organization was the significance of the difference in posture of the three icons placed in sanctums arranged vertically and hidden from view inside the vimana. Other Vishnu-houses with three floors were constructed later with icons in the same postures, but they were arranged in differing sequences. None of them, moreover, faced west as the Emperor’s Vishnu-house does. This raises another question: What difference does the temple’s west-facing orientation make to its intended meaning?
To answer these questions, I turned to the early reports on the Vaikuntha Perumal Temple by Alexander Rea and worked through C. Minakshi’s careful analysis of its sculpted dynastic history. I studied in the histories of India’s art, and read T. Goudriaan on the Vaikhanasa Agama and H. Daniel Smith and Sanjukta Gupta on the Pancharatra Agama. I explored the history of the Pallavas and of the capital Kanchipuram, read the poems of the Alvars connected to the realm (Pey, Poykai, Putam, and Tirumangai), puzzled over Pallava texts inscribed on stone and copper, and read the historical studies of T. V. Mahalingam and others. Eventually I realized three things. First, with the exception of C. Minakshi no one knew much about the Emperor’s Vishnu-house, and few had given it sustained attention. Second, some older assumptions and judgments about India’s religious history needed to be reexamined. And third, little was known about the way liturgies for the worship of icons had shaped the design of the buildings in which they were housed, or about the change from one liturgical system to another in the same temple.
Thus far the study had been entirely out of books. In 1983, however, I was in Chennai (then Madras) researching another topic and went to visit the Vaikuntha Perumal Temple in Kanchipuram with my wife, Lori Divine. I took the poem and she took her camera. The temple was then, as it is now, under the jurisdiction of the Archaeological Survey of India, yet worship continues there and we met the priest who led it. He was the late M. R. Sundaravarada Bhattachari (or Sundaravaratha Pattachari). When I explained in my inadequate Tamil that I thought Tirumangai had come there and recorded the specific meaning of the temple in his poem, Sundaravarda Bhattachari’s enthusiastic response told me that I could not let the question drop.
He knew Tirumangai’s poem about his temple by memory and recited it as he led us around the vimana. He took us from the bottom floor to the middle floor, animatedly explaining the correspondences he saw between poem and building. I did not understand well everything he said, but I did understand from his explanations that the poem does in fact record the icons according to the sequence of their three postures moving from the bottom sanctum upward.
Sundaravarda Bhattachari’s enthusiastic graciousness toward my efforts to understand his Vaikuntha Perumal Temple did not wane, nor has that of his son S. Devanathan Bhattachari, who has replaced his father as officiating priest. This is not to say, however, that he or his son would agree with all I say about it. Much of what he said at our first meeting revealed meanings in the poem that I had not seen, and each time I visited the temple his explanations revealed more about the building. Yet some of his modes of interpretation differ from the historical and critical methodology I have followed. As one example, his family follows the Vaikhanasa Agama, but I argue that it was designed according to the Pancharatra Agama. As another, he would use details to hang the meaning of an entire sculpted scene from what seemed to me to be a very slender thread. Our approaches to his temple were very different. He was Vaikuntha Perumal’s hereditary servant and voiced the oral knowledge of a worldview accepted as received. I was a scholar seeking knowledge from a stance that questions all worldviews, including the one it has received.
Due to the groundbreaking scholarship of H. Daniel Smith, I have long suspected that the liturgical basis for the worship of God as Krishna in southern India is the Pancharatra Agama, and that it underlies the poems of the Alvars. The Emperor’s Vishnu-house appeared to me to confirm this hypothesis. The first sculpted figure met in the clockwise (pradakshina) circumambulation of the bottom sanctum, for example, is an enthroned Snake facing north sitting casually in a state of mild inebriation. In the Pancharatra system, this Snake corresponds to the Plower (samkarshana) formation (vyuha), the first of three God makes to transform himself into the universe and to act within it. This single yet highly significant correlation of theology and sculpted program at the sacred center of the mandala confirmed other evidence I observed. I therefore looked to the Pancharatra Agama to find the liturgical basis for the temple’s design.
Some of the fifty-six sculpted panels on the vimana and its porch have been damaged by the weather, and important details have been clarified, interpreted, obscured, or even erased by restorations, most recently in 1998. Many panels were opaque to me, but the meaning of some was obvious. Among these are the depictions of Gajendra being saved from the “grasper” (graha), of the Churning of the Milk Ocean, of Man-lion grasping and disemboweling Hiranyakashipu (Golden Clothes), of Krishna dancing on Kaliya, of the Dwarf as Trivikrama, and of Madhusudana about to slay Madhu and Kaitabha. I assumed that the vimana’s designers had placed the panels with a coherent program in mind, but I had no idea what it was, and did not want to rely on guesses. The panels that I did recognize, however, gave me a place to begin, and so I turned to their narratives as found in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and in the collections of “ancient lore” (purana) common to devotees of Krishna.
Among the latter, I gave special attention to the Shrimad Bhagavata Purana. It is the most influential of these puranas; and at the time most scholars agreed that it appeared in southern India sometime between the eighth and tenth centuries and is in some way connected to the poems of the Alvars. I also studied the Alvar poems with the temple in mind, returning again with special attention to those poems associated with Kanchipuram. For accurate reference, I began to make a detailed description of each panel based on personal observations and on the photographs of others.
A leave from teaching sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1988–1989 allowed me to focus on this study, and I was led to a hermeneutic breakthrough. Careful reading of the stories in the Bhagavata Purana, especially the prayers, revealed that it was more intimately connected to the Pancharatra Agama than I had thought. Moreover, as I read the stories that explained the sculpted panels whose subjects I recognized, the details of the panels in turn taught me how to read the stories. Sculpted texts and written texts were interpreting one another. At times the detailed correspondence between Bhagavata Purama narratives and prayers and their sculpted depictions astonished me.
I began to see that the designers of the vimana had used a specific episode to encode an interpretation of the entire story, and that a story often begins and ends in places I had never noted. Some of the stories refer to other stories, and as I read those stories in the Bhagavata Purana, some of them explained panels on the vimana I had previously found opaque. In some cases, the newly decoded panels were nearby on the same wall, or were in a corresponding place on an opposite wall. Their locations were pointing me toward a systematic program of sculptures expressing the meanings of the vimana’s four sides, and a pattern of thought was beginning to emerge. I did not yet fully understand this pattern, but the sculptural program obviously corresponded to the Pancharatra theology of God’s four vyuha formations.
This evidence finally persuaded me to formulate a working hypothesis: the sculpted program of the vimana and porch document a single yet complex religious vision consistent with the Bhagavad-gita, the Bhagavata Purana, the Pancharatra Agama, and the poems of the Alvars. To test it I decided to see if, on the basis of these materials alone, I could plausibly explain the vimana’s entire sculpted program on its three floors, including the sitting, reclining, and standing postures of its three icons. After much pondering and many misjudgments, the pattern emerged and the “code” of the Paramecchuravinnagaram revealed itself.
It became apparent to me that this west-facing three-story palace sponsored by Nandivarman Pallavamalla about 770 was intended as an architectural “summa” of Bhagavata Dharma developed by that time. Moreover, it was designed to document Nandivarman’s own liturgical career as a Bhagavata, explicitly through sculpted panels on the prakara and implicitly through sculpted panels on the middle-floor sanctum. To persuade anyone else of this, however, I knew would not be easy. Persuasion would depend on the explanatory power of the “code,” on its ability to account for the details of sculpture, narrative, and design in a manner consistent with the texts and with Pancharatra liturgies. As a result, this work is an exercise in reading architectural, sculptural, written, and performed “texts” closely in order to understand the vision this Vishnu-house was intended to embody for sophisticated Bhagavatas of eighth-century Kanchipuram.