ABSTRACT
If we return to the pur~ic descriptions of heaven, where God lives in a vast palace, I would like to try roughly to follow a generalized pur~c description of heaven as we look at the temple. The spire now goes not only upward but indicates an inward motion; even its lattice tracing recalls the labyrinthine approach to the king in the innermost chamber of the palace. As we make this imaginative journey through heaven to reach the god in his sleeping quarters where he is served only by his most faithful devotees and where he sports with his wife, we must remember that this is only one of the many metaphors for the temple. To accept its plausibility, and you may indeed not wish to do that, by no means excludes other even conflicting interpretations. Like heaven, the temple was not one single thing, but a fluctuating reflection of the worshipper's religious needs. As one text tells us, people were born in heaven in a form that reflected their dying wishes and that reflected the way in which they worshipped god. Some are there as sages, some as gods, some as humans, some as various incarnations of Visnu, the fish, turtle, boar, and so on; some are four-faced like Brahma,
so~e are in the form of the sun god Surya, or Agni, the fire god.27 Perhaps the temple was equally fluid in the religious imagination, sometimes the cosmic man, sometimes the cosmos, and sometimes heaven on earth.
