ABSTRACT
Discussions on the religious meaning of the Hindu temple have tended to draw almost exclusively upon two different types of texts. The first group consists largely of technical handbooks on architecture and ritual texts, which themselves may be divided into those associated with the building and consecration of the temple and other forms of architecture, and those that deal with the building and consecration of the Vedic fire altar. The second major group of texts to which scholars have had recourse are of a very different nature: they are the very early philosophical passages and some of the cosmogonic speculations in the BraiullaI,las and Upani~ads. This emphasis on Vedic and ritual material has led to a number of interesting and widely accepted hypotheses: the temple is a model of the cosmos and depicts in visual form the creation of the universe; within, in the 'womb chamber' lies the god in his or her most subtle essence from which the teeming images on the temple walls are manifested. The goal of the devotee is to retrace the cosmic evolution in a reverse process and merge with the subtle godhead; the ascending spire of the temple symbolizes this process, for it leads to the crowning amalaka, itself a symbol of the formless heaven, and in effect a symbol of release. 1
Without rejecting entirely earlier hypotheses about the religious meaning of the Hindu temple, I would like to turn to a very different body of evidence that in fact leads us to almost the opposite conclusions. I would like to tum to purfu,lic stories and descriptions of the abodes of the deities, which I shall argue, point us towards a much more concrete and a much less abstract understanding of the nature of the god within the temple and indeed the various gods and goddesses, mortals and immortals, displayed on the temple
walls. These texts do not talk of meditation and denial of sensual pleasures in quest of union with a formless absolute; they speak instead of paradises that abound in all manner of delights, and of gods that worship and are worshipped, all of radiant unparalleled beauty and all of visible and concrete, sensible form. Before I begin to examine in some detail how the Purfu;las conceptualize the worlds of the gods, I should like to review briefly some of the reasons why I feel that a new model might be useful for understanding temple Hinduism.
