Seen from a distance, a Hindu temple is a mountain. Seen from inside, it is a cave. Between the two lies one of the most carefully thought-out buildings any civilisation has produced: a structure designed not to hold a congregation but to carry a single person from the noise of the street to a small dark room where a god is awake.
The builders worked from texts, the Shilpa Shastras and Vastu Shastras, that fixed the plan, the proportions and even the placement of each sculpture, and adapted those rules to local stone and taste until two great families of style emerged: the Nagara of the north and the Dravida of the south, with a third, the Vesara, between them. This article explains the shared idea first, then the styles, then what the building does to the person walking through it.
The temple as a diagram of the cosmos
Every temple begins on the ground as a Vastu Purusha mandala, a square grid of usually sixty-four or eighty-one smaller squares. The story behind it tells of a formless being who grew so vast that the gods pinned him face down to the earth, each sitting on a limb to hold him there; he was named Vastu Purusha, the spirit of the site, and promised worship in every building raised on him. In the grid, the central squares belong to Brahma and the surrounding rings to the gods who held the limbs. The square stands for the ordered cosmos, and the temple is laid out as a model of that order.
Above the central square of Brahma rises the sanctum, and above the sanctum the tower; the line from the deity's image up through the tower to the finial is the axis of the world. The temple, in the texts' own language, is the body of the god, its parts named for feet, legs, torso, neck and head.
The womb and the mountain
The sanctum is the garbhagriha, the "womb chamber". It is deliberately small, square, windowless and plain. Only the deity and the priest are inside; the devotee stands at the door. After the carved exuberance of the exterior, the bareness is a shock, and that is the intention. The garbhagriha is a cave, a seed, a womb: the place of origin, where there is nothing to look at but the one who is looked at. Light comes from the lamp alone.
Over the garbhagriha stands the tower, the shikhara in the north and the vimana in the south. It is a mountain, Meru at the centre of the universe or Kailasa where Shiva sits, and temples are sometimes simply named Meru or Kailasa to make the point. In front of the sanctum is the mandapa, the pillared hall where devotees gather; a porch, the ardhamandapa or "half hall", leads into it, and a narrow vestibule, the antarala, joins hall to sanctum. Many temples have a pradakshina patha, a passage around the sanctum, so that the worshipper can circle the deity clockwise, keeping the god on the right hand.
Two styles and a blend
Nagara: the curving towers of the north
The northern shikhara curves inward as it rises, like a beehive or a bud, and is crowned by a large ribbed disc, the amalaka (named for the amla fruit), with a pot-finial, the kalasha, above it. In its simplest form the tower is a single curving spire; later builders clustered many small spires around the central one, so that the temple rises like a mountain range rather than a single peak. Nagara temples usually stand on a high plinth, often without any enclosure wall, and the whole building is treated as sculpture.
The finest examples belong to the tenth to thirteenth centuries. At Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh the Chandela kings built temples whose clustered towers rise in waves and whose walls carry bands of figures. The Sun Temple at Konark in Odisha was built in the thirteenth century as a stone chariot for Surya with twelve pairs of carved wheels and seven horses; its tower has fallen but the hall before it still stands. Somnath on the Gujarat coast, destroyed and rebuilt many times, was raised again in the last century in the western Nagara manner of the Solanki kings.
Dravida: the gateway cities of the south
The southern style began under the Pallavas at Mahabalipuram in the seventh and eighth centuries and reached its first glory under the Cholas. Its vimana is a stepped pyramid of diminishing storeys, each ringed with miniature shrines, capped by a domed or octagonal crown and a finial. The temple is enclosed by walls, the prakaras, and entered through gateways topped by towers, the gopurams. In later centuries the gopurams grew taller than the vimana itself, so that the holiest point is the lowest and the grandest towers stand at the edges, announcing the temple from miles away. Inside the walls are tanks, kitchens, shops, and halls of hundreds or a thousand pillars.
The Brihadeeswara temple at Thanjavur, built by the Chola king Raja Raja in the early eleventh century, is the exception that shows the rule: its vimana towers over everything else at some sixty-six metres, and a great monolithic Nandi faces the sanctum from his own pavilion. The Meenakshi temple at Madurai, largely of the Nayaka period in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is a walled city of brightly painted gopurams and a thousand-pillared hall. Srirangam, on its island in the Kaveri, has seven concentric prakaras and twenty-one gopurams; it is the largest functioning temple in India, and whole streets of the town lie inside its walls.
Vesara, Hoysala and the rock-cut temples
Between north and south, the Deccan builders mixed the two. At Pattadakal in Karnataka the Chalukyas of the eighth century built Nagara and Dravida temples side by side. The Hoysala kings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made the blend their own at Belur and Halebidu: star-shaped plans, low towers, pillars turned on a lathe, and walls of soft soapstone carved so densely with elephants, horsemen, scrolls and scenes from the epics that the building seems made of lace. Some scholars call this fusion Vesara.
The oldest temples were not built but cut. At Ellora in Maharashtra the Rashtrakutas in the eighth century carved the Kailasa temple downward out of a single basalt hillside, removing the rock around it until a complete Dravida temple with courtyard, gateway, halls and tower stood free. Elephanta, Badami and the shore at Mahabalipuram hold other rock-cut shrines. They make the point literally: the temple is a cave that has become a mountain.
The furniture of the courtyard
Certain elements stand before nearly every temple. The dhvaja stambha is the flagstaff, often sheathed in metal, that marks the temple from afar and carries the deity's banner during festivals. Beside it is the bali peetha, a stone altar where cooked rice is offered to the guardian spirits of the site, so that they are fed before the god is approached. And between the flagstaff and the door sits the deity's vahana, the vehicle: Nandi the bull before Shiva, Garuda before Vishnu, the mouse before Ganesha, the lion before the Goddess. The vahana always faces the sanctum, in perpetual darshan, and the devotee who stands behind him joins his gaze.
At the very top of the tower is the kalasha, a pot, recalling the vessel of nectar and the vessel of water set up in every puja. When a temple is consecrated, or reconsecrated every twelve years in the south, sanctified water is poured over the kalasha in the kumbhabhishekam, and the building is brought to life from the top down.
Reading the sculpture
The walls of a temple are not decorated at random. The eight dikpalas, guardians of the directions, stand at their proper places: Indra on the east, Agni at the south-east, Yama on the south, and so round to Kubera on the north and Ishana at the north-east. The deity's own forms occupy the niches: on a southern Shiva temple, Dakshinamurti the teacher faces south, Lingodbhava or Vishnu faces west, Brahma faces north. Ganga and Yamuna wash the pilgrim at the doorframe; a kirtimukha, the "face of glory", grins above the lintel to devour whatever is unworthy. Mithunas, loving couples, appear on the walls as signs of auspiciousness and plenty; at Khajuraho a small fraction are openly erotic, and the simplest reading is that the outer walls show the whole of worldly life, desire included, which the pilgrim passes by on the way in. The carving grows sparser as you approach the sanctum until, at the door of the garbhagriha, it stops.
The walk from light to stillness
Now put the pieces together and walk. From far off you see the tower or gopuram against the sky. You pass through the gateway into the outer court, bright, loud, full of people and stalls and the smell of camphor and jasmine. You cross the courtyard past the flagstaff and the vahana, perhaps circling the whole temple clockwise first. You climb into the mandapa, where the ceiling is lower and the light dimmer and the pillars close around you like a forest. You pass through the narrowing antarala. And you stop at a doorway, barefoot, among a crowd that has gone quiet, looking into a dark room lit by a single flame, in which the god is looking back.
Each threshold has stripped away a little noise and a little light, and the carved abundance of the outside has given way to the bare interior, the way the senses are meant to give way to the self. The temple is a mountain outside and a cave within because that is the journey it was built to make you take.
If you go
Walk the outside of the temple before you enter, clockwise, and find the dikpalas at the corners and the main deity's forms in the niches. Look for the vahana and stand behind it for a moment. Look up at the kalasha. In the mandapa, notice how the hall has been built to slow you down. And at the sanctum door, do not rush: the whole building exists for those few seconds.