A Handbook of Indian Art/Section 1/Appendix

by Ernest Binfield Havell

APPENDIX

THE LOTUS DOME

The symbolism of the lotus flower and leaf is universal in Indian poetry, sculpture, and painting. It is especially applied to the rising or setting sun, which is likened to a lotus flower floating on the cosmic waters—hence the poetic expression of the Buddha's or Vishnu's or Siva's "lotus-foot." The similarity in form of the dormer windows and gable-ends of Indian cottages, when roofed with bent bambu rafters, to the sun's disc as it touches the horizon was doubtless the reason why they were so extensively used as a decorative motive in early Indian art, and why subsequently in Mahāyānist and Hindu art the same form was adapted as the aureole or glory for a Bodhisattva or Deva image.

The hideous archæological terms borrowed from Fergusson, such as "horse-shoe" arch and "bulbous" or "swelling" dome, are meaningless and misleading in their application to Indian artistic symbolism. Mr. K. A. C. Cresswell, in the Indian Antiquary for July 1915, attempts to disprove the theory of the Indian origin of the lotus dome by showing that Timūr, in his buildings at Samarkand, made his craftsmen follow the design of the great wooden dome of the Ummayad Mosque at Damascus; ergo, he argues, Timūr could not possibly have had in his mind the smaller and inconspicuous solid domes of Ajantā, or any domes he saw in India. Dr. Vincent Smith, pronouncing judgment on the evidence brought forward, condemns the Indian theory as "purely fanciful and opposed to clear evidence," and relegates my "erroneous theory" to a footnote.^[1] The question is not, however, disposed of so easily. Timūr's excursions as an amateur architect are interesting as an historical episode, but have nothing to do with the origin of ancient craft traditions. Mr. Creswell and Dr. Vincent Smith approach the subject from the old standpoint of academic "styles," which has long been discarded by the expert architectural historian. The question to be decided is not what style or fashion of those days appealed to Timur's architectural fancy, but what influence the many centuries of Buddhist temple craftsmanship had upon the living building traditions of Western Asia. It cannot have been an entirely negligible factor, as Mr. Creswell assumes. Arabian architecture, like most Arabian culture, was derivative. The dome of the great mosque at Damascus, built early in the eighth century a.d., was certainly not an invention of Saracenic builders, or the first of its kind. The miniature stūpa-domes at Ajantā exhibit the same constructive principle, though they themselves are only a sculptor's representation of real structural domes, with a bambu or wooden framework, which were probably built in thousands by Buddhist temple craftsmen of the same and earlier periods, not only in India, but wherever Buddhism was planted in Asia. If it be granted that these Ajantā domes are not mere fanciful creations of a sculptor's imagination, like the decorative motives of the Italian Renaissance, but exact representations of contemporary buildings—a proposition which can hardly be disputed—it follows that the original domes must have been hollow structural ones, built in the first instance upon a bambu or wooden framework, for it is a physical impossibility to place a solid dome of brick, stone, plaster, or wood, and of a similar design, over a life-size image. The only question to be decided, then, is by what method such hollow domes of large size could have been made structurally possible? Certainly bent bambu ribs must have been used originally to produce the characteristic curve of the dome, just as they were used to form the lotus-leaf arch, or window of early Buddhist buildings, and are used in the roofing of wooden Indian cottages. The use of radiating wooden or bambu ties, like the spokes of a wheel, is suggested in several of the earliest Indian stūpas, e.g. the ancient Jain stūpa found near Mathurā: they would have been a necessary means of producing stability in bambu or wooden structures of this kind, and the symbolism is peculiarly appropriate for a Buddhist shrine. An inner dome, such as is used in Persia at the present day, to serve as a support for the wheel and for the king-post to which the ribs of the dome were attached at the crown, is a natural development of the same structural principle. But that Persia borrowed the lotus dome from India is certain, for bent bambu in roof-construction is peculiarly an Indian method. Its application to domes is clearly indicated in the domed canopy shown on the Sānchī gateway (Pl. XXI, b), which is the prototype of the so-called Dravidian temple dome and also of the Ajantā stūpa-domes.

The appropriate name, "lotus dome," is not my invention: it was given to it by Indian craftsmen who worshipped the rising sun as the mystic world-lotus and carved its petals at the neck (griva) and crown (mahā-padma) of the dome. The Indian lotus dome is the technical modification of the primitive hemispherical dome of Mesopotamia, due to the use of bambu and thatch instead of clay in the forest asrams. In the same way the curvilinear sikhara is the technical modification of the conical hut of Mesopotamian and Persian villages. In both cases the forms were fully developed constructively in India many centuries before Indian craftsmen were pressed into the service of Islam and applied the same principle to the roofing of mosques in Arabia and Persia, and eventually to mosques in India.

1. Akbar the Great Mogul, p. 435.