Encompassing a Fractal World

This webpage explores fractal aspects of Hindu temple architecture, examining multiple archetypes and geometry of recursion. It is primarily about architectural design, religious symbolism and imagination. It concerns religious imagination involved in some of the ideas and plans used in Hindu temples. It is not intended to speak to issues of social justice, or economic questions. It is not intended to imply that all temples are the same, or that all temples are perfect institutions. Other studies exist which treat those topics. This short study can offer only a cursory suggestion of the intricasies of the symbol system, the modes of measuring units and proportions, and the reflection of the whole in some of the parts.

Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, 2023

2014

The structural order followed by nature, also adopted in the construction of Hindu temples, was to depict the ultimate truth. This became possible by following fractal geometry. Fractal geometry plays a major part in the transmission of the symbolic intended meanings from the visibly manifested art and architecture of the temple, to the intellect of human beings, for perception in the correct sense. This paper is therefore an attempt to integrate and analyse the fields of study of, temple architecture, fractal geometry, symbolism, human perception of architectural expression, and temple concept through cosmology and philosophy. It is advocated that the use of fractal geometry in the construction of temples, and sculptures adorning them, helps in imparting the temple concept and idea in its correct value.

Journal of Religious History, 2020

Hindu Ritual at the Margins is a thoughtful and fascinating collection of essays situated in the growing field of ritual studies as a subset of the study of religion. This work offers a variety of approaches to forms of Hindu ritual performed in marginal contexts, highlighting a complexity to Hinduism that has not traditionally been explored in depth by Western scholars. The book is divided into three sections/ themes: "Transformations: History and Identity" (Chapters 1-3); "Innovations: Globalization and the Hindu Diaspora" (Chapters 4-6); and "Reconsiderations: Context and Theory" (Chapters 7-9). Leslie C. Orr's chapter, "The Medieval Murukaṉ: The Place of a God among His Tamil Worshippers," explores the medieval practices of worship of the god Murukaṉ. Literary sources on the subject of Murukaṉ and his worship between the seventh and fourteenth centuries are largely non-existent, due likely to Sanskritisation and the subsuming of Murukaṉ and other deities into the Saiva pantheon. In their absence, Orr turns to an examination of temple art and inscription to uncover "the variations, shifting patterns, and significance of the worship of Murukaṉ within the ritual context of the medieval temple" (p. 22). By situating the history of ritual and worship during this period within the context of premedieval literature and the later resurgence in popularity of Murukan, Orr successfully highlights the complex relationship of Murukan with other deities within the Hindu pantheon, and with his worshippers. In Chapter 2, "A Tale of Two Weddings: Gendered Performances of Tulsi's Marriage to Krsna," Tracy Pintchman focuses on two different types of ritual performance of the marriage between the basil plant goddess Tulsī to Kṛs : ṇa, as observed during fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 1998. Pintchman examines the visual elements of performance and ritual as reflections upon greater notions of identity, comparing the performance of Tulsi's marriage by female householdersfor whom the performance may have a "deep social resonance" (p. 55) to a performance by male renunciants. "The Role of Ritual in Two 'Blockbuster' Hindi Films" by Philip Lutgendorf examines the performance of ritual within well-known Hindi films, with regard to its function "in both a narrative and prescriptive manner" (p. 59). The chapter's focuses are on the performance of fasting in Jai Santoshi Maa (Hail to the Mother of Satisfaction), and the performance of wedding rituals in Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! (Who Am I to You?). In doing so, Lutgendorf takes an innovative approach to the study of films that have been the subject of numerous analyses and interpretations.

In Alan Race & Paul Knitter, eds., New Paths for Interreligious Theology: Perry Schmidt-Leukel’s Fractal Interpretation of Religious Diversity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis), pp. 100-114, 2019

In his thought-provoking book Religious Pluralism and Interreligious Theology (2017), Perry Schmidt-Leukel breaks new ground in highlighting the pluralist tendencies in various religions and in developing an intriguing "fractal" paradigm for understanding religious diversity. This essay tries to identify some of the strengths and weaknesses of Schmidt-Leukel's views on religious pluralism and interreligious theology. Part I argues that his account of the pluralist and inclusivist strains in modern Hinduism is based on a selective and somewhat inaccurate interpretation of the views of Sri Ramakrishna and his famous disciple, Swami Vivekananda. Contrary to Schmidt-Leukel, I contend that both Ramakrishna and Vivekananda championed a full-blown doctrine of religious pluralism that has immense contemporary relevance. Part II turns the tables on Schmidt-Leukel by critically examining his fractal model of interreligious theology from the pluralist standpoint of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda.

Social Anthropology, 2005

Timothy Edensor, Uma Kothari and Ares Kalandides (eds.) 2020, The Routledge Handbook of Place. London: Routledge, 2020

The sacred landscape combines the absoluteness of space, the relativeness of places and the comprehensiveness of landscape. Altogether, this constitutes a 'wholeness' that conveys the inherent and imposed spirit of 'holiness', which here we call 'sacredscapes'; these are regulated and reproduced by those of faith and in their sacred rituals. Accordingly, as adherents of faith within sacred space, we form a sense of ourselves and the sense of our-place at varying scales of space-time. We begin from the local scale, and here we may first experience the sacred message through the spirit of place, its genus loci, and the power of place: place speaks, place communicates. In Hindu cosmology, the Matsya Purāṇa (ca. CE 400) enumerates a large number of sacred places with descriptions of associated schedules, gestures, dreams, and auspicious signs and symbols. The seven sacred cities within this schema (Sapta-purīs) are Mathura, Dvaraka, Ayodhya, Haridvar, Varanasi, Ujjain and Kanchipuram. Rather differently, the twelve most important Shiva abodes are scattered all over India and are known as Jyotir lingas tīrthas, with the four abodes of Vishnu in the four corners of India serving as another group of popular pan-Indian pilgrimage places. This chapter will focus on particularly vivid examples, illustrating Hindu reciprocal relationships between sacred places and the faith system. These are illustrated within the taxonomic frame of sacred places, ritualscapes, festivities, sacred water and aspects of spatial transposition that link locality and universality.

The homogeneity and unity of the whole ritual activity of the Buddhist rNyingmapa populations of Sikkim and Nepal could be found in the pervasiveness of the geometrical crossed threads constructions that we can see as ornaments for dough effigies, animals skulls or isolated in space, inside rNyingmapa's domestic as well as tantric monastic rituals. They can be pure ornamental figures to bring luck and chase bad influences away, or complex constructions with different meanings to lure the demons. One of the paradoxes of these crossed threads constructions is that they can be both container and contents: they can shelter or incorporate momentarily the demonic beings, which are summoned in order to be deceived and destroyed. The aim of this paper is to re-approach rituals with crossed threads called mdos in literary or nam mkha', zor, glud, yas (and eventually, many other local appellations) in Tibetan and non-Tibetan ritual and folk practices. We base our analysis on new and ancient research in Nepal and in Sikkim and we add a comparative perspective, opposing some Sikkimese and less known Nepalese Tamang examples of such rituals with mdos and nam mkha': a divinatory ritual in Sikkim and a ritual for ancestors in Nepal.

The deeper sense of geographic concerns employ to investigate the inherent power of sacred places by searching cosmic geometries embedded in ritual landscapes and the spatial orientations towards astronomical phenomena. Such sacred cities can be considered to be a mesocosm, geometrically linking the celestial realm of the macrocosm with the microcosmic realm of human consciousness and cultural traditions of text, tradition, and rituals. The Hindu literature, both the classical and modern, is full of reverence for ‘Mother India’ (Bhārat Mātā) and ‘Mother Earth’ (Bhū Devī). The ‘land (and the earth)’ is personified goddess. This image, as described in literary tradition, is conceptualised by relating all geographical features as lived and imagined landscapes, viz. mountains, hills, rivers, caves, unique sites, etc. to the mother earth and in that sense those sites and places automatically becomes part of the sacred geography of ancient India (cf. Eck 2012: 11). Every region or place has its own sacred geography where humans meet with the divinities and ultimate emerged the microcosmic web which are always regulated and expanded by the continuity of rituals, festivities and celebrations. Better known expression of the Nature-Man interfaces through spirituality is presented in the form of sacred geometry and maṇḍalas (i.e. geometric arrangements of esoteric symbols or symbolic representations of the abodes of various deities). The sacred landscape combines the absoluteness of space, relativeness of places and comprehensiveness of landscape; thus altogether result to a ‘wholeness’ carrying the inherent and imposed spirit of ‘holiness’, which is to be called ‘sacredscapes’. In Hindu tradition this is called ‘divya kṣetra’ (a pious/ divine territory).