Temple Consecration Rituals in Ancient India: Text and Archaeology.

• Author: Willis, Michael
• Position: Book review

Temple Consecration Rituals in Ancient Italia: Text and Archaeology. By ANNA A. SLACZKA. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 2007. Pp. 401, 40 plates.

This book, based on Slaczka's PhD dissertation at Leiden University under K. R. van Kooij (as the author notes in her acknowledgements), is a study centered on a text called (he Kasyapasilpa. This is a South Indian treatise, dating to the eleventh or twelfth century, dealing with architecture, art, and related rituals. Slaczka is interested in temple construction and consecration and for this purpose has studied three chapters of the Kasyapasilpa, providing it critical edition, commentary, and translation of the relevant chapters based on nine manuscripts and six transcriptions in South Indian libraries. The edition, commentary, and translation are the core of the book, presented in Chapter 4. The stage for this is set, after a brief introduction, by a discussion of the character, authorship, and date of the Kasyapasilpa in Chapter 2. Slaczka then turns, in Chapter 3, to the available editions of the text (all unsatisfactory), her manuscript sources, critical apparatus, and an account of the errors and unusual grammatical forms typical of the Kasyapasilpa.

In Chapter 5 Slaczka broadens the horizon of the study by looking at the prathamestaka, garbhanyasa, and murdhestaka rituals in other texts. Broadly speaking, these deal with the laying of the first building-block, the placing of deposits beneath the temple sanctum and image, and the crowning of the temple with a "headstone." As one might expect, these actions are dealt with in slightly different ways in different texts, and Slaczka's discussion gives insight into the cultural density of the tradition in which these practices were transmitted. In Chapter 7 the author embarks on a comparison of construction rituals in India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia, drawing on archaeological evidence. The effort to coordinate text and archaeology is, of course, essential, because without it we cannot quite understand what we read in the texts or properly interpret what we might uncover or see on the ground at temple sites. The end matter includes some useful tables and a massive catalogue of archaeological finds over one hundred pages.

As will be...