"This world is the image of that, and vice versa." (Aitareya Aranyaka, VIII.2, Keith)

Great Stupa at Sanchi

Edifice architecture, pneumatics, and the central axis mundi.

"Everything that exists derives its reality from a transcendent, supra-empirical principle and translates or expresses that principle in accordance with the limitations and modalities that characterize its own level of existence."

In the traditional Indian view, a building, if it is properly concieved, satisfies both a physical and metaphysical indigence. It has a twofold function: it provides 'commodity, firmness, and delight' so as to serve man's psychosomatic, emotional and aesthetic needs, and also supra-empirical principles.

In this view an adequately designed building will embody meaning. It will express the manner in which the phenomenal world relates to the Real and how the One 'fragments' into multiplicity; it will carry intimations of the non-duality (adwaita) of the sensible and the supra-sensible domains.

The fully functioning building will aid the attainment of the intellectual conciousness that the Indian traditions consider to constitute the goal and perfection of human life, that non-differentiated awareness or state of being in which there is no longer any distinction of knower from known, or being from knowing.

To the extent that the building embodies meanings conducive to an intellectual vision of the non-duality of principial Unity and manifested multiplicity, it functions as a symbol, that is to say, as a representation of reality on another. The belief that the building is capable of performing this symbolic function is founded on the Indian doctrine that there exists an anlagous, or anagogical corespondence between the physical and the metaphysical orders of reality, that the sensible world is a similitude of the intellectual, in such a way that:

"This world is the image of that, and vice versa." (Aitareya Aranyaka, VIII.2, Keith)

Work cited:

'The Symbolism of the Stupa'
by Adrian Snodgrass
Delhi, 1992
Highly recommended reading for all who are interested in edifice architecture and vastu living.

Other titles of interest:

'Elements of Buddhist Iconography'
by A. K. Coomaaraswamy
Cambridge, 1935

'Images and Symbols'
by Mircea Elliade
London, 1961

'Man and His Becoming According to Vedanta'
by Rene Guenon
London, 1945