The websites One Hundred Karnataka Temples and Forty Khmer Temples survey two of the most accomplished traditions in sacred architecture. At the same time, they pose the question how two “architectural languages,”1 the Karnata Dravida and Khmer, with such closely intertwined origins, spanning roughly similar periods, honoring the same gods, sharing a common theology, even employing some of the same design tools, pursued such strikingly different trajectories? More concretely, how could two expressions of the same cosmological metaphor, the “temple mountain,” 2 Mt. Meru, produce both the compression of the Kesava temple at Somanathapura and the expansiveness of Angkor Wat?
The following few pages can at most outline a few parameters which could be traced across these two websites’ thirteen hundred pages of photographs, diagrams and commentary. Beginning with a necessarily broad-brush sketch of Indic religions’ “emanative ontology,” they highlight the models it offered and challenges it posed for an ecclesiastical architecture. Brief descriptions of the earliest extant Karnata Dravida and Khmer temples introduce summaries of the bifurcating evolutionary paths followed by the one hundred and forty temples included in these two surveys. These suggest that the two traditions’ strikingly dissimilar expressions of the “temple mountain” motif might be traced to their differing interpretations of their shared Hindu ontology. They conclude by asking if these divergent emphases resulted in the development of contrasting “architectural tropes,” a rhetoric of emergence and of amplification? (Eighteen background notes follow discussing some of the less familiar topics mentioned in this overview.)
It is beyond the scope of these prefatory remarks (and the competence of their autodidactic compiler) to provide more than an impressionistic comparison of two seminal bodies of architecture which have enjoyed some of the most dedicated and perspicacious scholarship of the past century and a half. These comments are distinguished, if at all, by posing questions so rash more circumspect observers have neglected them it; they will have succeeded if they provoke better qualified minds to correct their more imprudent speculations. Their inclusion here is justified insofar as they offer visitors a propaedeutic with which to pursue their own more probing investigations of the remarkable monuments the two websites at best document.