EQUINOX in World's Richest Religious Temple #equinox #india #heritage #temple #ancientreligion

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Temples of India are living testimonies of a past where spirituality found stunning expressions through art and architecture. Every facet of a temple structure is suffused with aesthetics meant to evoke an emotional response that is beyond oneself. The sculptural and architectural forms of temples are guided by a vast body of design rules codified in the shilpa shastra and vasthu shastra texts handed down, and adapted to their present forms. These texts exemplify the heights of creative achievements of the past in the fields of art, architecture, science, and engineering; feats that remain extraordinary measured against even the best of present standards.

The Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram is a classic example of this. The temple stands in seven acres of land with four main entrances facing the prime directions. The principle deity of the temple, Sree Padmanabha Swamy, is in meditative Anantha-Shayana posture, reclining on Adi Sesha. The 18 feet long idol’s interior is filled with 1208 salagramas (sacred stones) transported from the Gandaki River in Nepal. The idol has an orientation precisely perpendicular to the East – West. Some of the additional deities of the temple are also positioned this way. The orientation along the east – west adheres to the agama design principles in the classical texts such as the samarangana sutradhara and tantrasamuchaya which recommend Vishnu temples fronting east such that the main deity of the temple is facing the rising Sun [1, 2]. Texts like manasara also maintain that the temples of Vishnu should have their main entrance facing the town. In olden days, the central part of Thiruvananthapuram city was primarily to the east of the Padmanabhaswamy temple.

A visual hallmark of the temple is the gopuram, a tower made of granite and brick that rises 100 feet above the ground, with a foundation that is nearly 40 feet deep. It has a pyramidal structure and rests above the main east entrance to the temple. Ornate sculptures adorn the walls of this lofty edifice. As per old temple records, the foundation of the gopuram was laid during the 16th century CE with the construction largely getting completed in the 18th century during the reign of the Travancore king Anizham Thirunal Marthanda Varma [1]. The temple however steeps far further back in antiquity.

There are seven floors to this gopuram, with a pair of window-like openings along the center on opposite sides of six of these floors. The opening on the lowest floor is also the grand doorway to enter the temple. The temple door and the window openings on the five floors are aligned vertically from the bottom to the top of the gopuram. At the top of the edifice are a set of seven kalasha evenly spaced.