Home > Kaladarsana > Exhibitions > Kham 

KHAM

Publication | Newsletter

Traditionally, universal-space and used-space were actually made to concur.

Universal-time and actual-time were likewise unified by rites-of-renewal at the turning year.

Astronomers now looking outward from our unstill earth reach the frontiers of vision at four billion light years.

Here, time as we experience it break down and simple systems of physical measure, ordinary terms for form and shape, fail.

Our creation-theory views the event of world creation as a solidification process within a massively compacting gas. This yields the discoid of our solar system. Beyond this, the further universe. Our space time concept is four dimensional. How does this enter our daily lives? Do we think of it at all?

Hoe did yesterday see it?

Almost all societies from simple to complex civilisations, saw an ordered and inclusive universe outside of which lay chaos.

To many societies this universe was aligned both vertically and horizontally around a fixed centre.

This axial centre was, and in many live traditions still is, viewed as the physical and metaphysical centre of sacred and physical geography.

It may be marked as the sacral site by the tree of life, its pillar-surrogate or by the primordial mountain.

Later cosmograms, emblematic space-usages and certain architectures continued to carry this symbol.

In Nepal the annual erection of the indra-Pillar revives this ritually. It is a tree.

It announces the New Year. It is still called by the name of the Vedic ritual-post: the yupa. Simultaneously, kingship is sanctioned for the coming year by the living Goddess. Outside the capital, local tradition surfaces in rites of fertility.

Again, among the Karen-speaking hill people of Burma and Thailand, the la, or Indra-pillar is a pole erected at the entry to the religious enclosure, with its stupas. It celebrates the territorial guardian-spirit: the first founder. Spiritual and territorial authority thereby converge.

Ancient kingship patterns of South East Asia established association with the mythical mountain at the sacred centre.

Only when the emperor actually entered, flanked by the entire hierarchy of the court in their ceremonial regalia could the centre be seen for what it really was: the world as empire. The empire of the Middle Kingdom as the court. Its pivot, the "living centre" of the "Dragon of Heaven" himself.

Spaceview was not simply theory. It was and is lived. At all levels.

Rituals-of-the-centre still circle the sacred site sunwise.

In later meditational and mystical traditions the devotional exercise of situating oneself at the centre of the universe is encouraged so that all formations may be dissolved inwards. This is the Buddhist and the tantrik way: oneself the tree of life, the primordial mountain, the site of epiphany: oneself, the world.

The idea of centrespace in people' building traditions, however, is functional. The courtyard of the dwelling and by extension, the communal square to the settlement, is public space where private areas abut.

In India, this is where the shrine is situated; it is also where collective decision-making, justice and census of opinion take place.

In mediaeval Europe the market place was at the crossroads frequently, of earlier tracks. The stocks were here. And the Celtic cross, surrogate for the tree of life.

[ Home | Search  |  Contact Us |  Index ]

[ Kaladarsana | List of Exhibition | Lectures | Seminars/Conferences/Workshops ]