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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful photograohy,
By wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 500 REVIEWER)
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This review is from: The Temple of Konarak: Erotic Spirituality (Paperback)
The temples at Konarak and Kajuraho confuse many Western observers. We have some sense of the sacred, and are well (maybe too well) aware of our sexuality. We just don't put the two together. When we look up into a niche in a church's wall, we expect to see statues, but not of couples embracing.
India, around the thirteenth century, saw the duality of man and woman as a holy thing. As an agricultural people, they knew first-hand how the continuing force of fertility sustained them. They also knew the intense human power of intercourse, and saw the sacred in it. That ongoing act of creation sustained their living world, and the gods had seen fit to make man and woman a vital part of it. Of course it was proper to acknowledge that directly. This book captures many beautiful fragments of that acknowledgement. Elisofon's photos show the general plan of the temple at Konarak, and many of the wonderfully carved details that cover every remaining wall. Some are parables and symbols of a more recognizably religious sort, and some honor other gifts of life, such as music. Many, however portray men and women - sometimes several of each - coupling in every way available to the fertile imaginations of the stonecarvers. There is endless variety in the display, much of which has eroded with time. Still, some of the carvings (p.107 for example) are achingly beautiful. Alan Watts wrote the explanatory text around the pictures, showing how the sacred notion of sexuality spring naturally from many facts of Hindu life. One facet had to do with praise of the living world, certainly. The physical practices also draw on the same tradition as yoga, using the body in disciplined ways to explore the holy. Yet another interpretation comes from the knowledge that a person's life includes a life among other people. Proper social intercourse is part of a proper life, including the proper behavior of men and women together. This book calls out to be read and reread, partly for the inherent beauty of the temple carvings. It also reminds my Western sensibility that there are other, possible better ways of combining the human and holy worlds. //wiredweird
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dated, but not bad.,
By
This review is from: The Temple of Konarak: Erotic Spirituality (Paperback)
Eliot Elisofon, Erotic Spirituality: The Vision of Konarak (Collier Books, 1971)
Those hunting this down expecting prurience are bound to be disappointed. Which makes a good deal of sense considering the stone carvings Elisofon is photographing (over, we find out at the very beginning of the book, the strenuous objections of his tourguides, when he first started out in 1949; they can still see prurience where a great deal of it has rubbed off). As well, roughly half the book is taken up first with Elisofon's own introduction to the photographs, and then with an essay by Alan Watts regarding the nature of sexuality in the Hindu religion, especially as it relates both to the temples themselves (Elisofon not only photographs Konarak, but also the nearby Khajuraho, which is also full of erotic sculpture work) and to yoga. In fact, it sometimes seems as if this is just one long advertisement for yoga, with the obvious subtext of "do yoga, all this will become available to you!" (And to be fair, just like the Kama Sutra, there's some stuff pictured here that you're not going to be able to do if you're not in tip-top shape, so maybe Watts is correct in that...) But the real draw is the photographs themselves, which are quite attractive. Elisofon does focus on the erotic carvings, but the books isn't exclusive to them; Konarak is, after all, a sun temple, and so there is a good deal of other imagery that is equally well-worked. Looked at forty years later, however, it seems a bit dated--not the photographs themselves, of course, but the surrounding text. ***
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