Kashmiri Stec and Eve Sweetser Borobudur and Chartres: Religious spaces as performative real-space blends

Humans have historically spent immense communal effort and creativity on religious structures. In this study, we examine two famous and complex monuments: one the 9th-century Buddhist monument of Borobudur and the other the cathedral church of Chartres. We argue that metaphor, metonymy, and other blends are literally “built in” to the architecture and art to structure the experience of people in these spaces. Metaphoric mappings such as good is up and power is up are common to many religious traditions, and certainly participate in the design of both of these structures. Asymmetry and eastwards orientation structure meaning experiences of Chartres in added ways, while the circular spiral of Borobudur, and its multiple levels, ground important aspects of Buddhist religious experience. Obviously, neither Christianity nor Buddhism claims that a glorious physical religious monument is necessary to achieve spiritual heights. But, as we examine the performative power of ritual – also performed in space, and specifically in the spaces of these monuments – we need also to consider the sources of performative power which reside in the physical spaces themselves. Human creativity not only builds blends as complex as the Mass, it also builds material anchors to match and support them. Kashmiri Stec: University of Groningen Eve Sweetser: University of California, Berkeley 1 The power of material anchors in performativity Throughout the world and throughout human history, humans have set up complex constructed environments to anchor their spiritual lives. Aurignacian cave art may already fall into this category; more recently, so do uncounted temples, pyramids, shrines, synagogues, churches and mosques. In this paper, we will examine two complex and fascinating products of this human behavior, namely the 9th Century C.E. Buddhist monument of Borobudur in Indonesia, and the medieval Christian cathedral church of Chartres in France. Crucially, we claim that they are of primary interest because they are the result of – and the trigger for – very general human cognitive processes, which are not at all restricted to 266 Kashmiri Stec and Eve Sweetser religious thought. Recent cognitive science research enables us to understand much more about the mysterious processes involved in religious experience. In bringing the theory of mental space blending to bear on religious art in particular, we follow the lead of Turner’s landmark collection The Artful Mind (2006; especially the contributions of De Mey, Ferrari and Scott). Material anchors (Hutchins 1995) have been recognized as powerfully affecting human cognitive processing. From ancient tally and token accounting systems to cars which beep until seat-belts get fastened, humans purposefully shape their environment to support cognition. Less evident is the degree to which all habitual environments – even when not intentionally shaped by the cognizer for this purpose – deeply shape cognition. Most of us have probably known a fragile or elderly person who became delusional during a hospital stay, but returned to a normal cognitive state when brought back to her own apartment. Other humans are of course the strongest possible material anchors, since they have so many more affordances than other physical objects. One of the authors of this paper was once requested to stay with a friend in the hospital for an afternoon while the patient’s wife went out to do necessary errands. The patient then explained to her that he was becoming delusional and imagining that he was in a Nazi hospital where “patients” were being tortured. However, the presence of any familiar human face from his life outside the hospital was sufficient to maintain his sanity and prevent the delusions. Our point here is that “miracles” are being performed daily by material anchors, entirely outside of any religious context. Take the anchors away, and cognition may be radically undermined; restore them and it may be healed. Medical science so far does not understand this healing, and is very far from being able to perform equivalent cures by other means. It is of course a short step from this to performative use of such material anchors. As Sweetser (2000) and Sørensen (2007) point out, personal ritual and “good luck” charms abound in modern Western life. Major league sports players have lucky socks or shirts – the ones they wore to pitch the no-hitter, or make the crucial goal. A husband may need to give the same kind of flowers to his wife on every wedding anniversary, or a parent may have to make exactly the same kind of cake for a child’s birthday every year. Lockets and wallets containing photos, and charm bracelets with one charm per grandchild, attest to our need to keep our loved ones “with us” when they are absent. The metonymic dimension of material anchors is particularly fascinating. The lucky shirt is metonymic for the great plays in the past game; the anniversary flowers are metonymic for all the past romantic moments of flower giving. And, as Fauconnier and Turner (2002) note, graves are metonymic material anchors for the dead people buried in them. Humans seem naturally to seize on such connections, good and bad. Tourists visit battle sites. A house previously lived in by Borobudur and Chartres: Religious spaces as performative real-space blends 267 Mozart or Shakespeare thereby acquires a special status for modern humans who revere the past residents. Prison camp memorials such as Dachau and Auschwitz are there to remind us and educate us – but their presence is facilitated by the fact that there is no present competition for use of those “haunted” sites. We cannot imagine just building an elementary school, or suburban tract housing, on the side of the Dachau camp. Indeed, in the 1980’s residents of the adjacent town of Dachau told visitors that they preferred to rent cars when traveling – Dachau license plates were subject to negative comment elsewhere in Europe. Temporal metonymy is strong as well: we celebrate and mourn past events on anniversaries, sometimes at the locations in which they took place. Battles are reenacted on anniversary dates, on the original battlefield sites. Western atheists may claim to find it odd that a Catholic would genuflect before an altar, or that a Buddhist would look for an auspicious date for a wedding. But Ground Zero is still a scary place for them. Many of them would find it unpleasant to live in a house where the previous residents were murdered. And almost all of them would find it entirely normal for a divorced person to reject the wedding anniversary of the first marriage as a wedding date for a second marriage – it would be weird and uncomfortable to attend a friend’s second wedding on the anniversary of the first, let alone to be married in such a wedding. As we said, humans are among the most powerful material anchors. And relics associated with humans – both body parts and possessions of holy people – are important in many religious traditions. Veronica’s Napkin, which supposedly was used to wipe Christ’s face during his walk to the Crucifixion, and miraculously retained the image of his face from that moment, is a major object of Catholic veneration, as are pieces of the wood of the Cross, and bones and possessions of saints. Body parts of the Buddha, and of Buddhist saints, are also widely venerated in stupas and shrines, such as the cave at Maratika which holds physical impressions made in the walls of the cave of the saint who practiced there (Østergaard 2011). Again, this kind of association is not the special province of religious traditions. Oscar Wilde’s and Jim Morrison’s graves in the Parisian cemetery of Père Lachaise are pilgrimage sites – and not, of course, primarily for people who would call themselves religious. And any object once owned by Elvis or Princess Diana will bring in an auction price completely unrelated to its aesthetic or functional value as an object, based on its frame-metonymic link to the previous owner. These are strong metonymic connections which are richly attested across cultures and time. Recent work on Aurignacian cave art suggests a strong metonymic link between humans-as-material-anchors and early symbolic “writing” systems (von Petzinger 2009). For better and for worse, humans make these connections – pervasively and inevitably. Some of them are made by other animals as well – certainly animals 268 Kashmiri Stec and Eve Sweetser show fear of places where unpleasant things happened to them (e.g., veterinary offices) and willingly return to familiar places where good things happened. But because human construction of the world is linguistically mediated and culturally structured, the human network of associations is hugely more complex, including current anniversaries of long-past events, or objects and locations associated with long-dead people. Returning to our holy sites, there are very strong claims associated with them. It is understood in Buddhism that for a Buddhist – but not for a Christian or Hindu tourist – the physical act of circumambulating the Borobudur monument enables the walker to attain nirvana. The person does not have to have practiced meditation actively or lived a monastic life – indeed, it’s not necessary to start out holy or knowledgeable, or even good, as a person. The act on its own is enough. Perhaps similarly, the Mass, the most primary Catholic ritual at Chartres and elsewhere, promises spiritual union with Christ to all believing participants. They do not have to be obviously “saintly” people, or theologically educated, for it to work. The point is precisely that it works on ignorant sinners too – assuming that they are Catholic and believe in the ritual (which includes some specific cognitive demands, such as sincerity in repenting past sins). Figure 1: Aerial view of Borobudur Borobudur and Chartres: Religious spaces as performative real-space blends 269 These are particularly strong claims given that both Buddhism and Christianity have long traditions of complex and lengthy practices directed towards the goals which are here supposed to be achieved so simply and directly. A Buddhist or Christian monk may spend an entire lifetime working towards nirvana or spiritual union with Christ. In both Buddhism and Christianity, these cognitive transformations entail a strong psychological change which completely transforms the participant’s relationship to reality, not to mention changes of other cognitive traits. Such a change takes a huge amount of conscious attention and effort and is not something most people can achieve. It’s possible, of course (and indeed it is the goal of these spiritual traditions), but it takes concentration and effort – just as consciously breaking habits today does. Instead of changing dependence on nicotine or alcohol, which we know to be difficult, these practices change the conscious experience of oneself in the world. No wonder it takes so much work to achieve, or that people need all the help they can get from practice, texts, teachers, and the environment. Figure 2: Cross-section of Borobudur 270 Kashmiri Stec and Eve Sweetser Without the complex material anchor of Borobudur, the individual Buddhist practitioner needs to independently maintain the very strong, very present conscious awareness which characterizes masters like the Dalai Lama. This means keeping all different possible states in mind, as well as one’s current relationship to them and progress made on the path. However, with an anchor like Borobudur, this task becomes significantly easier: as Figures 1 and 2 show, the monument is a constant, complex input to the pilgrim. Walking upwards through the structure of the monument and through the sculptural depictions is, in the blend, performatively achieving that same conscious state which would take a Buddhist master years of disciplined, conscious effort to achieve. Just by walking in circles for a few hours and becoming immersed in depictions of the cognitive transformations attained in the Buddhist world, pilgrims attain that cognitive state. The cognitive work is done “for free” by the monument and pilgrims leave the site as good as bodhisattvas, the living Buddha. (Obviously, a pilgrimage like this to such a remote area of the Indonesian jungle would not have been possible for most people, especially around the time of its construction in the 9th Century C.E., but those who were able to make the difficult journey received this lasting spiritual transformation in return.) Of course, powerful and complex material anchors are part of how long complex processes are short-circuited. These particular complex anchors were not built up without real debate within the two relevant traditions. Gothic architecture was based on innovative construction techniques, allowing taller buildings with much more window space than had been possible; this coincided with new techniques in stained glass, and changes to a more ornamented artistic style in general. The new style had contemporary detractors who felt that complex decoration would distract rather than focus worshippers, and that it would be better for lay worshippers to follow more of the inner ascetic and meditative tradition of monasticism. The 12th-century Abbot Suger of St. Denis, an early and influential patron of Gothic architecture, felt obliged to defend it against detractors of excessive ornament in religious space (Kidson 1987; Rudolph 1990). Buddhists had a similar debate around the 2nd century C.E. when the Gandhara and Mathura schools broke from tradition and began depicting the Buddha in human form (Hallade and Hinz 1968). Prior to this, the Buddha was only represented iconically in order to suggest the transcendence of physical form, but the Gandhara and Mathura schools felt that in order to help lay worshippers realize their own Buddha-hood and so adopt a contemplative practice, the Buddha should be depicted familiarly, in human form. This decision to make the Buddha “human sized” had a powerful effect on the religion, which expanded rapidly shortly after anthropomorphic figures emerged. It also has a powerful effect on the construction of Borobudur (but more on that below). Borobudur and Chartres: Religious spaces as performative real-space blends 271 Crucially, although Chartres and Borobudur are “super-stars” of religious spaces in two very different cultural traditions, their design is deeply based on shared human cognitive structures as well as on culturally specific ones. We will be suggesting that it is in part the construction of particular kinds of Grounded Blends – building particular experientially based metaphors into the physical structure of buildings – which gives these spaces their strong impact. They are Grounded Blends – that is, blends which make use of Real Space (the construed or understood physical space surrounding the conceptualizer) as one of their inputs (Liddell 1998, 2003; Dudis 2004). Sweetser (2009) argues that this is part of what gives gestural viewpoint its vivid character – seeing an actual viewpointed body enacting an action to depict it is more deeply viewpointed than a spoken description. In some cases these religious spaces go a step further – they are what one might call “fully grounded” blends – that is, all the relevant domains are present in the Real Space. We shall return to this at the end of the paper. 2 Spatial alignment with the universe Humans live in a world where physical space is meaningful in itself. We consciously create and shape our environments, and this in turn influences our behavior and development in those spaces (Kirsh 1993). In the kitchen or in the office, we cluster tools, ingredients and the items needed to complete our work, and then use that organization to mark plans, completed tasks and overall progress; e.g., a bowl of tomatoes next to the sink needs to be washed, but sliced vegetables on a cutting board are waiting for a hot skillet. The documents on my laptop’s desktop are what I am currently working on, but the stack of books on the edge of my desk is something I hope to eventually get to. These items, and their relative locations, are material anchors for our cognitive processes, and their orientation and placement reflects the way we think about them and use them. We manage them, and the space around us, constantly reorganizing it to help us think, plan, behave and work. Kirsh (1993) notes that experts use external partitioning of the environment to represent their internal cognitive processes, and thus find enough local information in their immediate spaces to save online planning time and dynamically embed informational structure into their environments, offloading cognition into physical spaces which then act as material anchors for the activities to be completed there. The richer the environment and its information structure, the easier the task to be completed there. Like Hutchins (1995), Kirsh was describing everyday work environments, but it seems to us that this organization of space pertains 272 Kashmiri Stec and Eve Sweetser to religious spaces as well, where multiple layers of symbolism are embedded in a single physical space which is meant to evoke not only the narratives associated with that religion or that space, but also a deep, transformative religious experience. This is possible, at least in part, thanks to the placement of objects in a physical landscape which highlights their importance and use. This placement facilitates perception and narrative retrieval which, in turn, facilitates perception (Østergaard 2011). As Østergaard argues, landscape is a dynamic instrument of religious experience; interaction with it facilitates both religious and cognitive experiences, with the one feeding the other. Only through physical interaction with the landscape, which is an anchor for metonyms that prompt the stories adepts are able to interpret and read, can a full experience be had. The landscape guides the pilgrim through a relevant set of narratives and experiences which prompt for religious and cognitive changes. The features of the landscape are tools for thought which augment a pilgrim’s religious consciousness by using the environment, just as spatial arrangements in the kitchen facilitate cooking preparations. By starting in the environment, these ideas subconsciously enter the pilgrim’s mind and the transformation happens naturally. The arrangement of a built monumental space is “a letter from the past to the future” which allows later inhabitants of the space to be cognitively shaped by the designers’ intentions (Østergaard 2011). Perhaps one of the most common meaningful dimensions in cognition is the association of vertical height with status, power and authority. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) expressed it, status is up and power is up are experientially basic metaphors – Primary Metaphors in Grady’s (1997) and Chris Johnson’s (1999) sense. Very young children necessarily experience the correlation between the power and authority of adult caregivers and their greater adult height; by the time children can walk and tussle, they know the advantage of height (or a higher ground) in a struggle, as well as the fact that the victor ends up on top. Sweetser (2004) has argued that these metaphors are central at least to Western metaphoric understandings of the structure of society and of selfhood – it is difficult for English speakers even to discuss status or authority without using terms such as higher and lower. But they have possibly universal experiential bases, and must join more is up as examples of candidates for universals of metaphoric structure; and indeed status is up is a common metaphoric mapping in many non-Western cultures. To cite one salient example, Bickel (1997) details the pervasive use of spatial verticality in the Himalayan culture of the Belhare, including cultural norms such as allowing one’s seniors to pass on the uphill side when they are met on a mountain path. Borobudur and Chartres: Religious spaces as performative real-space blends 273 good is up has perhaps a different set of experiential bases, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) set forth (and as further developed in Sweetser 2004). Not only is it better to be alive, healthy, upright and physically functional, rather than dead or sick and unable to stand upright; it is also generally preferable to be a victor in a fight, or a taller and more powerful person, rather than a victim. To add to the complexity of this metaphor nexus, many societies normatively wish morally good people to be powerful, and morally evil people to be subject to them. Thus, in addition to holiness is up, power is up. Both Borobudur and Chartres rely deeply on these understandings. It is interesting to note the difference between the meanings of the vertical dimension of religious monuments such as Borobudur and Chartres, and the meanings of vertical secular monuments. It is indeed the case that power is up seems related to the competition in height between secular skyscrapers, but a person who has managed to get a view from the top of the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building has not thereby been spiritually changed (there is no holiness is up or transcendence is up involved). Although, as we shall discuss, a pilgrim at Borobudur changes height more than a Chartres pilgrim does, both monuments invoke these spiritual metaphors – which have certainly been basic to European holy places since ancient temples were built on heights, approached in Greece via the upwards “holy way” to the Acropolis for example. In particular, Borobudur blends these spiritual understandings of up with one of the central metaphors of Buddhism, the lotus metaphor, which relates the different stages of human (cognitive) existence to the image of the lotus (see Ward 1952 for a thorough description of the lotus as a symbol in Buddhism). According to Buddhism, the roots of the lotus flower which are stuck in the mire at the bottom of a lake mirror the confusion and suffering of ordinary human existence. By progressing from the root to the stem and finally to the flower, one transcends that confused state and attains the perfection that the lotus metonymically symbolizes. Crucially, up-ward movement is important: the closer one comes to the top of the flower, the more tranquil one’s mind and cognitive state, and the more holy one becomes. Because of this, the Buddha is frequently depicted seated on a lotus blossom, an indication of his ultimate spiritual enlightenment. Borobudur, which is shaped like a lotus, is iconic for the lotus metaphor and thus helps pilgrims focus on immersion in, and transcendence of, the human condition. As we will describe later, movement from the base to the top of the monument is movement along the lotus flower, each of which parts metonymically represents the cognitive state anchored there. In this way, Borobudur anchors the Mahayana message that we are all bodhisattvas capable of attaining Buddha-hood. 274 Kashmiri Stec and Eve Sweetser As a material anchor for the cognitive/spiritual transformations taking place within the pilgrim, both the physical structure of Borobudur and the stories depicted on its various levels work together to enhance the pilgrim’s feeling of immersion in the human condition (i.e., suffering) and, later, of its transcendence. The square shaped lower terraces with their narrow corridors, high walls and richly depicted stories iconically represent the murky confusion accompanying ordinary existence. As these stories shift from depicting pure suffering to the life of the historical Buddha who was able to remove himself from the cycle of endless suffering to the not-so-subtle suggestion that anyone is capable of such transcendence, the pilgrim’s relative height increases until, at the apex, she joins other meditating Buddhas and attains that state herself. Figure 3 shows the expansive, tranquil scenery pilgrims enjoy along with the meditating Buddhas at the top of the monument. Figure 3a: View from the top of Borobudur Borobudur is composed of three parts and is, like many religious sites, oriented to the East. The base of the monument is composed of five square terraces, the roots and stem of the lotus, surrounded by 2m high walls full of well-organized and detailed panels which tell various stories of human suffering in all of their gory detail. These stories range from humans suffering from the whims of demons to the historical Buddha’s removal of himself from that cycle to the culmination Borobudur and Chartres: Religious spaces as performative real-space blends 275 at the top of the monument of the Gandavyuha, a sort of “everyman’s” search for transcendence by means of the perfect teacher. The square shape of the terraces indicates imperfection, compared to the higher levels of the monument, whose circular shape is considered in Buddhism to be more perfect. These square terraces are followed by three circular terraces (without any walls), the lotus flower, on which 72 Buddhas sit, serenely meditating over the valley. In the center of these circular terraces is the apex of the monument, the stigma of the lotus: one stupa which stands over the center of the monument containing a likeness of Shakyamuni, meditating peacefully. As the highest, central point of the monument, it is the most powerful and holy – and so gives the more important message: just like the Buddha, who transcended the endless cycles of suffering as a human, the pilgrim also can attain nirvana and transcend the world. This is described by the blend given in Table 1, which relates the physical structure of Borobudur to the lotus metaphor. Figure 3b: View from within Borobudur 276 Kashmiri Stec and Eve Sweetser