heartland was destroyed by the Holocaust, the genre of tek-
hines nearly disappeared, except among Hasidim and other
isolated traditional, Yiddish-speaking populations. After the
1980s, however, the tekhines aroused new interest among
both scholars and members of the Jewish public. Jewish
women in particular have sought to find a usable past in
which to root themselves. Orthodox women have turned to
the traditional tekhines as a direct expression of their pre-
decessors’ spirituality. This movement has occurred despite
the fact that, unlike their European ancestors, many young
Orthodox women in the United States in the early twenty-
first century are well-educated in the Hebrew prayer book
and classical sources in Hebrew and may not speak or read
Yiddish at all. Liberal Jewish feminists have also sought role
models in the historical tekhines uncovered by scholars, and
many of them have also written and published new tekhines,
some of which have been incorporated into new editions of
Conservative and Reconstructionist prayer books.
SEE ALSO Gender and Religion, article on Gender and Ju-
daism; Judaism, articles on Judaism in Northern and East-
ern Europe to 1500 and Judaism in Northern and Eastern
Europe since 1500; Liturgy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kay, Devra. Seyder Tkhines: The Forgotten Book of Common Prayer
for Jewish Women. Philadelphia, 2004.
Kratz-Ritter, Bettina. Für “fromme Zionstöchter” und “gebildete
Frauenzimmer.” Hildesheim, Germany, 1995.
Weissler, Chava. Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers
of Early Modern Jewish Women. Boston, 1998.
CHAVA WEISSLER (2005)
TEKKE SEE KHA ̄NAQGA ̄H
TELEVISION SEE RELIGIOUS BROADCASTING
TEMPLE
This entry consists of the following articles:
HINDU TEMPLES
BUDDHIST TEMPLE COMPOUNDS IN SOUTH ASIA
BUDDHIST TEMPLE COMPOUNDS IN EAST ASIA
BUDDHIST TEMPLE COMPOUNDS IN TIBET
BUDDHIST TEMPLE COMPOUNDS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
DAOIST TEMPLE COMPOUNDS
CONFUCIAN TEMPLE COMPOUNDS
ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN AND MEDITERRANEAN TEMPLES
MESOAMERICAN TEMPLES
TEMPLE: HINDU TEMPLES
“The Indian temple, an exuberant growth of seemingly hap-
hazard and numberless forms,” wrote Stella Kramrisch in
1922, “never loses control over its extravagant wealth. Their
organic structure is neither derived from any example seen
in nature, nor does it merely do justice to aesthetic consider-
ation, but it visualizes the cosmic force which creates innu-
merable forms, and these are one whole, and without the
least of them the universal harmony would lack complete-
ness” (“The Expressiveness of Indian Art,” Journal of the De-
partment of Letters, University of Calcutta, 9, 1923, p. 67).
This intuitive understanding of the temple’s structure and
significance has been fleshed out and confirmed by Kram-
risch and others in the years since those words were penned.
AXIS, ALTAR, AND ENCLOSURE. Hindu temples are built to
shelter images that focus worship; they also shelter the wor-
shiper and provide space for a controlled ritual. Between the
fifth and the fifteenth century CE, Hindu worshipers con-
structed stone temples throughout India, but sacred enclo-
sures of another sort had been built centuries before. Tree
shrines and similar structures that enclose an object for wor-
ship (tree, snake, lin:ga, pillar, standing yaks:a, all marked by
a vertical axis) within a square railing, or later within more
complicated hypaethral structures, have been illustrated in
narrative relief-sculptures from the first few centuries BCE
and CE. Whatever the variations, these structures mark a
nodal point of manifestation, as does Vis:n:u in reliefs from
the fifth century CE that show him lying on the cosmic ocean,
with a lotus that springs from his navel supporting Brahma ̄,
who proceeds to generate the universe.In creation myths and in the imagery of the lotus, as in
the structure of Mauryan monolithic pillars (from the third
century BCE), the cosmic axis separates heaven from the wa-
ters. Creation flows from this nodal point toward the cardi-
nal directions, producing a universe that is square, marked
by the railing-enclosure of these early shrines, by the harmika ̄
(upper platform) of the Buddhist stupa, and by the edges of
the brick altar used for sacrifice. The A ̄pastamba S ́ulbasu ̄tra,
a text probably of the fourth century BCE, comments that
“though all the earth is vedi [altar], yet selecting a particular
part of it and measuring it they should perform the yajña
[‘sacrifice’] there” (6.2.4). The identity of the altar and the
entirety of creation is thus established quite early, and this
configuration of vertical axis, square altar, and enclosure per-
sists in Indian architecture to demonstrate the participation
of each monument in the cosmogonic process.
DIAGRAM OF CONSTRUCTION. The Va ̄stupurus:a
Man:d:ala—the square diagram on which the altar, temples,
houses, palaces, and cities are founded—also outlines cre-
ation (see figure 1). The myth of the va ̄stupurus:a portrays the
first sacrifice, in which a demon is flayed and his skin held
down by divinities who ring the diagram (padadevata ̄s; lit.,
“feet deities”). In the center is the “place for brahman”—the
formless, ultimate, “supreme reality.” The use of this dia-
gram for the construction of houses and the laying out of cit-
ies on a grid of eighty-one squares (nine by nine) is recorded
in a chapter on architecture in Vara ̄hamihira’s sixth-century
CE text, the Br:hat Sam:hita ̄; the use of a grid of sixty-four
squares (eight by eight) as a special case for the construction
of temples (figure 1) is recorded in a separate chapter.9038 TEKKE