Silence

One of his students asked Buddha, "Are you the messiah?"
"No", answered Buddha.
"Then are you a healer?"
"No", Buddha replied.
"Then are you a teacher?" the student persisted.
"No, I am not a teacher."
"Then what are you?" asked the student, exasperated.
"I am awake", Buddha replied.

He was the Buddha. He achieved the awakening without the help of temples, only through meditation. Our temples too, once upon a time, served the purpose of awakening the most common of men. A man could be a Buddha if he listened hard to the silence within a temple. A temple served not only as a place for strengthening the beliefs but also as an entrance to a different, ethereal world where one could understand the silence and contemplate on it.
The vast, high ceilinged interiors, the darkness, many chambers one within the other- the temple may seem so easy to build- but has a vast significance as it is intimately connected to the elements of earth. Osho, in his book Hidden Mysteries, beautifully describes the relation between the elements and the temples. He says the domes in temples are built to resemble the sky so that they will rebound or echo the mantras we chant. The temples also resemble the caves, he says. And the ancient yogis used lightless, airless caves for meditation. We find that even those who sat for meditation in open air had, after a few years, had anthill (hutta) surrounding them resembling the privacy of caves.
Now, I avoid going to temples as they look like hospitals to me with tiles used in hospitals and bathrooms, wide windows, square buildings and lit up like a carnival. We won't find peace, let alone god in the modern temples. I have not felt like folding my arms and bowing my head to the god there. I feel my inner peace and the personal relationship I have with god is destroyed. I feel my privacy with god has been violated.
The temples are so modernised, I think they will have air conditioning, lounges and restaurants in no time, with a separate chamber for mobile users so that the other devotees (!) won't be disturbed. There are very few stone temples standing in Karnataka. Most beautiful temples have turned into ruins. Some like Belur, Halebidu temples have become only the objects of photography for tourists destroying its sacredness and the places where ancient statues can be plundered for money.
Someone has said the temple of our purest thoughts is silence. But, according to me, a temple of silence too helps in giving birth to the purest of thoughts. This wisdom of silence has been lost to the devotees who come to the temple with the sole purpose of praying to the god without and not to listen to the silence within. The silence found in a temple, mixed with the mild chanting of mantras, the burning incense, the occasional gong which reverberates through the temple and the minds of the people, is the most effective form of therapy for a disturbed mind.
I found a Vishnu temple in ruins near Sode Mutt, Sirsi. I don't even remember the name of the tiny village it is in. I had seen numerous temples until then. But that was the temple I somehow liked, felt close to my heart. Then I discovered the Kanchi Kamakshi temple. Even though most of Tamil Nadu's temples are on the way to becoming commercialised, this was different. I fell in love with it at once. For the first time in my life, I cried standing at a temple, looking at the vastness, feeling lost in a strange yet beautiful universe. I still don't know what was so special about it.
Now, the temple is just a place for a prominent politician or a celebrity to visit before a major undertaking, a place where annual festivals are held so that more revenue can be collected, or a place where something so miraculous happened that the person responsible for it needs to be worshipped. Even celebrities have temples to their names. The very concept of a place called temple has been lost. People visit temples like they visit picnic spots.
A temple's sanctity and original purpose is in its manifestation of a godliness we cannot perceive otherwise. We cannot successfully think of nothingness as a god, we need something solid and life-like to worship, to surrender ourselves and our weaknesses.
Man, despite the corner of the world he lived in, has built temples in every form. He needs to be constantly assured of godliness, of some being above him to protect him so that he does not feel alone in the universe. A child is taken constantly to temples since his birth so that it becomes an integral part of his life. But, a temple and its significance will so well merge in his life that he will cease to think of its importance long before he attains adulthood. He starts seeing it as a place where one has to visit periodically to ensure god's grace on him, his family and a place where special occasions can be celebrated.
Westernisation has destroyed the architecture of a temple by introducing large, brightly lit halls, square rooms with gleaming tiles and painted with different hues destroying the nature of stones, with which they were built earlier, which brought us closer to nature. The western concept of a place of worship has also created an assumption in the minds of people that they ought to visit a temple only for a specific purpose. The purely Indian quality of doing something just for the sake of doing it is now obscure thanks to the concept of time management exotic to our country. Earlier, we were the citizens of a unique place who did any job without any strong reason to do it, including eating, sleeping, working. Now we do everything for the sake of a gain. If there is no gain, we will refrain from doing any task. This concept the so-called 'utilising time' has affected people who simply went to temples, sat there for hours and left when they wanted to. Then, it was called ' finding inner peace' and meditation'. Now, it is called 'laziness.'
Francois Gautier, a writer and journalist, has argued that Mughal emperor Aurangzeb ordered the demolition of many temples including Kashi Vishwanatha temple, the most sacred place of worship to followers of Vedic religion, thinking that once their centre of faith is destroyed, they will be weakened morally and spiritually. But it was not to be so. The invaders wrongly surmised that destroying an icon will eventually destroy its purpose in the minds of people. The temple survives, albeit in a less spiritual form, serving the same purpose it did a few centuries ago, of increasing our losing faith.
The tradition and culture of temple survives in a child who is taken by its parents to the temple and taught to touch the first step with reverence, to bow its head before the deity, in the innocence of a child when it follows its parents in every ritual. The inner meaning of a temple may have been lost forever but the culture still remains.