THE term silpa means an art, fine or mechanical. It covers some THE sixty-four such arts. But here Silpa-sästra is used in the sense of Vastu-sastra, this latter term being less usual. The literal render ing of Västu-sastra would be soience of architecture,' but a complete Västu-bastra deals with more than what is generally understood by architecture. In the Vastu-sustras the term architecture is taken in its broadest sense and implies what is built or constructed. Thus in the first place it denotes all kinds of buildings, religious, residential, and military and their auxiliary members and component mouldings. Secondly, it covers town-planning; laying out gardens; constructing market-places including ports and harbours; making roads, bridges, gate ways, triumphal arches; digging wells, tanks, trenches, drains, sewers, moats; building enclosure walls, embankments, dams, railings, landing places, flights of steps for hills and bathing ghats, and ladders. Thirdly. it connotes articles of furniture such as bedsteads, couches, tables, chairs, throues, wardrobes, baskets, cages, nests, mills, conveyances, lamps and lamp-posts for streets. It also includes the making of dresses and ornaments such as chains, crowns, head-gear and foot and arm wear. Architecture also includes sculpture and deals with carving of phalli, idols of deities, statues of great personages, images of animals and birds. It is also concerned with such preliminary matters as the selection of site, testing of soil, planning, designing, finding out cardinal points by means of a gnomon, dialling, and astronomical and astrological calculations. All these matters are systematically treated in the standard work on the subject known as the Münasära. Under this short title the work has been catalogued and generally referred to. But the complete title, as appears from the seventy colophons of the text, is the Mānasära-västu-sastra. Some me nuscripts have the title Manavasara. It is stated on the fly-leaf of some other manuscripts that those manuscripts were copied from a Silpa-sastra which is apparently meant to be the title of the original work.
The etymological rendering of the word manasara is the essence of measurement,' sara meaning essence and mana measurement. It insy, however, be rendered by the standard measurement or the system of proportion as has been done by the author of An Essay on the architecture of the Hindus. In this sense the full title Manasara Vastu-sastra would imply a Vustu-sästra or science of architecture, where the essence of measurement is contained, the standard measurement followed, or the system of proportions embodied.
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