A white marble lotus of twenty-seven petals, open to all, in which no sermon is preached and no image hangs — only the scriptures of the world's religions are read and sung.
Tagged: Architecture Temple/Shrine Modern Devotional Extant House of Worship Nine-Sided Temple Bahá'í
Why It Stands Here
The Bahá'í House of Worship carries the tradition's image rule into architecture: nine sides, nine doors, one hall, and nothing in it to look at but light and text. Its architect, Fariborz Sahba, has an entry in this section's artist directory.
Completed in 1986 to Fariborz Sahba's design, the Lotus Temple rises in three ranks of nine petals each, clad in Greek marble, ringed by nine pools. Bahá'í houses of worship are nine-sided by requirement and open to people of every faith by law; inside, no clergy officiate, no ritual is performed, and no picture or statue may be displayed — readings come from the Bahá'í writings and, in the same service, from the scriptures of other religions.
It receives millions of visitors a year, more than the Taj Mahal in some years, and functions in Delhi as both a working temple and the city's emblem of interfaith welcome. Its image rule is total and it is beautiful anyway — the section's clearest proof that aniconism is not the absence of art.
Recorded Makers
- Fariborz Sahba — born 1948
References
Related Across the Site
- The Dilwara Temples Art Entry — Five Jain temples on Mount Abu whose plain exteriors open into marble interiors carved to the thinness of lace — the summit of Jain temple art.
- The Dome of the Rock Art Entry — The oldest surviving monument of Islamic architecture (Jerusalem, 691–692): a shrine of mosaic, marble, and inscription, whose entire decorative program argues aniconism's positive case.
- The Golden Temple Art Entry — A gilded sanctum standing in the middle of a sacred pool, reached by one causeway and entered by doors on all four sides — open to every direction and every caste.
- The Greatest Name in Calligraphy Art Entry — The Bahá'í invocation rendered as calligraphy by Mishkin-Qalam, the tradition's master penman — the sacred name made visible as pattern, in a faith that declines to depict its Manifestations.
- The Hanging Temple Art Entry — A monastery of forty halls pinned to a cliff face on Mount Heng, holding altars to Confucius, Laozi, and the Buddha under one roof — the Three Teachings in a single building.
- The Ise Grand Shrine Art Entry — The most sacred shrine in Shinto is a plain cypress building that is torn down and rebuilt, identically, every twenty years — and has been for some thirteen centuries.
- The Shiva Linga Art Entry — A polished stone shaft rising from its base, bathed daily in water, milk, and flowers: the aniconic murti of Shiva, worshipped not as a symbol of an absent god but as the god's own form.
- The Yazd Fire Temple Art Entry — A temple in Yazd whose sacred fire has been kept burning, by the tradition's account, since about 470 CE — carried from shrine to shrine across fifteen centuries and tended daily behind glass.