"Khajuraho - Temple structure"

The views of some scholars, Indian and Western, who are mostly unwilling to grant that the Khajuraho sculptures may indeed be Tantric. 

We have also pointed out some of the reasons for this strange reluctance to call  a spade. Our arguments may sound polemical, but they are really quite justified as a corrective to the scholarly neglect of this interesting part of the Indian tradition. As Bharati put it aptly, “For this omission, there is positively no excuse, unless prudishness, fear of social and scientific opprobrium, and other items of the puritanical calculus were held to be valid excuses.

"Now, conceding as Vidya Prakash does that some at least of these erotic sculptures may be representations of Tantric rituals, let us conclude our argument by considering the architectural logic behind their positioning, vis-a-vis the over-all scheme of the temple structure. This has been described with insight by Meister, in his article on “punning" in temple architecture. He points out that most prominent erotic scenes at Khajuraho are on the kapili, or juncture wall connecting the main sanctum and the mandapa in front. The kapili walls are functionally “walls of architectural conjunction", as he puts it. He uses Sanskrit etymology and grammar (viz. the word samgam, the root kam, and the grammatical samdhi rules) to indicate the intentional pun behind this positioning.

To clinch the point, he turns to iconography and refers to conjoint images of deities which can be seen on some similar temples, e.g. of Harihara, Ardhanarisvara, and even one conjoint of Shiva and Brahma. All these conjunct images are placed on the juncture wall. He concludes, therefore, “Architects at Khajuraho have struck on the same location faced with the need to give prominent place to scenes of ritual and physical union." In addition, he points out, “The temples at Khajuraho in fact show a progression in the development of this sexual imagery.

Thus the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva is represented on the descending levels on the kapili wall. Only Shiva’s level shows lovers in sexual conjunction." Finally, Meister notes that the Lakshmana temple hints at a “subtle hierarchy of religious union." This is in line with the Tantric ideology, whose redemptive goal is the mystical experience of the “Divine Bi-sexual Unity" referred to earlier, which is transsexual.

We may thus conclude that some of the famous erotic sculptures at Khajuraho are indeed quite possibly Tantric, though of course in these matters “there is no hard and fast rule which would apply without any possible modification.”