Being Digital?

[Michael Rabe]

Friends,

In the award-winning Tamil documentary on sculpture (including a first-ever
filming of an eye-opening ceremony for a stone Ganesh image), Sthapati
Ganapati Shastri of Mamallapuram makes the following claim, quoted here
verbatim from the subtitles:


_What we worship is numbers.
Truly the universe can be contained in numbers.
The cosmic centre replicates in rhythm and order,
It is this order that is illustrated in architecture.
The Thalam measures are converted...
to corresponding measures in the structure.
Architecture is really the pinnacle of mathematics.
The building is the very form of the measures.
The building too is worthy of worship.
That is why during the consecration of a temple,
the holy water is poured on the 'kalasam' (spire)...
and not on the idol in the sanctum-sanctorum._

from _Vaastu Marabu_, by Bala Kailasam, producer: Min Bimbangal, 1992
[Best Arts and Cultural Film, 38th National film festival, New Delhi]

My question is whether the opening lines might be substantiated by citation
of any traditional Indian texts?
Is the statement reminiscent at all of anything in Vedic zulba or Shaiva
Agamas, or any mathematical treatises, by any chance? Or has the esteemed
sthapati, on the side, been reading Plato, or Nicholas Negroponte of the
MIT Media Lab?

Just wondering, before having to tell undergradutes who saw the film what
to make of it all.

Thanks in anticipation of any vague recollections or specific proof texts
some of you might be able to offer without going to any trouble,

Michael Rabe
Saint Xavier University
&
The School of the Art Institue of Chicago