latticed dagobas, all, save the one mysterious figure standing in the
central or summit dagoba, are seated on lotus cushions. Those of the
terrace rows of chapels face outward to the four points of the compass,
and those of the three circular platforms face inward to the hidden,
mysterious one. All are alike save in the position of the hands, and
those of the terrace chapels have four different poses accordingly as
they face the cardinal points. As they are conventionally represented,
there is Buddha teaching, with his open palm resting on one knee; Buddha
learning, with that hand intently closed; Buddha meditating, with both
hands open on his knees; Buddha believing and convinced, expounding the
lotus law with upraised hand; and Buddha demonstrating and explaining,
with thumbs and index-fingers touching. The images in the lotus bells
of the circular platforms hold the right palm curved like a shell over
the fingers of the left hand—the Buddha who has comprehended, and sits
meditating in stages of Nirvana. It was never intended that worshipers
should know the mien of the great one in the summit chalice, the serene
one who, having attained the supreme end, was left to brood alone,
inaccessible, shut out from, beyond all the world. For this reason it
is believed that this standing statue was left incomplete, the profane
chisel not daring to render every accessory and attribute as with the
lesser ones.
[Illustration: FOUR BAS-RELIEFS FROM BORO BOEDOR.
After Wilsen’s drawings.]
Humboldt first noted the five different attitudes of the seated figures,
and their likeness to the five Dhyani Buddhas of Nepal; and the discovery
of a tablet in Sumatra recording the erection of a seven-story vihara to
the Dhyani Buddha was proof that the faith that first came pure from the
mouth of the Oxus and the Indus must have received later bent through
missionaries from the Malay Peninsula and Tibet. The Boro Boedor images
have the same lotus cushion and aureole, the same curls of hair, but not
the long ears of the Nepal Buddhas, who in the Mongol doctrine had each
his own paradise or quarter of the earth. The first Dhyani, who rules
the paradise of the Orient, is always represented in the same attitude
and pose of the hands as the image in the latticed bells of these upper,
circular or Nirvana terraces of Boro Boedor. The images on the east
side of Boro Boeder’s square terraces correspond to the second Dhyani’s
conventional pose; those on the south walls, to the third Dhyani; the
west-facing ones, to the fourth Dhyani; and the northern ones, to the
fifth Dhyani of Nepal.
There are no inscriptions visible anywhere in this mass of
picture-writings, no corner-stone or any clue to the exact year of its
founding. We know certainly that the third great synod of Buddhists in
Asoka’s time, 264 B. C., resolved to spread Buddhism abroad, and that
the propaganda begun in Ceylon was carried in every direction, and that
Asoka opened seven of the eight original dagobas of India enshrining
relics of Buddha’s body, and, subdividing, put them in eighty-four
thousand vases or precious boxes, that were scattered to the limits of
that religious world. Stupas, or dagobas, were built over these holy
bits, and all the central dagoba of Boro Boedor is believed to have been
the original structure built over some such reliquary, and afterward
surrounded by the great sculptured terraces. Fa Hian, the Chinese pilgrim
who visited Java in 414 A. D., remarked upon the number of “heretics and
Brahmans” living there, and noted that “the law of Buddha is not much
known.” Native records tell that in 603 A. D. the Prince of Gujerat came,
with five thousand followers in one hundred and six ships, and settled at
Mataram, where two thousand more men of Gujerat joined him, and a great
Buddhist empire succeeded that of the Brahmanic faith. An inscription
found in Sumatra, bearing date 656 A. D., gives the name of Maha Raja
Adiraja Adityadharma, King of Prathama (Great Java), a worshiper of
the five Dhyani Buddhas, who had erected a great seven-storied vihara,
evidently this one of Boro Boedor, in their honor. This golden age of the
Buddhist empire in Java lasted through the seventh, eighth, and ninth
centuries. Arts and religion had already entered their decline in the
tenth century, when the Prince Dewa Kosoumi sent his daughter and four
sons to India to study religion and the arts. The princelings returned
with artists, soldiers, and many trophies and products; but this last
fresh importation did not arrest the decay of the faith, and the people,
relapsing peaceably into Brahmanism, deserted their old temples. With the
Mohammedan conquest of 1475-79 the people in turn forsook the worship of
Siva, Durga, and Ganesha, and abandoned their shrines at Brambanam and
elsewhere, as they had withdrawn from Boro Boedor and Chandi Sewou.
[Illustration: ON THE SECOND TERRACE.]
When the British engineers came to Boro Boedor, in 1814, the inhabitants
of the nearest village had no knowledge or traditions of this noblest
monument Buddhism ever reared. Ever since their fathers had moved there
from another district it had been only a tree-covered hill in the midst
of forests. Two hundred coolies worked forty-five days in clearing away
vegetation and excavating the buried terraces. Measurements and drawings
were made, and twelve plates from them accompany Sir Stamford Raffles’s
work. After the Dutch recovered possession of Java, their artists and
archæologists gave careful study to this monument of earlier civilization
and arts. Further excavations showed that the great platform or broad
terrace around the temple mass was of later construction than the body
of the pyramid, that a flooring nine feet deep had been put entirely
around the lower walls, presumably to brace them, and thus covering
many inscriptions the meanings of which have not yet been given, not to
English readers at least. Dutch scientists devoted many seasons to the
study of these ruins, and Herr Brumund’s scholarly text, completed and
edited by Dr. Leemans of Leyden, accompanies and explains the great folio
volumes of four hundred plates, after Wilsen’s drawings, published by
the Dutch government in 1874. Since their uncovering the ruins have been
kept free from vegetation, but no other care has been taken. In this
comparatively short time legends have grown up, local customs have become
fixed, and Boro Boedor holds something of the importance it should in its
immediate human relations.
For more than six centuries the hill-temple was lost to sight, covered
with trees and rank vegetation; and when the Englishmen brought the
great sculptured monument to light, the gentle, easily superstitious
Javanese of the neighborhood regarded these recha—statues and relics of
the ancient, unknown cult—with the greatest reverence. They adopted them
as tutelary divinities, as it were, indigenous to their own soil. While
Wilsen lived there the people brought daily offerings of flowers. The
statue on the first circular terrace at the right of the east staircase,
and the secluded image at the very summit, were always surrounded with
heaps of stemless flowers laid on moss and plantain-leaves. Incense
was burned to these recha, and the people daubed them with the yellow
powder with which princes formerly painted, and even humble bridegrooms
now paint, themselves on festal days, just as Burmese Buddhists daub
gold-leaf on their shrines, and, like the Cingalese Buddhists, heap
champak and tulse, jasmine, rose, and frangipani flowers, before their
altars. When questioned, the people owned that the offerings at Boro
Boedor were in fulfilment of a vow or in thanksgiving for some event
in their lives—a birth, death, marriage, unexpected good fortune, or
recovery from illness. Other worshipers made the rounds of the circular
terraces, reaching to touch each image in its latticed bell, and many
kept all-night vigils among the dagobas of the Nirvana circles. Less
appealing was the custom, that grew up among the Chinese residents of
Djokjakarta and its neighborhood, of making the temple the goal of
general pilgrimage on the Chinese New Year’s day. They made food and
incense offerings to the images, and celebrated with fireworks, feasts,
and a general May-fair and popular outdoor fête.
[Illustration: THE LATTICED DAGOBAS ON THE CIRCULAR TERRACES.]
After the temple was uncovered the natives considered it a free quarry,
and carried off carved stones for door-steps, gate-posts, foundations,
and fences. Every visitor, tourist or antiquarian, scientist or
relic-hunter, helped himself; and every residency, native prince’s
garden, and plantation lawn, far and near, is still ornamented with
Boro Boedor’s sculptures. In the garden of the Magelang Residency, Miss
Marianne North found a Chinese artist employed in “restoring” Boro Boedor
images, touching up the Hindu countenances with a chisel until their
eyes wore the proper Chinese slant. The museum at Batavia has a full
collection of recha, and all about the foundation platform of the temple
itself, and along the path to the passagrahan, the way is lined with
displaced images and fragments, statues, lions, elephants, horses; the
_hansa_, or emblematic geese of Buddhism; the _Garouda_, or sacred birds
of Vishnu; and giant genii that probably guarded some outer gates of
approach. A captain of Dutch hussars told Herr Brumund that, when camping
at Boro Boedor during the Javanese war, his men amused themselves by
striking off the heads of statues with single lance- or saber-strokes.
Conspicuous heads made fine targets for rifle and pistol practice. Native
boys, playing on the terraces while watching cattle, broke off tiny heads
and detachable bits of carving, and threw them at one another; and a few
such playful shepherds could effect as much ruin as any of the imaginary
bands of fanatic Moslems or Brahmans. One can better accept the plain,
rural story of the boy herders’ destructiveness than those elaborately
built up tales of the religious wars, when priests and people, driven
to Boro Boedor as their last refuge, retreated, fighting, from terrace
to terrace, hurling stones and statues down upon their pursuers, the
last heroic believers dying martyrs before the summit dagoba. Fanatic
Mohammedans in other countries doubtless would destroy the shrines of
a rival, heretic creed; but there is most evidence in the history and
character of the Javanese people that they simply left their old shrines,
let them alone, and allowed the jungle to claim at its will what no
longer had any interest or sacredness for them. To this day the Javanese
takes his religion easily, and it is known that at one time Buddhism and
Brahmanism flourished in peace side by side, and that conversion from
one faith to the other, and back again, and then to Mohammedanism, was
peaceful and gradual, and the result of suasion and fashion, and not of
force. The old cults faded, lost prestige, and vanished without stress of
arms or an inquisition.
XVI
BORO BOEDOR AND MENDOET
With five hundred Buddhas in near neighborhood, one might expect a little
of the atmosphere of Nirvana, and the looking at so many repetitions of
one object might well produce the hypnotic stage akin to it. The cool,
shady passagrahan at Boro Boedor affords as much of earthly quiet and
absolute calm, as entire a retreat from the outer, modern world, as one
could ever expect to find now in any land of the lotus. This government
rest-house is maintained by the resident of Kedu, and every accommodation
is provided for the pilgrim, at a fixed charge of six florins the day.
The keeper of the passagrahan was a slow-spoken, lethargic, meditative
old Hollander, with whom it was always afternoon. One half expected him
to change from battek pajamas to yellow draperies, climb up on some
vacant lotus pedestal, and, posing his fingers, drop away into eternal
meditation, like his stony neighbors. Tropic life and isolation had
reduced him to that mental stagnation, torpor, or depression so common
with single Europeans in far Asia, isolated from all social friction,
active, human interests, and natural sympathies, and so far out of touch
with the living, moving world of the nineteenth century. Life goes on
in placidity, endless quiet, and routine at Boro Boedor. Visitors come
rarely; they most often stop only for riz tavel, and drive on; and not a
half-dozen American names appear in the visitors’ book, the first entry
in which is dated 1869.
I remember the first still, long lotus afternoon in the passagrahan’s
portico, when my companions napped, and not a sound broke the stillness
save the slow, occasional rustle of palm-branches and the whistle of
birds. In that damp, heated silence, where even the mental effort
of recalling the attitude of Buddha elsewhere threw one into a bath
of perspiration, there was exertion enough in tracing the courses
and projections of the terraced temple with the eye. Even this easy
rocking-chair study of the blackened ruins, empty niches, broken statues,
and shattered and crumbling terraces, worked a spell. The dread genii
by the doorway and the grotesque animals along the path seemed living
monsters, the meditating statues even seemed to breathe, until some
“chuck-chucking” lizard ran over them and dispelled the half-dream.
In those hazy, hypnotic hours of the long afternoon one could best
believe the tradition that the temple rose in a night at miraculous
bidding, and was not built by human hands; that it was built by the
son of the Prince of Boro Boedor, as a condition to his receiving the
daughter of the Prince of Mendoet for a wife. The suitor was to build
it within a given time, and every detail was rigidly prescribed. The
princess came with her father to inspect the great work of art, with its
miles of bas-reliefs and hundreds of statues fresh from the sculptor’s
chisel. “Without doubt these images are beautiful,” she said coldly, “but
they are dead. I can no more love you than they can love you”; and she
turned and left her lover to brood in eternal sorrow and meditation upon
that puzzle of all the centuries—the Eternal Feminine.
At last the shadows began to stretch; a cooler breath came;
cocoanut-leaves began to rustle and lash with force, and the musical
rhythm of distant, soft Malay voices broke the stillness that had been
that of the Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted castle. A boy crept out of
a basket house in the palm-grove behind the passagrahan, and walked
up a palm-tree with that deliberate ease and nonchalance that is not
altogether human or two-footed, and makes one rub his eyes doubtingly at
the unprepared sight. He carried a bunch of bamboo tubes at his belt,
and when he reached the top of the smooth stem began letting down bamboo
cups, fastening one at the base of each leaf-stalk to collect the sap.
Everywhere in Java we saw them collecting the sap of the true sugar-palm
and the toddy-palm, that bear such gorgeous spathes of blossoms; but
it is only in this region of Middle Java that sugar is made from the
cocoa-palm. Each tree yields daily about two quarts of sap that reduce
to three or four ounces of sugar. The common palm-sugar of the passers
looks and tastes like other brown sugar, but this from cocoa-palms has a
delicious, nutty fragrance and flavor, as unique as maple-sugar. We were
not long in the land before we learned to melt cocoa-palm sugar and pour
it on grated ripe cocoanut, thus achieving a sweet supreme.
The level valley about Boro Boedor is tilled in such fine lines that it
seems in perspective to have been etched or hatched with finer tools
than plow and hoe. There is a little Malay temple surrounded by graves
in a frangipani-grove near the great pyramid, where the ground is white
with the fallen “blossoms of the dead,” and the tree-trunks are decked
with trails of white and palest pink orchids. The little kampong of Boro
Boedor hides in a deep green grove—such a pretty, picturesque little
lot of basket houses, such a carefully painted village in a painted
grove,—the village of the Midway Plaisance, only more so,—such a set
scene and ideal picture of Java, as ought to have wings and footlights,
and be looked at to slow music. And there, in the early summer mornings,
is a busy passer in a grove that presents more and more attractive
pictures of Javanese life, as the people come from miles around to buy
and to sell the necessaries and luxuries of their picturesque, primitive
life, so near to nature’s warmest heart.
All the neighborhood is full of beauty and interest, and there are
smaller shrines at each side of Boro Boedor, where pilgrims in ancient
times were supposed to make first and farewell prayers. One is called
Chandi Pawon, or more commonly Dapor, the kitchen, because of its empty,
smoke-blackened interior resulting from the incense of the centuries of
living faith, and of the later centuries when superstitious habit, and
not any surviving Buddhism, led the humble people to make offerings to
the recha, the unknown, mysterious gods of the past.
[Illustration: THE RIGHT-HAND IMAGE AT MENDOET.]
Chandi Mendoet, two miles the other side of Boro Boedor, is an exquisite
pyramidal temple in a green quadrangle of the forest, with a walled foss
and bridges. Long lost and hidden in the jungle, it was accidentally
discovered by the Dutch resident Hartman in 1835, and a space cleared
about it. The natives had never known of or suspected its existence,
but the investigators determined that this gem of Hindu art was erected
between 750 and 800 A. D. The workmanship proves a continued progress
in the arts employed at Boro Boedor, and the sculptures show that the
popular faith was then passing through Jainism back to Brahmanism. The
body of the temple is forty-five feet square as it stands on its walled
platform, and rises to a height of seventy feet. A terrace, or raised
processional path, around the temple walls is faced with bas-reliefs
and ornamental stones, and great bas-reliefs decorate the upper walls.
The square interior chapel is entered through a stepped arch or door,
and the finest of the Mendoet bas-reliefs, commonly spoken of as the
“Tree of Knowledge,” is in this entrance-way. There Buddha sits beneath
the bo-tree, the trunk of which supports a pajong, or state umbrella,
teaching those who approach him and kneel with offerings and incense.
These figures, as well as the angels overhead, the birds in the trees,
and the lambs on their rocky shelf, listening to the great teacher, are
worked out with a grace and skill beyond compare. Three colossal images
are seated in the chapel, all with Buddha’s attributes, and Brahmanic
cords as well, and the long Nepal ears of the Dhyani ones. They are
variously explained as the Hindu trinity, as the Buddhist trinity, as
Buddha and his disciples, and local legends try to explain them even
more romantically. One literary pilgrim describes the central Adi Buddha
as the statue of a beautiful young woman “counting her fingers,” the
mild, benign, and sweetly smiling faces of all three easily suggesting
femininity.
One legend tells that this marvel of a temple was built by a rajah who,
when once summoned to aid or save the goddess Durga, was followed by
two of his wives. To rid himself of them, he tied one wife and nailed
the other to a rock. Years afterward he built this temple in expiation,
and put their images in it. An avenging rival, who had loved one of the
women, at last found the rajah, killed him, turned him to stone, and
condemned him to sit forever between his abused partners.
A legend related to Herr Brumund told that “once upon a time” the
two-year-old daughter of the great Prince Dewa Kosoumi was stolen by a
revengeful courtier. The broken-hearted father wandered all over the
country seeking his daughter, but at the end of twelve years met and,
forgetting his grief, demanded and married the most beautiful young
girl he had ever seen. Soon after a child had been born to them, the
revengeful courtier of years before told the prince that his beautiful
wife was his own daughter. The priests assured Prince Dewa that no
forgiveness was possible to one who had so offended the gods, and that
his only course of expiation lay in shutting himself, with the mother
and child, in a walled cell, and there ending their days in penitence
and prayer. As a last divine favor, he was told that the crime would be
forgiven if within ten days he could construct a Boro Boedor. All the
artists and workmen of the kingdom were summoned, and working with zeal
and frenzy to save their ruler, completed the temple, with its hundreds
of statues and its miles of carvings, within the fixed time. But it was
then found that the pile was incomplete, lacking just one statue of the
full number required. Prayers and appeals were useless, and the gods
turned the prince, the mother, and the child to stone, and they sit in
the cell at Mendoet as proof of the tale for all time.
With such interests we quite forgot the disagreeable episode in the
steaming, provincial town beyond the mountains, and cared not for
toelatings-kaart or assistant resident. Nothing from the outer world
disturbed the peace of our Nirvana. No solitary horseman bringing
reprieve was ever descried from the summit dagoba. No file of soldiers
grounded arms and demanded us for Dutch dungeons. Life held every tropic
charm, and Boro Boedor constituted an ideal world entirely our own. The
sculptured galleries drew us to them at the beginning and end of every
stroll, and demanded always another and another look. A thousand Mona
Lisas smiled upon us with impassive, mysterious, inscrutable smiles,
as they have smiled during all these twelve centuries, and often the
realization, the atmosphere of antiquity was overpowering in sensation
and weird effect.