Ruins of Buddhistic temples in Prågå-valley.

I.

The Buddhists believe their community, their worship, their church, or whatever one may be inclined to call this, to have been founded 24 centuries ago by the wise and humane king’s son of Kapilavastu, called Gautama, the Shâkja muni or wise Shâkja, Buddha or the Enlightened. All that which the later legends related either of Buddha himself or of his former lives, they consider historically true.

Competent Orientalists, among whom the Dutch ex-professor Dr. H. Kern, stated however that, much about those legends that cannot be true from a historical point of view, will become quite comprehensible and possible as soon as taken in a mythical sense, and when we understand the hero of the myth to be a sun-god. And then it will be perfectly indifferent to us, non-Buddhists, whether those legends may or may not have historical foundations and whether the Buddha of the Buddhists may have really lived and existed or not.

Still it is an indisputed matter of fact, that the Buddhist religion must have existed as such for about three centuries before the beginning of our era, and professed by king Ashoka the great. Inscriptions partly saved, and found upon columns, and on the walls of rocks, prove all this to be just[1].

This Buddhism taught that mankind might be freed from any sensual passion, and sin by following a pure conduct of life, and from the curse of being continually reincarnated in either a human or animal being, and that it could gain eternal rest as the highest reward of virtue on earth. And therefore Buddhism taught self-command, self-denial and self-conquest; the love of all beings either man or beast: patience with others, the sons of different castes, and patience too with the followers of all other religions.

6

The original Buddhism can’t be called a religion, for it knew no god and didn’t believe in a personal immortality. But like any other creation of time and of human desire to form and reform again and again, Buddhism also lost much of its original character, and so it came to pass that Buddhism in the first year of our era after its separation into two main sections, the so-called southern and northern churches, especially the last mentioned or the Mahâyâna acknowledged, besides the Buddha of this world, quite other Buddhas to be the redeemers of former and future worlds, whilst the Buddhists thought all of them to be the revelations of a same original and impersonal deity, Adi-Buddha; and even the gods or some of the gods of the Hindus were admitted as the awatâras of the same first Buddha[2]. It may be easily understood that this Buddhism also invented hell in contradiction to heaven. However, by no means an abode for the eternal damned, such as the hell of Christianity alludes to.

But the southern church, the Hînayâna swerved less far from the ancient doctrine, though it may be true that it did not always keep its originality, for in its pagodae, are also found a few sculptures honoured there as the representations of Buddha himself[3].

Since some centuries Buddhism has been repelled from its country of birth by the ancient Hinduism. Its place was taken by the shivaistic and other Hindu religions which at their turn again were partly superseded by Islâmism.

But the Hînayânistic worship still exists in Ceylon and in Further-India at Burma, and Siam and Kamboja and Mahâjânism at Népâl and at Tibet and, more or less degenerated, in China and Japan. It flourished for some centuries in the island of Java, but became entirely exterminated by the fanatic and absolutely intolerant followers of Allah and Mohammed.

This was death after life; slavery after the command of senses; the decline of a civilisation lost for ever, and of a highly developed 7 art whose products, by time’s tooth changed into ruins, still testify to her lost greatness.

This Mahâyânism only acknowledged Buddha the redeemer of this world, next to him were honoured the Buddhas of three former worlds, and even a fifth Buddha, the redeemer of a future world, which is to exist in the darkness of ages after the crack of this doom. These are the five Dhyâni-Buddhas: Wairotyana, Akshobya, Ratnasambhava, Amitâbha and Amoghasiddha. And with the exception of these five Buddhas they also honoured the five Dhyâni-Bodhisattvas or Buddha’s sons or Buddhas in a state of being, that is, in a state of self-exercise or self-denial which precedes the Buddhaship. They are in the same order of succession: Samantabhadra, Wadyrapâni, Ratnapâni, Padmapâni and Wishvapâni. The southern church doesn’t know these Dhyâni-Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, so their images on the Båråbudur and on other tyanḍis in Java prove to us that the Buddhists of those temples belonged to the northern church.

Proofs of the existence of Hînayânism in Java, there were none as yet. But the Chinese Buddhist J Tsing, who visited India and the Dutch Indonésian countries in the seventh century of our era, wrote us that at that period of time Hînayânism must have ruled here in Java[4].

It goes without saying that even the Mahâyânists honoured, among others, the Buddha of this their world, Amitâbha, as their Lord and Redeemer, putting faith in his life on earth as man and prince’s son, as ascetic and preacher, just as the Israelites do believe in the personage of their Jahvé, their Lord God of Hosts, their god of battle and revenge, and just like our German ancestors trusted in Odhin, and Thor, and in the dying sun-god Baldur.

And when we wish to judge and understand the temples built by these Buddhists, we also ought to start from that point of view, and accept the hero of the legend as if he should have really lived, and suffered in order to redeem the world from the burden of the sin of life, and from the curse of death, and infinite regenerations.

8

II.

The Buddhists assert the ashes of their Buddha to have been divided after his cremation into eight towns, and buried there. King Ashoka is said to have seven of these graves re-opened again so as to distribute the holy ashes among some 84000 metal, crystal or stone vases or urns to cause them to be spread throughout his empire and without, and kept under barrows or stûpas.

We know the proper history of Buddhism to begin with this king in the third century before our era, and in several parts of Hindustan are found still undamaged inscriptions chiselled at his order upon rocks as so many unobjectionable evidences of this fact. I willingly allow this number of 84000 to be very exaggerated—yet, it is a fact proved by many an existing and opened grave, that the Buddhists of that or later date, and wherever they might have settled, always kept small quantities of ashes or bones they considered the remains of their Buddha’s corpse, in order to be buried under earthen or stone barrows to honour them as the relics of the great Master himself.[5]

There where the Buddhists founded a community, there, under such a hill or stûpa they also buried an urn of ashes whereas the hill itself was honoured as the Master’s grave.[6]

Those hills however, were badly protected from the influences of temperature and time, and not proof against the profaning hand of 9 man, and therefore built of stone, the dâgaba or dagob, generally placed on a pedestal of composed leaves of the lotus, the padmâsana, hardly dispensible to Indian images.[7]

Many temples’ ornaments have been copied after these dagobs, among others, the shape of the small-sized prayer-bell which is still rung by the visju in chinese temples even at this day. These are facts proving this tomb-stone’s having been highly honoured.

10

III.

Not anything do we know about the Buddhists of eleven centuries ago who once populated these regions where afterwards arose the Mohammedan empire of Mataram. We only know that there formerly must have existed a Hindu empire of this name because of a found copper engraving all covered with ancient-javanese writing which contained in a oath-formula the words: “Sri mahârâja i Mataram.”

We understand them to have come from India, probably from the North, but we don’t know when this happened, and when they first began to deposit their Buddha ashes worthily.

It may be easily imagined however, that also the Båråbudur must have been such a depository, and so much the more, because of its being too large to think of a mausoleum built in honour of even the most powerful prince of that empire.

In flat defiance of Rhys Davids’s opinion who declared the Båråbudur to be only 7 centuries old, we, on the other hand, are inclined to give this monument, according to later data, more than eleven centuries[8].

11

That the Buddhists of Central Java were a powerful nation at that period of time may fully appear from the extent and splendour of the building which surpasses all other Buddha- and Hindu temples on all the earth.

And though it may be true that the grouping of the rock temples of Alara (vulg. Ellora) and Ajunta in India occupies more room, and granting Angkor in Kamboja (which wasn’t a Buddhist temple) to seem more majestic when seen at a distance, still, according to competent judges who also visited these ruins, the Båråbudur is grander by far as well for the unity of its whole as for the harmony of its different parts, and for both the nobleness of the schemer’s thought and the excellence of the execution.

This harmony supports the opinion of this building’s having been built after the scheme of one and the very same architect; a man of a surprising intellectual capacity indeed, who could have conceived such a scheme to be carried out in an incalculable number of years by hundreds of thousands of labourers.

We cannot possibly believe that so much labour and time would have been spent on the building of a prince’s mausoleum, however powerful he might have been.

Moreover, there are reasons enough to suppose that the prince of this empire, at whose command the Båråbudur must have been built, commenced or partly achieved, should have died before the finishing of this colossal work, and that his ashes were buried in the sumptuous grave temple, at that period of time most likely already finished, and the ruins of which we shall visit in the desså (native village) of Mĕndut. Or more exactly: that his successor or children or blood-relations, or perhaps his people, built this tyanḍi on the pit in which those ashes had been put away, and that as a worthy mausoleum to the king who once presented his subjects with the Båråbudur.

Some unfinished parts of both the Båråbudur and the ruins in the valley of Parambanan, especially the unfinished imageries at the foot (hidden again under the outer-terrace) on the outer-wall of the large temple, make us suppose that these products of art had been scarcely achieved, and the imageries hardly finished and placed on their walls, when the buddhistic empire of Central Java fell into a state of decay or became ruined at all.

Upwards of a thousand years have rolled since over these colossal 12 ruins. Earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions replaced their masses of stone, solar heat and torrents introduced and supported their decay, parasitic plants dispersed their foundations, and narrow-minded slaves of ignorance and fanaticism damaged or spoilt many of their produce of art—still the ruins stand there as an impressive fact scarcely no less uncredible than undeniable; a majestic product of a master-mind of the past, a stone epic immortal even in its decline.

On account of its general form (“par le dessin général, mais par là seulement”) the French scholar about Indian matters A. Barth called the Båråbudur the only stûpa in Java[9], and this may be just when we understand a stûpa to be only those barrows where were buried some ashes or another relic of the Buddha himself, and when we consider all other tyanḍis in this island—with the exception of the monasteries which are no tyanḍis—to be nothing else but the mausolea of sons of Princes, or of gurus and monks, or belonging perhaps to other noble men and women.

Hereabove we already saw reasons enough to make us suppose that Tyanḍi Mĕndut had been built on the ashes of the prince of the buddhistic empire of which we don’t know anything but its having been supreme in Central Java for at least eleven centuries ago.

These ruins stand in the village after which they have been named, along the road leading from Jogyåkartå to the Båråbudur, not far from the Magĕlang route, and as they are the first we reach on our way from one of the two capitals, and generally visited, we shall therefore first describe this most interesting grave temple.

13