Ruins of Buddhistic Temples in Prågå Valley—Tyandis Båråbudur, Mendut and Pawon

by I. Groneman

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.

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 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.