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].
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 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.