Madura is a hundred miles farther south than Tanjore. It is really the center of Dravidian worship. While some features of the Tanjore temple are more beautiful, the temple at Madura is more vast. Five great pyramidal towers, four of them on the points of the compass, meet the eye as one looks upon the temple from a distance. The temple is built about two great shrines or cells, one for the god Siva and the other for his goddess wife Minakshi, each cell surmounted by a noble dome of plated gold. On the four sides of the temple are stone porches, arcades, and pillared halls of great variety, filled with elaborate and grotesque carvings and sculptures. The extent of the structure may be judged from the simple statement that the outer walls, twenty-five feet high, surround a space eight hundred and thirty by seven hundred and thirty feet, and are surmounted by four lofty gate-pyramids, each of them ten stories in height. The portico roof of Minakshi's Hall is supported upon six rows of carved pillars, each made from a single stone. There is an extensive "Golden Lily Tank," bordered by a granite corridor hung with cages of parrots, and the putrid waters of the tank furnish purification preparatory to worship at Minakshi's shrine. The very porch or entrance pavilion of this shrine is called "The Hall of a Thousand Pillars," though the actual number is nine hundred and eighty-five. Here and there among the pillars are seated learned men or pundits, who place offerings of flowers and perfumed water before their sacred books and chant the meaning of Sanskrit scriptures to groups of devout listeners.
The great temple, with its dimly lighted corridors, is open to the public day and night, and there is special illumination by hundreds of little lamps in an arch at the entrance when night comes on. Long avenues are filled with buyers and sellers of wares, and the rent of their stalls furnishes a large revenue for the support of the many priests. A big elephant and a baby elephant, each with the mark of the god upon its forehead, are paraded up and down, and are taught to pick up with their trunks the coins thrown down by visitors. Innumerable dark alcoves invite the crowd to rest, and many a sleeping form is seen at the foot of the altars. Imagine a festival night with these dimly lighted courts crowded with worshipers, the fierce and lustful images, the glorification of the lingam, the secret places of assignation! And this is the acme of Hindu religion!
There are better things than this to be seen in Madura. The palace of Tirumala, a raja of the seventh century, is a magnificent specimen of Moorish architecture with unexpected Gothic tendencies. Its entrance hall, one hundred and thirty-five feet long, half as wide, and seventy feet high, has a lofty roof supported by heavy stone pillars with pointed arches of Saracenic type. It shows that the Moslem, in the long ago, had at least a temporary hold upon South India. This palace, which has the structural character of a Gothic building, has now been partially restored and taken for the law-courts of the British Government.
The same Tirumala who built the palace, built the Teppa Kulam, an artificial reservoir outside the town, about one thousand feet on a side, very symmetrical and the largest of its kind in South India. The whole "tank" is surrounded with granite walls and parapets, and next the water there is a granite walk five feet wide running round the whole structure. Flights of steps lead down to the water, at intervals. In the center of this small lake is an island, also walled around with granite slabs, and on it there are five towers, a large one in the center and one at each of the four corners. The whole effect is very graceful and it makes a sight long to be remembered, when the "feast of lights" takes place and the island and the parapets and the granite curbings are illuminated with hundreds of little oil-lamps. Not far away from the "tank" is a famous banyan-tree which covers with its shade an area sixty yards in diameter, has a main stem seventy feet in circumference, and has besides two hundred branches that have struck root.
But the noblest sight of Madura is its American Congregational Mission. Beginning in 1836, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions planned and founded their most wise and successful foreign missions. They have aimed to do one thing well: to make the Madura station not only complete but well supported, to embrace in it all stages of education and all sorts of evangelization; and to reduce the whole work to a unified system. And the result has been the raising up of a large native ministry, churches with twenty-two thousand members, schools of every grade from the kindergarten to the college and the theological seminary. We were most hospitably entertained by the principal of the college, Dr. J. X. Miller, and the other missionaries; and we met and addressed both the native church at their Sunday service, the faculty and students of the seminary, and the annual conference of Congregational missionaries. The Madura Mission is a light shining in a dark place, the darkest place indeed in India. But it is a light that cannot be hid. Like our missions to the Burmans and the Telugus, it is showing the power of the gospel to "cast down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God," and to make a spiritual desert "bud and blossom as the rose."
XII
TWO WEEKS IN CEYLON
Ceylon is not a part of India. It is a Crown Colony of Great Britain, and is administered directly from London, while India has more of independence and self-government. The relation of Ceylon to Britain is somewhat like that of the Philippine Islands to the United States, while the relation of Britain to India resembles that of the United States Government to our several territories. Ceylon, however, is very productive and prosperous. Surrounded by the sea, it is free from Indian droughts and famines. Its people are stalwart and loyal. The English language is fast becoming the easiest method of communication between Cingalese and Tamils, Hindus and Malays. Colombo is really a European city, as large as Rochester, with noble public buildings and lovely parks. Our Galle Face Hotel, on the very edge of the sea, with a great stretch of green lawn in front of it, is one of the finest hotels in the East, and our week of rest here was delightful.
Buddhism has been one of the great missionary religions of the world. It was a reform of Hinduism. But the Hindus, with their caste system, would have none of it and drove it out. The Buddhist triumphs were in Burma, Tibet, China, Japan, at the north; in Ceylon and Java, at the south. Here in Ceylon is preserved a sacred tooth of Buddha; and one of his bones, recently discovered in northern India, is to be brought next week with great pomp and ceremony to the temple in Kandy, which already ranks in sacredness next to the great Shwe Dagon pagoda in Rangoon. A temple in Java is founded upon a single hair of Buddha's head. All this superstition and imposture dates back to a couple of centuries before Christ, and there is great reason to believe that the Roman Catholic worship of relics is only an appropriation of this form of heathenism.