GROUND-PLAN OF BORO BOEDOR.
All this ruined splendor and wrecked magnificence soon has an overpowering effect on one. He almost hesitates to attempt studying out all the details, the intricate symbolism and decoration lavished by those Hindus, who, like the Moguls, “built like Titans, but finished like jewelers.” One walks around and around the sculptured terraces, where the bas-reliefs portray all the life of Buddha and his disciples, and the history of that great religion—a picture-Bible of Buddhism. All the events in the life of Prince Siddhartha, Gautama Buddha, are followed in turn: his birth and education, his leaving home, his meditation under Gaya’s immortal tree, his teaching in the deer-park, his sitting in judgment, weighing even the birds in his scales, his death and entrance into Nirvana. The every-day life of the seventh and eighth century is pictured, too—temples, palaces, thrones and tombs, ships and houses, all of man’s constructions, are portrayed. The life in courts and palaces, in fields and villages, is all seen there. Royal folk in wonderful jewels sit enthroned, with minions offering gifts and burning incense before them, warriors kneeling, and maidens dancing. The peasant plows the rice-fields with the same wooden stick and ungainly buffalo, and carries the rice-sheaves from the harvest-field with the same shoulder-poles, used in all the farther East to-day. Women fill their water-vessels at the tanks and bear them away on their heads as in India now, and scores of bas-reliefs show the unchanging customs of the East that offer sculptors the same models in this century. Half the wonders of that great three-mile-long gallery of sculptures cannot be recalled. Each round disclosed some more wonderful picture, some more eloquent story, told in the coarse trachyte rock furnished by the volcanoes across the valley. Even the humorous fancies of the sculptors are expressed in stone. In one rilievo a splendidly caparisoned state elephant flings its feet in imitation of the dancing-girl near by. Other sportive elephants carry fans and state umbrellas in their trunks; and the marine monsters swimming about the ship that bears the Buddhist missionaries to the isles have such expression and human resemblance as to make one wonder if those primitives did not occasionally pillory an enemy with their chisels, too. In the last gallery, where, in the progress of the religion, it took on many features of Jainism, or advancing Brahmanism, Buddha is several times represented as the ninth avatar, or incarnation, of Vishnu, still seated on the lotus cushion, and holding a lotus with one of his four hands. Figure after figure wears the Brahmanic cord, or sacrificial thread, over the left shoulder; and all the royal ones sit in what must have been the pose of high fashion at that time—one knee bent under in tailor fashion, the other bent knee raised and held in a loop of the girdle confining the sarong skirt. There is not a grotesque nor a nude figure in the whole three miles of sculptured scenes, and the costumes are a study in themselves; likewise the elaborate jewels which Maia and her maids and the princely ones wear. The trees and flowers are a sufficient study alone; and on my last morning at Boro Boedor I made the whole round at sunrise, looking specially at the wonderful palms, bamboos, frangipani-, mango-, mangosteen-, breadfruit-, pomegranate-, banana-, and bo-trees—every local form being gracefully conventionalized, and, as Fergusson says, “complicated and refined beyond any examples known in India.” It is such special rounds that give one a full idea of what a monumental masterpiece the great Buddhist vihara is, what an epitome of all the arts and civilization of the eighth century A. D. those galleries of sculpture hold, and turn one to dreaming of the builders and their times.
No particularly Javanese types of face or figure are represented. All the countenances are Hindu, Hindu-Caucasian, and pure Greek; and none of the objects or accessories depicted with them are those of an uncivilized people. All the art and culture, the highest standards of Hindu taste and living, in the tenth century of triumphant Buddhism, are expressed in this sculptured record of the golden age of Java. The Boro Boedor sculptures are finer examples of the Greco-Buddhist art of the times than those of Amravati and Gandahara as one sees them in Indian museums; and the pure Greek countenances show sufficient evidence of Bactrian influences on the Indus, whence the builders came.
Of the more than five hundred statues of Buddha enshrined in niches and 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.
FOUR BAS-RELIEFS FROM BORO BOEDOR.
After Wilsen’s drawings.