When the director was called away to his workmen, we bade our guiding Mohammedan lead the way to Chandi Sewou, the “Thousand Temples,” or great Buddhist shrine of the ancient capital. “Oh,” he cried, “it is far, far from here—an hour to walk. You must go to Chandi Sewou in a boat. The water is up to here,” touching his waist, “and there are many, many snakes.” Distrusting, we made him lead on in the direction of Chandi Sewou; perhaps we might get at least a distant view. When we had walked the length of a city block down a shady road, with carved fragments and overgrown stones scattered along the way and through the young jungle at one side, we turned a corner, walked another block, and stood between the giant images that guard the entrance of Chandi Sewou’s great quadrangle.
The “Thousand Temples” were really but two hundred and thirty-six temples, built in five quadrilateral lines around a central cruciform temple, the whole walled inclosure measuring five hundred feet either way. Many of these lesser shrines—mere confessional boxes in size—are now ruined or sunk entirely in the level turf that covers the whole quadrangle, and others are picturesque, vine-wreathed masses, looking most like the standing chimneys of a burnt house. This Buddhist sanctuary of the eleventh century has almost the same general plan as Boro Boedor, but a Boro Boedor spread out and built all on the one level. The five lines of temples, with broad processional paths between them, correspond to the five square terraces of Boro Boedor; and the six superior chapels correspond to the circles of latticed dagobas near Boro Boeder’s summit. The empty central shrine at Chandi Sewou has crumbled to a heap of stones, with only its four stepped-arch entrance-doors distinct; and the smaller temples, each of them eleven feet square and eighteen feet high, with inner walls covered with bas-reliefs, are empty as well. When the British officers surveyed Chandi Sewou, five of the chapels contained cross-legged images seated on lotus pedestals—either Buddha, or the tirthankars, or Jain saints; but even those headless and mutilated statues are missing now. Every evidence could be had of wilful destruction of the group of shrines, and the same mysterious well-hole was found beneath the pedestal of the image in each chapel—whether as receptacle for the ashes of priests and princes; a place for the safe keeping of temple treasures; as an empty survival of the form of the earliest tree-temples, when the mystery of animate nature commanded man’s worship; or, as M. de Charnay suggests, the orifice from which proceeded the voice of the concealed priest who served as oracle.
With these Brambanam temples, when Sivaism or Jainism had succeeded Buddhism, and even before Mohammedanism came, the decadence of arts and letters began. The Arab conquest made it complete, and the art of architecture died entirely, no structures since that time redeeming the people and religion which in India and Spain have left such monuments of beauty.
PLAN OF CHANDI SEWOU (“THOUSAND TEMPLES”).
From Sir Stamford Raffles’s “History of Java.”
The ruins of the “Thousand Temples” are more lonely and deserted in their grassy, weed-grown quadrangle, more forlorn in their abandonment, than any other of the splendid relics of Java’s past religions. The glorious company of saintly images are vanished past tracing, and the rows of little sentry-box chapels give a different impression from the soaring pyramids of solid stone, with their hundreds of statues and figures and the wealth of sculptured ornament, found elsewhere. The vast level of the plain around it is a lake or swamp in the rainy season, and the damp little chapels, with their rubbish-heaps in dark corners and the weed-grown well-hole, furnish ideal homes for snakes. As our Mohammedan had suggested snakes, we imagined them everywhere, stepping carefully, throwing stones ahead of us, and thrusting our umbrellas noisily into each chapel before we ventured within; but the long-anticipated, always expected great snake did not materialize to give appropriate incident to a visit to such complete ruins. Only one small wisp of a lizard gave the least starting-point for a really thrilling traveler’s tale. The only other moving object in sight at Chandi Sewou was a little girl, with a smaller sister astride of her hip, who followed us timidly and sat for a time resting on the knee of one of the hideous gate guardians—one of the Gog and Magog stone monsters, who, although kneeling, is seven feet in height, and who, with a club in his right hand, a snake wound around his left arm, and a ferocious countenance, should frighten any child into spasms rather than invite familiarity.
Herr Perk pointed out to us, on the common between the two great temples, a formless green mound which he would excavate the following week, and showed us also the Chandi Lompang, a temple cleared off eighty years ago, but covered with a tangle of underbrush and a few tall trees—a sufficient illustration of what all the Loro Jonggran temples had been when the Djokja Society began its work of rescue and preservation. The British engineers could see in 1812 that Chandi Lompang had been a central shrine surrounded by fourteen smaller temples, whose carved stones have long been scattered to fence fields and furnish foundation-stones for the neighborhood. It was hoped that the kind mantle of vegetation had preserved a series of bas-reliefs of Krishna and the lovely gopis, wrought with an art equal to that employed by the sculptors of the “Three Graces” at Loro Jonggran which the British surveyors uncovered. Every one must rejoice that a period of enlightenment has at last come to the colony, and that steps are being taken to care for the antiquities of the island.