It once stood there under the shadow, partly upon and among the roots of a gigantic tree, the most beautiful randu alas or “wild cotton-tree” (Bombax malabaricus D. C.) I ever saw. A whole, so strikingly beautiful that it charmed the eyes of all who understood a little the language of lines and forms (and colours), and of harmony and contrast. “An image of life which kills, and rises again from death.”
In 1901 conducting the Jena professor Ernst Haeckel to this spot, when on our journey home from the ruins of the Båråbudur, this scholar so sensible of nature’s beauty drew this rare scene in his sketch-book, and devoted himself for two or three hours to the contemplation of this combined creation of art and nature.
And even to him the mutilation this majestic tree had already undergone in its frame of roots beautifully formed by nature, seemed to be a sacrilege against—just as very long ago the destruction of ancient art—by Nature. But the latter worked quite unconsciously whereas the profaning hand of man did not.
I know full well the most insignificant remainders of this ancient Art to be of great value to Science; as well as the creations of Nature; in my opinion however, it would have been by no means necessary to fell this gigantic tree in order to preserve this small produce of art, though others with a less developed sense for nature’s beauty may be inclined to think otherwise.
The architect van de Kamer, one of the two members of the former Båråbudur Committee however, did not. He also thought it wrong to sacrifice this tree “not because the ruin doesn’t show us anything else we don’t know better preserved elsewhere; but because it might have been pulled down stone by stone, and then ... rebuilt again without killing the tree itself.” That which had been hidden under the ... tree on the north side was crushed long ago, and I therefore thought the felling down of this tree a useless deed and consequently a mistake. Attending in 1900 the Dutch Governor-general Roozeboom to these ruins we were photographed under this tree by his adjutant the naval officer de Booy, but the photographic productions soon faded. The following year I accompanied the Padang photographer C. Nieuwenhuis to tyanḍi Pawon spending one night in the Båråbudur pasanggrahan (resthouse). Next day he successfully succeeded in photographing the glorious group which still speaks of the truth I asserted, though the tree itself has been lost for ever.
The small ruin has some conformity to the many, almost as large grave temples, which surround the main temple of tyanḍi Sévu, in Parambanan valley, in four rectangles. Probably, also to those surrounding the terrace of the larger ruins of the Parambanan group in three quadrangles, still, these are no truisms, because out of the 157 small tyanḍis we dug up we found nothing else but their foundations only, and a few altar-shaped pedestals (without any escape-pipe for the holy-water the different sculptures were aspersed with, so that these pedestals are likely to have carried Buddha images) such as are to be seen in the small temples of tyanḍi Sévu. Other ones now adorn the premises of the residences of leaseholders living in these environs, for instance, at the tyanḍi Sévu sugar-factory.
But this conformity is not a perfect one.
A small square room with a very small porch we enter by means of some narrow treads flanked by the Garuḍa-Naga ornament, but this room is empty and unadorned, and I haven’t known it otherwise for more than 30 years. There is only a shallow niche in each side-wall in front of the place where once may have stood a pedestal and image.
On account of their height and breadth I estimated these niches too shallow for an image, a long time ago, and before I knew their destination. Just as in tyanḍi Mĕndut these niches may have been consequently used to light the inner-part by means of little bronze or earthenware lamps we also found elsewhere, and all this in spite of the very small and narrow air-openings, even those in the back wall which, though newly covered, only admit a very dim light now that the small porch, separately roofed in, has been rebuilt and covered again even when the two small doors remained open.
I suppose that, just as in other such tyanḍis, there must have stood in this dark inner-room opposite to the (westerly) entrance a small cubic pedestal without any sidelong escape-pipe, and thereupon a small image of the Buddha or of another buddhistic greatness. Beneath there, in a small square pit, may have been buried an urn containing the ashes of a guru or of some monk of high standing, and finally I suppose this small mausoleum to have been built by their surviving relations who generally but not slavishly kept within the provision of the existing examples of such a style of building.