As the exhalations of the incense rise to the dying rays of the sun and mix with the scent of the kembangan telon, the flowers of sacrifice, melati, kananga and kantil, the soughing of the trees in the evening breeze repeats the lessons taught by an ancient inscription found near the temples of Prambanan, and a summary of which Hindu-Javanese Libro del Principe, taken from a translation by a Panambahan of Sumanap, may be acceptable: What has been here set down, was in the beginning an ancestral tradition, very useful if observed, but, if disregarded, it becomes a curse. This inscription was made in the year 396 (?), in the third month, on a Friday in the sixth era. Let it inform you of the most exalted, of the road to enlightenment and happiness, to attain your country’s progress and prosperity. Proof thereof will be cheap food and raiment, and universal peace, that those who honour the gods may lead tranquil lives. Honouring the gods is the perfection of conduct. Whosoever strives after that will be smiled upon by them, for the practising of virtue provides access to heaven, which shines in splendour, and all gods will unite with the supreme Siva Bathara Indra to assist the practiser of virtue. But whosoever does wrong will go to perdition and his appearance will be monstrous, his shape like the shape of a dog; such a one acts unwisely because he turns away from virtue and obeys his passions, which are his enemies. It seems good to know this in life, in order to practise virtue and praise the godhead, believing in Bhatara, who has power over the world, possessing heaven and earth. The teachers must also be respected, without exception, because of their venerable charge, and you must learn of them to honour Bathara above all gods, the Omnipotent, the Ruler and Maintainer of everything. Praise him in order that you may gain happiness and bliss even while you live on earth. Honour your parents and the parents of your parents and their teachings, which are inviolable, as they before you considered inviolable the teachings which came to them from their parents and ancestors as received from the god Bathara, who opened their hearts to probity. Know that they were allowed to adorn themselves with fragrant flower-buds wherever their influence penetrated: this will also be your privilege after the purification of your minds. Conduct yourselves honestly according to divine direction, acquire discretion and try to resemble the illustrious kings of the past who compassed the felicity of their subjects. Be no regarders of persons either among the good or among the bad; all are mortals in a fleeting world. This consider: Bathara is the King of Kings who ordains the holy institutions. Fill the place of a father among his children. If there are any of your subjects who act wickedly, command them to mend their ways; if they persist in evil, teach them to distinguish between what is good and what is bad in their souls, to the advantage of the living. Excellent men must be appointed to manage the affairs of the people. These three things are of highest importance: that proper instruction be given; that your subjects become prosperous instead of poor through oppression; that every one of them know the boundaries of his fields. Persevere in honouring Bathara! Glorify him and inherit joy! Dress cleanly and keep your bodies clean. Acknowledge the omnipotence of Bathara Giri Nata and, protected by him, no one can harm you. May his superiority be reflected in you to confound the wicked doers. If you desire a change of station, seek seclusion to do penance in order that Bathara’s brilliancy may become visible in you. Nothing is so beautiful and so profitable to you as the conquest of your passions, subduing them to a pure mind and lofty aspirations, vanquishing the enemies of virtue who reveal themselves: it will help to proclaim your lustrous righteousness. Glorify Bathara! He will descend in his beneficence to show you the way. Reflect seriously: some day you must die; ponder over the mystery of life and make the ignorant understand for their own salvation. Behaving in this manner, happiness cannot escape you, kings of good rule, all of whose prayers will be listened to and with whom no one can be compared: this is the sign of the eminence of the sovereign who dominates men as the tiger dominates whatever breathes in the forest. The gods will protect such kings to the benefit of their subjects, traders and carriers of merchandise and labourers in the fields. Nothing is denied to the obedient, for the gods ward off evil from their thrones; evil is known in heaven before it touches the mortals on earth. Glorify Bathara! The men of rank and high birth who serve kings, must be of middle age. In their fiftieth year it behoves them to retire from the world into prayerful solitude to die as a child dies; let the body suffer for the soul, crowning the end of life. As you grow in knowledge your wishes will be fulfilled and your soul will leave its prison. The token of higher knowledge is evident. Where does the soul go? It gains in beatitude or, if no progress has been made, it seeks a refuge in the bodies of animals and people of mean appetites. Gaining in beatitude, it reaches heaven, the garden of rest, but hell is the abode of sin. Cleanse, therefore, your thoughts; eschew impurity! Do not favour the wealthy, nor despise the poor; all are equally confided to your care. O ye, who are kings and represent the gods in your kingdoms, listen to this admonition and know your responsibility for the ultimate lot of your subjects. Bathara, the lord of life and death, will call you to account. Woman has been created inferior to man; but many men are enticed to wrong-doing by the smooth speech of their women-folk, who lack perception by the inscrutable decree of the gods. Woman wishes to control man, taking her caprice for wisdom, always pressing him to follow her fancies. The chronicles, however, mention the names of queens like Sri Chitra Wati, Sinta Devi and Sakjrevati Drupadi. In the days of Dhipara Jaga, Tirta Jaga, Karta Jaga and Sang Ngara bloody wars devastated the land; kings were bewitched and changed into dragons and elephants because they disregarded the ordinances of Bathara and also because they were weak, not able to restrain their burning passion for beautiful women, acting differently from that which behoves those in authority. Possess your souls in continence! Bathara watches and you are unacquainted with the hour of your death.
XII. PRAMBANAN RELIEFS
(Centrum.)
The shadows of evening thicken; darkness gathers, darkness in the train of Rahu, the devourer of sun and moon, robing the temples in gloom. Fire-flies, darting from between the sculptured bo-trees and festooned foliage, begin to hold their nocturnal feast but subside before a red glare, nascent in the holy of holies. They return, as if borne by strange, wild melodies, and grow into the luxurious forms of luminous nymphs, the apsaras, who leave their stations round the house of fear to dance their voluptuous dance of death, renouncing their allegiance to the Mahadeva to court Kama of the flowery bow, consumed by the desire to enjoy life and life’s best before the approach of the mower cutting them down. Their mates, the gandharvas, excite them in their weird revelry with songs and the musicians urge them with the clang of tabors and cymbals. Shaped for the enchanting arts of love, skilled in the wiles of female magic, they move in a whirl of passion, like flames of fire, more redoubtable to man than the sword and arrows of his bitterest foe. Luring the unwary who tarry at Prambanan when the fates, weaving the web of the world, change the colours of day into night’s blackest dyes, when the lotus-blossoms hang heavy on their stems and the air is burdened with the odour of incense and sacrificial wreaths, they intend his subversion by a mirage of delight, a hallucination of the senses, and present the gratification of carnal desire as the triumph of reason. Woe to him if he does not resist in the delirium of his infatuation! The moment he tries to grasp their flitting forms, they evade him as a mountain stream in spate, as the spray of its water dashing down the rocks, as foam on the surging brine. The apsaras mock, the gandharvas hiss him, the musicians howl, all turning again to stone, having instilled their subtle poison into his heart. He seeks in vain the joy they held out to him, begs in vain for a draught of the soma, the nectar of the gods. Then, shooting out from the great god’s abode as a flash of lightning, the red glare takes substance and Siva appears in his most terrible aspect, Kala, destroying time, waving the skull which springs from the lotus stem, menacing men and cattle, the wild beasts of the woods, the fowl of the air and the fish of the sea, with the trishula, the trident of desolation. Behind him the Devi, his spouse, emerges from her niche, riding Vayu, the stormwind, not Doorga or Uma disguised as Loro Jonggrang, but Kali, the furious, of hideous countenance, crowned with snakes, dripping with blood. Lifting up her voice above the roaring of her steed, she joins the Dread One, Rudra, the Thunderer, and passion and baffled desire become a portion of the tempest she raises, the odour of the kembangan telon breathing agony. Mahakala, the Almighty Overthrower, deals death under his veil. But if the night of terror begins in darkness, it will end in dawn and light of day: all that lives, is born to die for new life to succeed, and so teaches Siva himself, the Bhatara Guru. In adoration of Ganesa, the fruit of his union with Parvati, wisdom will accrue to him who learns the lesson; enlightenment from the spectacle of time, the demolisher, fortifying fecund nature, reanimating the universe in anguish of decay. Wisdom is the great gift, purification of the soul in abstinence from the pleasures which drag it down, to keep the spark of the divine undefiled in its earthly sheath with the aid of the father and the son, whose distinctive qualities merge in Wighnesa, the vanquisher of obstacles. Drinking their essence, man’s hearing and knowing leads to affection and commiseration, to the second Brahma Vihara, the sublime condition of sorrow at the sorrow of others, and when dissolution arrives as a reward, Yama, the judge of the dead, will find no cause for reproach. The good will enter the diamond gate, but grievous torment awaits the foolish who pamper the flesh and are ensnared by the daughters of lust.
CHAPTER V
MORE OF CENTRAL JAVA
Le bon sens nous dit que les choses de la terre n’existent que bien peu et que la vraie réalité est dans les rêves. Charles Baudelaire, Les Paradis Artificiels (Dédication).
Except during a period of some four centuries and a half, from about 940 till the palmy days of Mojopahit, when declining Hindu civilisation, for reasons as yet unexplained, sought a refuge farther east, Central Java and especially that part of it known in our time as the Principalities, i.e. Surakarta and Jogjakarta, has always been the heart of the island. There lived and live the true Javanese, the people of heaven’s mercy, cherishing their old traditions; these and the beautiful scenery of their fire-mountains and fertile valleys are still theirs, whatever else may fail: glory, power and freedom. They lived and live in their world of custom and formality a life unintelligible in its inner workings to the western brain, impenetrable to the western eye. There are forces hidden in the Javanese mind, the resultant of a strangely moved past, which we can never understand, though we may admire their creative energy, revealed in the now conventional designs guiding the hand of the potter, the wood-carver, the goldsmith, the armourer, the batikker,[49] hereditary practisers of dying arts and crafts; in the remains of a marvellous architecture long since altogether dead. No chapter in the whole history of eastern art, says Fergusson, is so full of apparent anomalies or upsets so completely our preconceived ideas of things as they ought to be, as that which treats of the architectural history of the island of Java ...; the one country to which they (the Hindus) overflowed, was Java, and there they colonised to such an extent as for nearly a thousand years to obliterate the native arts and civilisation and supplant it by their own ...; what is still more singular is, that it was not from the nearest shores of India that these emigrants departed but from the western coast.... A linga, erected in the Kadu in the year 654 Saka (A.D. 732), a Sivaïte symbol of generation, marks the origin of an artistic activity whose most brilliant period, the classical one of central Javanese architecture, as G. P. Rouffaer styles it rightly, begins with the construction of such buildings as the Buddhist chandi Kalasan or Kali Bening. The inscription of King Sanjaya in Venggi characters, and vestiges of Vaishnav tendencies in the Suku and Cheto temples of a much later date, point to the worship of Vishnu, while Brahma’s four sublime conditions and more subtle transcendentalism do not seem to have attracted the Javanese converts to Hinduïsm. They could grasp the unity of Siva’s threefold functions much better and accepted him as Mahadeva at the head of the Trimoorti. The advent of Buddhism in its mahayanistic form, the creed of the northern church so called, served to emphasise native tolerance. Sivaïsm and whatever there was of Vishnuïsm, harmonised with Buddhism to the extent of borrowing and lending symbols, emblems and divine attributes; Hindu gods played puss in the corner with Bodhisatvas, as already remarked upon in the preceding chapter; the chandi Chupuwatu surprises us with a stupa-linga;[50] a Javanese prince of the thirteenth century bears the expressive name of Siva-Buddha; the old Javanese Sang Hiang Kamahayanikan contains the dictum: Siva is identical with Buddha.[51] If more inscriptions had been found, more light might have been thrown on the anomalous ornamentation of, for instance, the Prambanan temples and the Mendoot; but Sivaïte records of the kind leaving the matter unexplained, Buddhist information is still scantier, perhaps a consequence of Baghavat’s followers not excelling in epigraphy or literary labours of any description.