Several of the bas-reliefs fortunately escaped destruction and found an interpreter in Dr. Brandes, to whom we also owe explanations of the stereotyped decorative scrolls and flourishes. Though inferior in workmanship to the reliefs of Panataran, those of Toompang, “speaking” reliefs as he called them, are vigorously animated, gaining in interest to the devotee as he ascends the terraces, their masterly treatment culminating in what has been preserved on the portion still standing of the temple-walls. No better illustration of high and low life, of the nobility and the riff-raff portrayed in classic Javanese literature, could be imagined; the typical perfect knights and sly buffoons are there in crowds, princes and courtiers, warriors and peasants, gallivanting beaux and love-sick maidens, jealous husbands and frisky wives, worldwise sages and babbling fools, Javanese Don Quijotes riding out with their trusty squires of the Sancho Panza species, go-betweens neither better nor worse than Celestina, entangling dusky Melibeas. Every honourable soul is set off by his or her vulgar counterpart, of the earth earthy: the panakawan (page) and the inya (nurse) play most important rôles, almost equally important with those of the hero and heroine, and their characters are, conformably to the requirements of Javanese literature, clumsy and coarse but droll; their actions, whether they accomplish or fail to accomplish their tasks, reflect the performances of the born ladies and gentlemen whom they accompany, who lose each other and are reunited, who quarrel and make up, always in a comely, stately way, proud and sensitive, expressing their feelings in graceful gestures corresponding with the choicest words. When treating of Panataran, the ornamentation of the ancient monuments of East Java in its relation to Javanese literature will be more fully discussed. Here, however, belongs a reference to Dr. Brandes’ ingenious explanation of the slanting stripes or bars, left uncarved at irregular intervals on the narrow tiers of bas-reliefs at the chandi Toompang; comparing those sculptured bands with the lontar[96] leaves on which the tales, whose illustration they furnish, were originally written, he saw in them the finishing strokes of the different chapters.
The statuary of the chandi Toompang has been removed, for the greater part, to the Museum at Batavia and, possibly, one or two images, with Professor Reinwardt’s invoice of 1820, to that of Leyden. The deities are brilliantly executed, of idealistic design, to borrow Rouffaer’s words, exuberant to the point of effeminacy. Some of them show the conventional Hindu type and we can imagine the wonderful effect they produced among the essentially Javanese scenes chiselled on the walls. For their inscriptions Nagari characters have been used, a circumstance adduced to prove the predominant Buddhist significance of this temple. The principal statue seems to have been the decapitated and otherwise damaged, eight-armed,[97] colossal Amoghapasa, Lord of the World, reproduced by Raffles, including the head, “carried to Malang some years ago by a Dutchman,” he informs us, which, symbolic of unity with Padmapani, displays Amitabha, the Dhyani Buddha of the West, the Buddha of Endless Light, in the manner of a frontal. The goddess Mamakhi, scarcely less beautifully cut and also reproduced by Raffles in his History of Java, was carried to England in tota by himself. Efforts to trace her whereabouts have not met with success; she remains more securely hidden, probably in one of the store-rooms of the British Museum, than the stone with inscription recording an endowment, transported from Java to the grounds of Minto House near Hassendean, Scotland. Talking of carrying away: a little to the southeast of the chandi Toompang stood a temple of which hardly a stone has been left; a little to the south of the chandi Singosari another is visibly melting into air. The Chinese community at Malang, as Dr. Brandes informed the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences, boast of a permanent exhibition of Hindu statuary and ornament, consisting of more than 160 numbers, gathered together in the neighbourhood and on view in their cemetery. Baba collects Sivaïte and Buddhist antiquities with great impartiality, subordinating religious scruples to practical considerations, as when he lights his long-stemmed pipe at one of the votive candles on the altars in his places of worship. Excellent opportunities for the study of Chinese influences on Javanese art are offered by the decoration of his temple in Malang with its motives derived from creeping, fluttering, running, pursuing and fleeing things: tigers, deer, dragons, bats, especially bats, shooting up and down, flitting off, swiftly turning back, circling and scudding. The mural paintings of a good many other klentengs, too, are of more than passing interest since they promote a right understanding of the development of the Greater Vehicle of the Law, which in Java exchanged fancies and notions with both Chinese Buddhism and Taoïsm, discarded the classic for the romantic, if the expression be permissible in this connection, and still continues to live among the island’s inhabitants of Mongolian extraction, as Sivaïsm among the Balinese, their creative thought moulding old fundamental ideas in unexpected new forms. If Buddhism brought new elements into Chinese art, stimulating ideals and religious imagery, as the Count de Soissons remarks,[98] leading, for instance, to sublime personifications of Mercy, Tenderness and Love, the debt is repaid and emigrating Chinese decorators shower the graces of their benign goddess Kwan Yin on their labours in distant climes. As to Java, with which China entertained relations from the remotest Hindu period, they animated and reshaped in endless variation the ornament they found, the makaras, the kala-heads, at last, in their saï-shiho tracery, being gradually supplanted by the bat-motive.
XVIII. CHANDI PANATARAN
(Archaeological Service through Charls and van Es.)
The chandi Panataran is the most beautiful, for many reasons also the most remarkable temple in East Java and, with the exception of the Boro Budoor, the largest in the whole island. It was discovered by the American explorer Thomas Horsfield. Its foundations and the interior of its sepulchral pit are constructed in brick; its terraces are in general design not unlike those of the chandi Toompang; among its statues, stolen and scattered far and wide, it may have contained images of Buddhist purport and inspiration. Sivaïtic in aspect, however, as it stands now, it is the only one of the monuments in Kediri sufficiently preserved to determine its religious origin. Fergusson classes the chandi Panataran with the tree- and serpent-temples whose most peculiar feature in the residencies Malang and Kediri consists in having “a well-hole in the centre of their upper platform, extending apparently to their basement,” and the suggestion occurring to him “as at all likely to meet the case, (is) that they were tree-temples, that a sacred tree was planted in these well-holes, either in the virgin soil, or that they were wholly or partially filled with earth and the tree planted in them.” He compares the chandi Panataran with the Naha Vihara or Temple of the Bo-tree in Ceylon and bases its claim to being called a serpent-temple on the fact that “the whole of the basement moulding is made up of eight great serpents, two on each face, whose upraised breasts in the centre form the side-pieces of the steps that lead up to the central building, whatever that was. These serpents are not, however, our familiar seven-headed Nagas that we meet with everywhere in India and Cambodja, but more like the fierce, crested serpents of Central America.” So far Fergusson; but the well or pit, notwithstanding the veneration of which the bo-tree was the object, seems rather to have been a receptacle for the ashes of the princes of Mojopahit whose memory the founder of this mausoleum, probably Queen Jayavisnuvardhani, the above-mentioned Ratu Kenya, immortalised in the Damar Wulan, intended to perpetuate. The raksasas, guardians of the ruins of the principal structure, bear the date 1242 Saka (A.D. 1320); a minor temple and terrace give the dates 1369 and 1375, from which it has been concluded that they were added in the reign of Ratu Kenya’s son Hayam Wurook.
The edifice rose from a square base and large statues of Siva as Kala adorn the feet of the staircases which lead to the first and second terrace. Of the temple proper not a stone is left; the walls of pit and terraces are covered with sculpture, a sort of griffins on the highest, scenes from the Ramayana and illustrations of other popular poems and fables on the lower ones, beautiful work but irreparably damaged by official bungling. As if the apathy which suffered this noble monument to be despoiled and the providentially undemolished parts to crumble away, had not done enough harm, an amateur invested with local authority conceived a plan of restoration and preservation on official lines, that beat even the methods of the art-connoisseurs of the chain-gang to whom the care for the antiquities at Jogjakarta is entrusted, which would make reconstruction impossible for all time to come and deface the ornament in the thoroughest possible way. In obedience to a Government resolution of June 22, 1900, Nr. 18, the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences having been consulted with a view to save the chandi Panataran from further decay, the Contrôleur in charge of the administrative division within whose boundaries it is situated, engaged native masons who, following their instructions, cemented, plastered and whitewashed to the tune of fl. 989.10 (about £82) with the magnificent result that the upper terrace has been transformed into a thickly plastered reception-bower for picnic parties; that everything has received a neat coat of whitewash to rejoice the hearts of housewives out for the day with their husbands, little family and friends; that the architectural detail has been hidden under solid layers of mortar and cement. Plaster, whitewash and cement everywhere: the noses and other extremities of the scanty statuary still in place but injured by time and hand of man, have been touched up with it; from top to bottom it has been smeared over whatever could be reached, making the venerable old temple hideously ridiculous—an orgy of “conservation” in the pernicious official acceptance of the word, hoary age being ravaged by cheap, destructive “tidying up”. This is how the theory of Government solicitude for the ancient monuments of Java works out in practice.
It must be considered a miracle or evidence of the native masons possessing a higher developed artistic sense than their employer, that the bas-reliefs have suffered less than this extraordinary process of restoration and preservation portended, though much detail has been destroyed, thanks to their vandalism under orders from Batavia as understood by the Philistine of Blitar. In the first place we find again, divided by medallions with representations of animal life, a sculptural delineation of the Ramayana, the artist’s buoyant fancy, blending the celestial with the human, shedding a divine light on acts of most common daily occurrence by making gods and semi-gods partake of man’s estate in deeds sublimely natural. The Ramayana was a great favourite for the decoration of temples, as proved by the chandis Panataran, Toompang, Surawana and Prambanan; the Mahabharata or, rather, its Javanese version, the Brata Yuda, came as a good second; the Arjuno Wiwaha of the poet Mpu Kanwa has been put to use for the embellishment of the chandis Surawana and Toompang; the Kersnayana for that of the chandis Toompang and Panataran. We might do worse and, in fact, we are doing worse with our insipid epitaphs and tasteless lapidary pomposity in our cemeteries, than adorn the tombs of our great departed with imagery taken from our poets, tellers of good tales and fabulists, the life they knew so well aiding us to fathom death with its mysteries and promises. The promise most cherished by the Hindu Javanese was that personified in Siva: death to make new life grow and increase in beauty among mortals feeding on happiness, by reason of Kala’s breath destroying the misery of tottering old age, raising man to equality with the gods. That is what the people, for whom the marvellous ancient monuments of Java were built, loved to read in the masterpieces of their literature, carved for their benefit on the mausoleums of their kings, heeding the wise lessons for whoso chooses to reflect, of their Canterbury Tales, Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained; their Narrenschiff, Dil Ulenspigel and Faust; their Divina Commedia and Decameron; their Romancero del Cid and Conde Lucanor; their nouvelles and joyeux devis, their vies très horrifiques of their Gargantuas and Pantagruels. Life in their thought being intimately connected with death, which consequently inspired nothing of the abject terror the practice of western Christianity clothes it with, in curious contrast to the saving hope of its eastern origin, we discern cheerfulness, the effect of serene meditation, the true amrita, the rejuvenating nectar of self-existent immortality, as the keynote also to sensible earthly existence in the infinitely varied forms inviting our examination on the walls of the chandi Panataran. Greift nur hinein ins volle Menschenleben! If the beholder be a philosopher or an artist, or both, desirous to grasp the full life of man, he will receive rare instruction; and if a lustige Person as well, joy will accrue to him from the sempiternal relevancy of Javanese allegorical humour, at times almost prophetic: the sculptor of the pigheaded but self-satisfied peasant who cultivates his land with a plow drawn by crabs,[99] must have had a vision of the Dutch Government endeavouring, after periodical visitations of worse than customary want, misery and famine, to secure progress and prosperity in the island by appointing long commissions with long names, toiling long years over long reports that leave matters exactly where they were.
The skies in the scenery of the bas-reliefs on the lowest terrace of the chandi Panataran have something very peculiar, termed cloud-faces by Dr. Brandes, who recognised in the fantastic forms of the floating vapour as reproduced in the hard stone, demons and animals to which he drew special attention: a kala-head, a furious elephant threatening to charge, etc. The figures of all bas-reliefs, mostly perhaps those of the second tier from below, are notable for their departure from the smooth treatment generally accorded to Javanese sculpture of the period and best defined perhaps in the phrase of one of Canova’s critics when he derided that artist’s “peeled-radish” style. Angular and flat, they remind one of the wayang-puppets, and the obvious correspondence between the manner in which the chandi Panataran illustrates some of the chief productions of Javanese literature and the performances of the Javanese national theatre, has been cleverly insisted upon by Rouffaer. The wayang, i.e. the dramatic art of the island, sprang probably from religious observances of pre-Hindu origin. Dr. G. A. J. Hazeu[100] is of opinion that it formed part of the ritual of the ancient faith, and even now the hadat requires a sacrifice, the burning of incense, etc., before the play commences. The Javanese word lakon, a derivation from laku, which signifies both “to run” and “to act”, applied to stage composition, is the exact etymological equivalent of our “drama”; the lakon yèyèr (layer or lugu) confines itself to tradition, the lakon karangan to subjects taken from tradition but freely handled, the lakon sempalan to episodes from works otherwise unsuitable because of their length. The wayang appears, according to means of interpretation, as wayang poorwa or kulit,[101] gedog, kelitik or karucil, golek, topeng, wong and bèbèr, of which the wayang poorwa holds the oldest title to direct descent from the ancestral habit of invocation of the spirits of the dead. The epithet poorwa has been derived from the parwas of the Mahabharata which, together with the Ramayana and similar sources, offered an abundant supply of dramatic material; it is from the wayang poorwa that the Javanese people derive their notions of past events, as the inhabitants of another island did theirs from their poet and playwright Shakespeare’s histories before eminent actor-managers set to “improve” upon his work, mutilating him on his country’s stage in the evolution of a (fortunately more textual) interpretation, pointedly designated as Shakespearian post-impressionism.