Monumental Java

by J. F. Scheltema

XXIV. CHANDI MENDOOT AFTER ITS RESTORATION
(Archaeological Service.)

The operations were hampered by still other contrarieties. A tremendous battle was waged apropos of the question whether or not gaps in the layers of stones of the front wall above the porch pointed to the existence of a passage or passages for the admittance of air and light to the inner chamber; if so, whether or not those passages inclined at an angle sufficient to let the sun’s rays illumine the head of the principal statue in that inner chamber. To rehearse the heated dispute is not profitable: as usual, after the chandi had fallen into ruin and an endless official correspondence had lifted its ruin into prominence, archaeological faddists of every description tried to acquire fame with absurd suggestions and crazy speculations. Leaving their theories regarding the inclinations of the axes of probable or possible transmural apertures for what they are, more instruction is to be derived from the decorative arrangements. The inherent beauty of the ornament survived happily the injurious effects of changing monsoons, of ruthless robbery, of preservation in the Government sense of the word. When the sun caresses it, the Friendly Day, under the blue vault of the all-compassing sky, smiling at this gem of human art, offered in conjugal obedience by the earth, which trembles at his touch, it seems a sacrificial gift of reflowering mortality to heaven. In art, said Lessing, the privilege of the ancients was to give no thing either too much or too little, and the remark of the great critic, as here we can see, applies to a wider range of classic activity than he had in mind. Wherever the ancient artist wrought, in Greece or in Java, we find moreover that he drew his inspiration directly from nature; that his handiwork reflects his consciousness of the moving soul of the world; that the secret of its imperishable charm lies pre-eminently in his keenness of observation. To Javanese sculpture in this period may be applied what Fergusson remarked of Hindu sculpture some thousand years older in date: It is thoroughly original, absolutely without a trace of foreign influence, but quite capable of expressing its ideas and of telling its story with a distinction that never was surpassed, at least in India. Some animals, such as elephants, deer and monkeys, are better represented there than in any sculptures known in any part of the world; so, too, are some trees and the architectural details are cut with an elegance and precision which are very admirable. Turning to the Mendoot we notice how the sculptors charged with its decoration, always truthful and singularly accurate in the expression of their thoughts and feelings, portrayed their surroundings in outline and detail, wrote in bas-reliefs, ornament and statuary the history, the ethics, the philosophy, the religion of the people they belonged to and materialised their splendid dreams for. What conveys a better knowledge of the Tripitaka, the Buddhist system of rules for the conduct of life, discipline and metaphysics, than their imagery, coloured by the very hue of kindliness and effacement of self in daily intercourse; what inculcates better the paramitas, the six virtues, and charity the first of them, than their carved mementos of the reverence we owe to the life of all sentient creatures, our poor relations the animals, striving on lower planes to obtain ultimate delivery from sin and pain but no less entitled to benevolence than man?

As in the decoration of the younger chandis Panataran and Toompang, fables occupy a prominent position in that of the chandi Mendoot. Among the twenty-two scenes spread over the nearly triangular spaces to the right and left of the staircase which ascends to the entrance, eleven on each side, partly lost and wholly damaged, are, for instance, reliefs illustrative of the popular stories of the tortoise and the geese, of the brahman, the crab, the crow and the serpents, etc. Of one of them only a small fragment is left, representing a turtle with its head turned upward, gazing at something in the air, whence Dr. Brandes infers its connection with the following tale, inserted in the account of the concerted action of the animals which conspired to kill the elephant, as rendered in the Tantri, an old Javanese collection of fables: Once upon a time there were turtles who took counsel together about the depredations of a ravenous vulture and their kabayan (chief of the community) asked:—What do you intend to do to escape being eaten by that bird? Accept my advice and lay him a wager that you can cross the sea quicker than he; if he laughs at your conceit, you must crawl into the sea where the big waves are, except two of you, one who stays to start on the race when he begins to fly, and one who swims across the day before and waits for him at the other side. What do you think, turtles? You cannot lose if you manage this well.—Your advice is excellent, answered they, and while the kabayan was still instructing them, the vulture arrived and demanded a turtle to eat.—What is your hurry, spoke the kabayan for them all; I bet you that any one of us can swim quicker across the sea than you can fly.—I take that bet, replied the vulture, but what shall I have if I win?—If you win, you will be at liberty to eat me and my people and our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on and so on to the end of time; but you must pledge your word that if you lose, you will move from here and seek your food elsewhere. It is now rather late but to-morrow morning you can choose any one of my people you please to match your swift flight with.—All right, said the vulture and he went to his nest to sleep, but the kabayan sent one of his turtle-people across the sea. The vulture showed himself again a little after dawn, not to waste time, for he felt pretty hungry and the sooner he could win the race, the sooner he would have breakfast. He did not even take the precaution to select an adversary among the decrepit and slow, so sure was he of his superiority, and, besides, all the turtles were so much alike. The kabayan counted one, two, three, go! and the vulture heard one of them plunge into the water and he unfolded his wings and alighted at the other side in an instant, when, lo! there he saw the beast calmly waiting for him. The vulture felt ashamed and moved to a distant country for he did not know that he had been cheated. And there was only one vulture but there were many turtles. And the boar told this event to his friends, exactly as the reverend Basubarga saw it happen.

Another fable, still more widely distributed and clinching the same moral, is that of the kanchil (a small, extremely fleet species of deer) and the snail; travelling to Europe, it is there best known in its German form recorded by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. Of its many variants in the Malay Archipelago we may mention the wager between a snail and a tiger as to which could most easily jump a river; the snail, attaching herself to one of her big competitor’s paws, wins, of course, and convinces the terror of the woods by means of his hairs adhering to her body, that she is accustomed to feed on his kind, two or three per diem, freshly killed, whereupon the tiger leaves off blustering and sneaks away.[130] The prose version of the Tantri which, somewhat different from the two metrical readings known to us, contains the vulture and turtle incident, dates probably from the last half of the Mojopahit period and is therefore at least four centuries younger than the chandi Mendoot, so that its author and the sculptors of the scenes from popular beast-stories on the temple’s walls, must have had access to a common stock of ancient fables. All turned it to best advantage and the decorators of this splendid edifice seized their opportunity to let the men and animals they carved in illustration of their national literature, express what they had to say in their passionate overflow of the creative instinct. They gave their narrative a frame in ornament of dazzling beauty, sweetly harmonious with the moral of the lessons they taught, stirring to deepest emotion; they cased thoughts of happiest purport in shrines embossed and laced with fretwork more suggestive of ivory than of stone. They adorned the Mendoot as a bride, to be displayed before her husband, the Boro Budoor, revelling in the fanciful idea which makes the saktis of the Dhyani Buddhas carry budding flowers to honour incarnate love. The wealth of statuary, while orthodox Buddhism did not admit the worship of images either of a saintly founder of temples or of his saintly followers; the deities with the attributes of Doorga, Siva and Brahma, who diversify the ornament of the exterior walls, from which right distribution of lines and surfaces may be learnt in rhythmical relation to contour and dimension, are further indications of the syncretism signalising the tolerance, the fraternal mingling of different creeds in the distant age of Mataram’s vigour and artistic energy.

The religious principles underlying that empire’s greatness and providing a basis for a firm sense of duty to guide a temperament of fire, are nobly embodied in the three gigantic statues placed in the inner chamber of the Mendoot or, to be quite exact, round which that chandi was reared, for the entrance is too small to let them through, especially the largest of them which, miraculously undamaged save one missing finger-tip, has slid down from its pedestal and consequently occupies a lower station between the subordinate figures than originally intended. All three are seated and the first in rank, of one piece with his unembellished throne, measures fourteen feet; the two to his right and left, of less grave aspect, wearing richly wrought necklaces, armlets, wristbands, anklets and tiaras, measure eight feet each. If the oorna[131] more excellent than a crown, identifies the master among them, the position of whose fingers reminds of Vajrochana, the first Dhyani Buddha, the others have been taken respectively for a Bodhisatva and for a devotee who attained by his meritorious life a high degree of saintliness but whose Brahmanic adornment flatly contradicts the Buddhist character of such perfection. This explanation is therefore considered unsatisfactory and unacceptable by many, as, for instance, his Majesty Somdetch Phra Paramindr Chulalongkorn, the late King of Siam, who, by the way, when visiting the chandis Mendoot and Boro Budoor in 1896, claimed those masterpieces of mahayanistic art for his own, the southern church, to use the incorrect but convenient distinction. According to this royal interpreter, the idea was to represent the Buddha in the act of blessing the Buddhist prince who ordered the Boro Budoor to be built, here placed at his right with an image of the deliverer in his makuta and carrying no upawita but a monk’s robe under the insignia of his dignity; the third statue, directly opposite, at the Buddha’s left, without Buddhist accessories but with an upawita hanging down from its left shoulder, might impersonate him again in his state before conversion, or his unconverted father on whom, after death, he wished to bestow a share in the deliverer’s benediction. However this may be, there is no doubt of the Enlightened One’s identity in one of his many personifications and, leaving the eighty secondary marks unexplored (three for the nails, three for the fingers, three for the palms of the hands, three for the forty evenly set teeth, one for the nose, six for the piercing eyes, five for the eyebrows, three for the cheeks, nine for the hair, ten for the lower members in general,—without our entering into further detail!), the thirty-two primary signs are all present: the protuberance on the top of the skull; the crisped hair (of a glossy black which the sculptor could not reproduce) curling towards the right;[132] the ample forehead; the oorna, which sheds a white light (also unsculpturable) as the sheen of polished silver or snow smiled upon by the sun; etc. Though the colossal statue of the welcome redeemer, like those of the worshipping kings, does not recommend itself by faultless modelling, it breathes the spirit which sustains the arahat, him who becomes worthy; it radiates the tranquil felicity of annihilation of existence, sin, sorrow and pain; it promises the final blowing out of life’s candle, the Nirvana, when the understanding will be reached of the Adi-Buddha, the primitive, primordial, immeasurable. And the lowest of the four degrees of the Nirvana, it seems to say, is already attainable on earth by emancipation from the bondage of fleshly desire and vice, by avoidance of that which taints and corrupts.... The noonday glare, subdued by the heavy shadow of the porch, fills the sanctuary with a golden haze and upon its dimly gleaming wings a faint music descends, a song of deliverance. The psalmist’s visions of the covering of iniquity compass us about and invite to recognition of a common source of divine inspiration in mankind of whatever creed. The scent of the melati and champaka flowers, strewn at the feet and in the lap of the deity—the image of him who taught that there is none such, and revered by professed believers in the Book which consigns idolaters to hell-fire!—mingles with the pungent odour of the droppings of the bats, fluttering and screeching things in the dark recesses of the roof, disturbed in their sleep. Truly there ought to be a limit to syncretism and this last mentioned mixture of heterogeneous elements soon affects the visitor in a manner so offensive that retreat becomes a matter of necessity.

XXV. INTERIOR OF THE CHANDI MENDOOT
(Cephas Sr.)

As we step outside, our eyes are blinded by the burning light inundating the valley, the fiery furnace ablaze at the foot of mountains flaming up to the sky, a terror of beauty: Think of the fire that shall consume all creation and early seek your rescue, said the Buddha. It speaks to us of the cataclysm which shook Java on her foundation in the waters and upset the work of man, killing him in his thousands and burying his temples, the Mendoot and many, many more, under the ashes of her volcanoes, some such upheaval as when the conflict began between the Saviour of the World and the Great Enemy, to quote from the sacred scriptures; when the earth was convulsed, the sea uprose from its bed, the rivers turned back to their sources, the hill-tops fell crashing to the plains; when the day at length was darkened and a host of headless spirits rode upon the tempest. Though the ground has also been raised by the drift down the slopes of the Merapi, by the overflowing runnels discharging their load of mud into the Ello and the Progo, the magnitude of volcanic devastation can be gauged from the difference in level between the base of the chandi and the site of the kampong higher up, under which the platform extends whereon its subsidiary buildings stood. Excavations in the detritus have already resulted in the discovery of portions of a brick parapet once enclosing the temple grounds; of vestiges of smaller shrines in the east corner of the terrace and of a cruciform brick substructure to the northeast with fragments of bell-shaped chaityas;[133] of a Banaspati, probably from the balustrade of the staircase, and detached stones with and without sculptured ornament, which revealed the former existence of several miniature temples surrounding the central one. At the time of my last visit (which came near terminating my career in my present earthly frame, through the rotten scaffolding giving way under my feet when ascending to the roof), more than half of the space conjecturally encompassed by the parapet, still awaited exploration, and since then restoration, within the limits of the scanty sums allowed, seems to have superseded excavation. In connection with both, the names should be mentioned of P. H. van der Ham, who did wonders with the little means at his disposal, and C. den Hamer, who showed that the decoration of the Mendoot too was not completed before the great catastrophe which devastated Central Java and stopped architectural pursuits.[134]

Reviewing the history of the ancient monuments of the island, not one can pass without a repetition of the sad tale of spoliation. However unpleasant it be to record in every single instance the culpable negligence of a Government stiffening general indifference and almost encouraging downright robbery, the rapid deterioration of those splendid edifices allows no alternative in the matter of explanation. When officials and private individuals of the ruling race set the example, the natives saw no harm in quarrying building material on their own account for their own houses, and they had no time to lose in the rapid process of the razing of their chandis for the adornment of residency and assistant-residency gardens, the construction of dams, sugar-mills and indigo factories. Temple stones have been found in many villages round the Mendoot and particularly in Ngrajeg, about two miles distant on the main road, there is no native dwelling in the substructure of which they have not been used.[135] Though the wealth of the dessa Ngrajeg in this respect may be explained by its once having boasted its own chandi, of which nothing remains but the foundations, there is abundant proof that the chief quarry of the neighbourhood on this side of the river was the Mendoot as the Boro Budoor on the other. From a juridical standpoint, the natives in possession of such spoil, acquired by their fathers or grandfathers, have a prescriptive right on it not disputable in law, averred the administration at Batavia, and so whatever the architects in charge of the restoration needed, had to be bought back and diminished still further the disposable funds. Leaving the doubtful points of this legal question and the enforcement in practice of the theoretical decision for what they are worth to Kromo or Wongso, ordered to part with his doorstep or coinings, there is no doubt that it is illegal and highly censurable to demolish temples, and temples like the Mendoot at that, to secure building material for Government dams and bridges. What happened in Mojokerto with the bricks of Mojopahit and has been complained of elsewhere, I saw happen in 1885 with Mendoot stones, freely used for abutments, piers, spandrel fillings, etc., when near by the spanning of the Progo was in progress. That bridge has since succumbed like the railway bridge then in course of construction farther down the Progo, a warning which, if heeded, might have prevented, for instance, the chronic misfortunes of the railway bridge in the Anei gorge, West Coast of Sumatra.

With Government bridges lacking the strength to resist the impetuosity of more than ordinarily boisterous freshets, there may always be a surprise in store for the pilgrim to the Boro Budoor who has arrived at the first station, the Mendoot: will he or will he not find the means to cross? For, in time of banjir, i.e. when the river is in spate, the primitive ferry which maintains the communication in lieu of better, a bambu raft or two frail barges fastened together, fails as to both comfort and safety, and after heavy rains large groups of men and women can often be seen waiting for the turbulent waters to quiet down a bit. Lord Kitchener visited the Mendoot in December, 1909, during a bridgeless spell and conditions generally inauspicious to his proceeding a mile and a half farther to the Boro Budoor. Otherwise the being ferried over in company of gaily dressed people going to or coming from market with fruit, garden produce and all sorts of merchandise for sale or bought, has its compensations; rocked by the eddying stream which glides swiftly between its steep banks, our dominating sensation is one of joy in the splendour of unstinted light, of freedom from the petty torments of everyday routine,—and let worry take care of itself! As we climb the opposite shore, comes the mysteriously grateful feeling of being enveloped in the soil’s genial exhalation of warm contentment, the fertile earth’s response to the passionate embrace of the sun. Their espousal, their connubial ardour appears incorporate in the chandi Dapoor,[136] a petrified spark of universal love, a wonder of structural and decorative skill in a shady grove some hundred paces to the right of the road.[137] And again the spiritus mundi is symbolically interpreted in the story of yond temple betrothed and wedded to the tree. They were very much smitten with each other, the chandi Pawon and a randu alas[138] living in the hamlet Brajanala. They married and the pretty comedy of affection turned into tragedy: as chances very often in the case of a weaker and a stronger partner in the matrimonial game, the latter throve and prospered at the expense of the former. Now of his brothers there were and still are many exactly like him, but of her sisters there were only few and none of her peculiar kind of beauty, and since it seemed a pity that she should waste her singular comeliness in supporting a husband of no particular worth for all his bigness and parade of protecting her, a divorce was resolved upon which meant his sentence of death. Voices in favour of reprieve or commutation of the penalty were disregarded: what did one randu alas more or less matter compared with the preservation of the exquisite chandi Pawon, sole surviving representative of her class? So the tree was cut down and she escaped happily the fate which overtook the chandis Perot and Pringapoos. The chandi Pawon was even wholly restored; its foundations, sapped by a tangle of roots, relaid; its roof reconstructed.[139] In its graceful proportions a striking illustration of the truth that a great architect can show the vast range of his art in a very small building, may it stand many centuries longer between Mendoot and Boro Budoor as the typical expression of Javanese thought in Dravidian style!