CHAPTER IX
THE STONES OF THE BORO BUDOOR
... la vérité rendue expressive et parlante, élevée à la hauteur d’une idée. Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus (Introduction).
The pasangrahan, built for the convenience of visitors to the Boro Budoor, offers fair accommodation to the student of oriental architecture and lover of art in whatever form. Also to a good many who feel it incumbent on them to be able to say: “I have taken everything in,” or who have quite other ends in view than communion with the thought of distant ages: foreign tourists whose principal care is to exhibit trunks and travelling-bags covered with labels of out-of-the-beaten-track hotels while their brains remain hopelessly empty; junketers of domestic growth, often in couples whose irregular relations seek shelter behind the excuse of “doing” the island, and heartily disinclined to practise the virtues preached in the reliefs of the shrine of shrines, particularly down on continence. So even the Philistines derive advantage, after the notions of their kind, from the ramshackle fabric of vile heathenism, as this magnificent temple has been called by one of their number, and its visitors’ book tells a sorry tale of irreclaimable vulgarity; the wit, laboriously aimed at in many entries, but widely missed, partakes altogether too much (minus the element of badinage) of the answer given by a young naval officer to an old aunt when she asked him where, in his opinion, the most striking natural scenery of Java was to be found: At Petit Trouville,[143] said he, on Sunday in the dry season.
The pasangrahan’s guests of that ilk are generally no early risers and their company is therefore not likely to mar the impression received of the Boro Budoor at second sight after supper, supplied by the army pensioner in charge of the place, and a night’s sound rest. Looking tranquillity itself, the vast pile charms and soothes the heart, notwithstanding its enormous size, before the intellect, scrutinising its outline, begins to marvel at the unaccustomed form the builder has chosen to proclaim his idea. Save one or two temples in hinayanistic Burmah, which present a faint resemblance, nothing else can be named as producing the same effect, but then, wrote Fergusson for the land where the creed was born that inspired its founder, it must be remembered that not a single structural Buddhist building now exists within the cave region of Western India. Rising light and airy for all its grandeur, it expresses more strength than a mere massing together of the ponderous material in huge walls and buttresses and towers could have done; its quiet consciousness of power is enhanced by its strange beauty of contour in perfect harmony with its setting of living colour. There it lies, clasping together the sapphire sky and the emerald garden of Java.
The mahayanistic character of the Boro Budoor is well attested by the Dhyani Buddhas among its statuary, despite the opinion of Siamese connoisseurs, and by its further ornamental sculpture, of which more anon. Meant for a reliquary, it may or may not be, in the absence of historical proof pro or contra, one of the 84,000 stupas consecrated to receive and hold a fractional portion of the Indian Saviour’s remains after King Asoka had opened seven of the depositories of his ashes in the eight towns among which his remains were originally divided, to make the whole world share in their blessed possession. Who has not heard of the transfer, in the ninth year of the reign of Sirimeghavanna, A.D. 310, of the Dathadathu, the holy tooth, from Dantapura to Ceylon, where it became the mascotte, so to speak, the pledge of undisturbed dominion to the rulers of the island who should control its guardians. The sacrosanct yellow piece of dentin, about the length of the little finger,[144] enclosed in nine concentric cases of gold, inlaid with diamonds, rubies and pearls, is but rarely shown, far more rarely than even the seamless coat at Treves, and then under conditions of excessive adoration. But, notwithstanding all this pomp and circumstance, who that has visited the Dalada Malagawa at Kandy and the Boro Budoor in Java, can fail to prefer the latter, though sacrilegious robbers have carried off its relic, leaving the desecrated shrine to decay.
The wordy war waged around the etymology of the name Boro Budoor, did not solve the mystery of its origin; all derivations thus far suggested are mere guess-work and unsatisfactory, whatever reasons be adduced for Roorda van Eysinga’s explanation that it means an enclosed space, or Raffles’ surmise that it is a corruption of Bara (the great) Buddha, or the late King of Siam’s that it refers to the (spiritual) army of the Buddha, if not to the several Buddhas, as alleged by others. One of the oldest existing monuments in the island, the foundation of the chandi Boro Budoor has been attributed by native tradition to Raden Bandoong, already known from the legends connected with the chandis Prambanan and Sewu, who, as King of Pengging, assumed the name of Handayaningrat. Professor Kern[145] puts the date of the substructure at about 850, allowing several years for its completion—if ever it was fully completed, for this temple, like the chandi Mendoot near by, the chandi Bimo on the Diëng plateau and so many more, shows traces of the work having been suspended before the decoration was quite finished. Sculpture just commenced or little further advanced than the bare outlining, found on the walls, especially of the covered base; divers blocks of stone half transformed into ornament and statuary, Dhyani Buddhas and lions, very illustrative of the methods followed at different stages of the carving, lying forsaken on the slope and summit of a neighbouring hillock, disclose an interruption of the labour by some event of tremendous consequence.[146] Rather than accept the theory that the ancient temples of Java were left intentionally defective from religious motives, viz. to emphasise the sense of human imperfection as an incentive to humility and prostration before the divine, we may believe in the Merapi, that wicked old giant, having asserted himself in one of his destructive moods, belching forth flames and ashes, shaking and burying the handiwork of Hindu and Buddhist pygmies with strictest impartiality. Standing on the first of the highest terraces on the south side, says an article[147] in the Javapost of December 5, 1903, one observes a bulging out of the lower terraces, best accounted for by a violent earthquake in a southerly direction. When the galleries were cleared in 1814 and 1834, the volcanic character of the detritus which filled them (ashes from the Merapi, wrote Roorda van Eysinga in 1850) and also forms the substratum of the rubbish still unremoved from the once enclosed grounds of the chandi Mendoot, furnished strong evidence in support of an eruption of the nearest fire-mountain having been the cause of the precipitate flight, perhaps the death in harness, of the builders. Of the preservation of their work too, in so far as finished, for, to speak again with the writer in the Javapost, the very fact of its having been embedded has saved much of its artistic detail; and the reason why some of the sculptured parts are damaged to a far greater extent than others adjoining, is probably that they were exposed earlier and longer. Deterioration and demolition set in rapidly when wind and weather began to ravage the wholly unprotected edifice, when unscrupulous collectors wrought havoc unchecked.
The Boro Budoor was never hidden from view to the point of blotting out its existence from memory. I shall have occasion to refer to native chronicles mentioning it in the eighteenth century. To speak of its rediscovery by Cornelius is therefore inaccurate though we owe to that clever Lieutenant of Engineers, purposely sent to the Kadu by Raffles, in 1814, the first scientific survey and description with elucidating drawings. Except for the publication, in 1873, of Dr. C. Leemans’ book with an atlas containing illustrations after drawings by F. C. Wilsen, and the mission of I. van Kinsbergen to obtain photographic reproductions of the reliefs, the Dutch Government left the matchless temple entirely to its fate until very recently. An official correspondence, kept trailing indefinitely to invest ministerial promises regarding the antiquities of Java with a semblance of sincerity, had the usual negative effect. Whenever a colonial Excellency declared with unctuous pomposity that the most conscientious care would be taken of the Boro Budoor, a monument of incalculable value considered from the standpoint of science and art, most brilliant memento of the island’s historic past, etc., etc., those versed in the phraseology of Plein and Binnenhof at the Hague trembled in expectation of bad news of criminal negligence, theft and mutilation to follow. The later history of the “brilliant memento” agrees but too well with the ominous prognostics derived from such dismal parliamentary fustian. A great poet sang of things of beauty scarce visible from extreme loveliness: the readily movable things of beauty constituting the loveliness of the Boro Budoor, became invisible sans phrase. We are told in legendary lore of statues which flew through the air to take domicile at enormous distances from their proper homes, or vanished altogether, dissolving into space: the statues of the Boro Budoor developed that faculty in an astonishing degree; if handicapped by great weight or solid attachment to the main structure, bent on travelling à tout travers, they sent their heads alone to seek recreation and instruction in the varying ways of the world, and their heads did never return, either because they were amusing themselves too jollily away from the austerities of the eight-fold path or because they found themselves unavoidably detained in durance vile.
The remaining, mostly headless statues are sad to behold, and the fishy account given of their defective condition, that, namely, the Buddhists, beleaguered in the sanctuary by the Muhammadans, battling pro aris et focis, drove the enemies off by bombarding them with the Lord of Victory’s noble features, hewn in stone, smacks of a too ingenious evasion of the disgraceful facts.[148] The chronicles are silent on such a desperate struggle in that locality between the conquering hosts of Islām and the followers of him who pleaded peace, love and goodwill, whose doctrine and example alike forbade strife and armed resistance. Not that there has been no fighting round and even within the walls of the Boro Budoor among the Javanese engaged in internecine warfare and during the insurrection of Dipo Negoro,[149] but the story of the using up of the statuary in the shape of missiles, has no leg to stand on. In the Java War (1825-1830) the Dutch troops erected a temporary fort near the temple, but it is improbable that chandi material entered into its construction, not because the warriors of the Government would have scrupled to destroy any ancient monument, but because the Boro Budoor stones are exceedingly heavy and earthen fortifications amply sufficed against native bands without artillery. Though cavalry in particular never enjoyed a high reputation in respect of their relations to art,[150] there does not seem to be any more substance in the confession of a ci-devant commander of a squadron of hussars, cited by Brumund, that his men used to try the temper of their swords on the ears and noses of the silent host of Dhyani Buddhas when the rebels of Sentot and Kiahi Maja were not available.
The true misfortune of the Boro Budoor was official indifference and negligence; and far more injurious than the fretting tooth of time or even the merciless hand of the spoiler combined with the provoking laissez aller yawned in periodical circulars from the central administration, from Sleepy Hollow at Batavia, was the dabbling in archaeology of ambitious persons who posed as discoverers, the less their aptitude to digest their desultory reading, the more arrogant their cock-sureness where famous scholars reserved their conclusions. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing and might have proved disastrous to the venerable temple in combination with one of their vaunted discoveries, which established beyond doubt what not a few knew well enough and never had doubted of, viz. that there was a gallery lower than its lowest uncovered terrace, wisely filled up to increase the stability of the building, very probably soon after or even before the erection of the upper storeys. The removal of the supporting layers of stone impaired, of course, the general condition of the structure and the good news of its being again in its former state, was received by many with a sigh of relief. This happened in 1885 with great flourish of trumpets, and the only benefit derived, certainly not of sufficient importance to balance the inevitable weakening of the foundations attendant on such excavations, consisted in the bringing to light of rude, scarcely decipherable inscriptions or rather scratchings,[151] and the intelligence that of the photographed sculptures, in which, so far, no representation of connected events has been recognised, twenty-four are unfinished and thirteen damaged—six wholly smashed. In 1900 new shafts were sunk for new discoveries of the long and widely known, and while this pernicious dilettantism was going on, pseudo-archaeologists vying with professed iconoclasts who should do most harm to the Boro Budoor, the Government confined itself to antiquarian pyrotechnics at the yearly debates on the colonial budget in Parliament.
