Heart and head rebel against such a religion, which considers conscious life the great enemy to be destroyed, seeks life’s meed in dissolution of energy, man’s best part flickering out as the flame of a spent candle. With the gladdening odour of the garden of Java in our nostrils, rational instinct struggles free from the torment of imposed passivity and we rather take a more militant stand concordant with the Buddha’s dying words: Work out your salvation with diligence. How is it to be done? Shall we turn for guidance to the creed of the men of power and pelf, who seem to think that their best recommendation to divine favour is the defacement, in their western theological mill, of the gospel they received from the East; whose mouths are filled with promises while their hands sow calamity; whose moral superiority is but a delusion; who mar impiously what they pretend to improve; who boast of investing their moral surplus in political efficiency, as King Siladitiya did, for the benefit of their wards, but whose greedy immorality spoils even the reckoning of their own selfishness! Not so: their deeds giving the lie to their words, their iniquities increasing, their trespasses growing up into the heavens, who can wonder that the glory of the deity they profess to worship, suffers in the estimation of the native? And yet, how might Christianity thrive in a soil prepared by the doctrine of elimination of self, by adherence to the three duties Buddhism laid down as far more important than Brahmanic sacrifice: continence, kindness, reverence for the life of all creatures. Insisting on man’s obligations to his fellow-men, the Buddha anticipated by six centuries the precept: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. If he did not match it with the first and greater commandment of the Christian dispensation, his atheism, to quote Hunter, was a philosophical tenet which, so far from weakening the sanctions of right and wrong, gave them new strength from the doctrine of Karma or the metempsychosis of character. Teaching that sin, sorrow and deliverance, the state of a man in this life, in all previous and all future lives, is the inevitable result of his own acts, the Buddha applied the inexorable law of cause and effect to the soul: What we sow, we must reap. “All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil,” as redemption flowers from straight vision, straight thought, straight exertion in truthful endeavour. The lesson might be profitably taken to heart in furtherance of a nation’s Karma by statesmen who have no explanation for the unsatisfactory condition of dependencies oversea but evasive oratory backed by a dexterous shuffling of cooked colonial reports and doctored colonial statistics when the sinister farce of the colonial budget is on the boards. And each of us, however limited his sphere, finds his own opportunities for individual transition to a higher state: like Gautama we meet every day the poor and needy, the old and decrepit in want of assistance, the prostrate sufferer in agony of death.
And, like Gautama, each one who strives for enfranchisement, must have his struggle with Mara, the Prince of Darkness. After the first watch on the Boro Budoor, night thickens and covers the earth as a pall; the wan stars glimmer weakly, shining on the misery of deficient fulfilment of intention. Reflecting on our errors of commission and omission, seeing our deeds laid bare and their why and wherefore, dejection masters hope, though steadfast determination might take an example at the Buddha wrestling with the Enemy, who offered him the kingdom of the four worlds; though we know that the giving or withholding of the fifth, the world of glory, is beyond the Enemy’s power. We see the contest re-enacted before us and tremble. Appearing bodily, horrible to behold, Mara, the god of carnal love, passion and sin, Papiyan, the very vicious, besets the incarnate word, surrounded by his demons of ever changing gruesome aspect, barking dogs with enormous fangs and lolling tongues; roaring tigers with sharp, murderous claws and bloodshot eyes; hissing serpents, darting forward to strike and crush their prey. While we fancy the contest raging hottest round valiant patience, personified in the image of the dagob, the maimed statues of the chaityas and lower niches join in the dire battle as the headless spirits that rode upon the tempest when Evil assailed the elect’s purity. Papiyan cannot prevail and seeing the futility of violence, he has recourse to his daughters, the winsome apsaras, who dance and provoke to lascivious commerce by their seductive arts. But they make no more impression than their brutish brothers and, in spite of themselves, they are compelled to praise the fortitude of a virtue which will not succumb even when one of them assumes the shape of a beloved youthful spouse. The baffled apsaras dissolve in floating vapour, and Papiyan, in despair, traces flaming characters on the dome of the dagob with his last arrow: My empire is ended. The stars resume their brightness and a sense of coming light pervades the gloom of despondency. It is borne toward us in the flower tendered by Chandra, the deity of the chaste radiance proceeding from the conqueror’s crest. Lo, his crown is transferred to the sky and, climbing slowly, the cusped moon invests the moulders of past and future worlds with halos of liquid silver.
This is the time, the stilly hour before dawn, the last watch before morning, the chosen moment of the Buddha’s attainment to the summit of the triple science, wherein the supernatural beauty of the Boro Budoor, cleansed and reconsecrated after the white man’s profanation, by the burning fire of day and the mellow touch of night, helps us to penetrate the meaning of his promise. He who holds fast to the law and discipline and faints not, he shall cross the ocean of life and make an end of sorrow. The blitheness of spirit which consists, because of that whereby the sun riseth and setteth, and the moon waxeth and waneth, in discarding the ignorance engendered by conceding to this world a reality it does not possess, regarding as constant that which changes with every wind that blows,—the exaltation born from silent contemplation, loses its vagueness in the manifestation of the godhead in ourselves. For contemplation becomes seeded and blooms in the triad of meditation, the recognition of the entities of time and space, and connecting thought as the unity of universal relationship. The Dhyani Buddhas, wrapped in the shadows from which dawn will deliver them, seek to comprehend, and our mentality expanding with theirs, looking down upon the gray waves of mist that break on the old temple as on a rock of ages in a stormy sea, we feel the dagob rise to meet the moonbeams and soar to unutterable delight. Presently the first smile of day salutes and awakens mother earth; a murmur of contentment thrills the air in harmony of praise: the dimming, quivering stars, the crimson mountain-tops, the purple and azure perspective between, all creation combines in a song of thanksgiving. The mystic planetary music, the singing together of earth and heaven in melody of colour and sound, welcomes the bright morning. Dawn, with blushing face and heart of gold, bewrays the glory of her eternal abode to the world of man, sending her outriders before, the Asvins, the lords of lustre, whose shining armour, forged of the sun’s rays, illumines the pearly sky with dazzling splendour. They roll the billowy vapours together and chase them up the hill-side “like wool of divers changing colours carded,” that the eye of the life-giver may rest on the plain where the palm-groves rise in the hazy dew as emerald islands in an opalescent lake. The Merbabu and the Soombing are still half in darkness when the Merapi, flecked with orange and violet, blazes in reflection of aërial effulgence, soon to commingle the smoke of its fiery crater with the clouds mounting its slopes. The fire-mountains keep a good watch on the garden of Java, than which Jatawana, the famous pleasance where the Buddha enounced the substance of his teachings preserved in the Sutras, cannot have been more delicious; and the Merapi in particular makes the land pass under the rod when sacred covenants are broken.
XL. THE DAGOB OF THE BORO BUDOOR AFTER ITS RESTORATION
(Archaeological Service.)
The heart too is illuminated as thoughts take their hues from the skies, knowledge clearing up the anarchy of conflicting creeds which exercised and exercise their sway over Java. Brahmanic terrorism and Buddhist despondency, Moslim fanaticism and Christian dissensions vanish before her unsophisticated children’s delight in life for its own sake, as the morning dew before the warmth of the sun. Twining memories of the jaman buda with current happenings, they take their spiritual nourishment directly from nature and the symbolic form of their natural religion from everywhere. Without troubling about erudite dissertations regarding the legend of the Buddha as the development of an ancient solar myth, or Buddhism as a development of the Sankhya system of Kapila; without going into abstruse speculations anent the evolution of the universe from primordial matter, they are in constant intercourse with the surrounding worlds, seen and unseen. The virile Surya, impregnating air and earth, unfailing source of plenty, enters deep into their metaphysics as the cosmic pivot of faith. When high-born dawn rouses the tillers of the soil to go forth to their work and the eye of day showers benediction, the solar word, spoken from the eternal throne and descending on wings of happiness, the living word, is found emblazoned on the sea of light which floods the Kadu just as the fertilising water of the mountain-rills floods the sawahs;[170] is found embodied in that superb temple, the Boro Budoor, whose soul, the soul of humanity in communion with the all-soul, is the soul of Java. Adorned with that priceless jewel of sanctity, the plain lifts its sensuous loveliness to heaven as the bride meets the caresses of her wedded spouse, trembling with love. They obey the divine law which bids them follow nature in drinking the amrita, gaining immortality like the gods in creation of life, which may change, yet never dies, aging but reviving, the mystery of the Trimoorti. Clothed with the resplendent atmosphere, touched by the beams of the rising sun, its effulgent dagob a mountain of gold, the Boro Budoor bursts out in the bloom of excellence, not the sepulchre of a discarded religion, of a fallen nation’s dreams, but a token of the germinal truth of all religion, a prophetic expression of things to be. The tide of destiny runs not always in the same channel and there is promise in the joy of day, promise of a slaking of the thirst for freedom, an abatement of the fever engendered by doubt of enfranchisement always deferred. If hope endures in the battle with darkness, patient fortitude will lead to victory. It baulked the power of Mara and blunted the weapons of the demons who assailed the Buddha and turned aside the missiles which did not harm him but changed into flowers before his feet, into garlands suspended over his head. When knowledge shall cover the world at the advent of Vishvapani, deceit and avarice will cease tormenting and glad content will dwell in the negri jawa for ever.
So be it!
