The next recorded event that seems to bear on our investigations is the mission of the children of Dewa Kusuma to Kling or India, in order that they might be educated in the Brahmanical religion.[604] This event took place in A.D. 924, and seems to point distinctly to a time when the Buddhist religion, as evidenced by the erection of Boro Buddor, had died out, and the quasi-Hindu temples of Brambanam and Singa Sari had superseded those of the Buddhists. Those at Brambanam are said to have been completed in A.D. 1097, which seems an extremely probable date for the Chandi Sewa, or “1000 temples,” which, however, are much more Jaina than Hindu. From that period till the beginning of the 15th century, the series of monuments—many of them with dates upon them[605]—are tolerably complete, and there will be no difficulty in classifying them whenever the task is fairly undertaken.
At this time we find the island divided into two kingdoms; one, having its capital at Pajajaram, about forty miles east of Batavia, occupied the whole of the western or Sunda part of the island. The Sundas, however, were not a building race, and the portion occupied by them need not be again referred to here. It contains no buildings except the rude Hindu remains above referred to.
The eastern portion of the island was occupied by the kingdom of Majapahit, founded, apparently, about the year 1300. It soon rose to a higher pitch of power and splendour than any of the preceding kingdoms, and the capital was adorned with edifices of surpassing magnificence, but mostly in brick, so that now they are little more than a mass of indistinguishable ruins. When, however, it had lasted little more than a century, Mahomedan missionaries appeared on the island, and gradually—not by conquest or the sword, but by persuasion—induced the inhabitants of the island to forsake the religion of their forefathers and adopt that of the Arabian Prophet. In the year 1479 the Mahomedans had become so powerful that the city of Majapahit was taken by them by storm, and the last Hindu dynasty of the island overthrown, and those that remained of the foreign race driven to take refuge in the island of Bali.[606]
Then occurred what was, perhaps, the least-expected event in all “this strange eventful history.” It is as if the masons had thrown away their tools, and the chisels had dropped from the hands of the carvers. From that time forward no building was erected in Java, and no image carved, that is worth even a passing notice. At a time when the Mahomedans were adorning India with monuments of surpassing magnificence no one in Java thought of building either a mosque, or a tomb, or a palace that would be deemed respectable in any second-class state in any part of the world.
For nearly nine centuries (A.D. 603-1479) foreign colonists had persevered in adorning the island with edifices almost unrivalled elsewhere of their class; but at the end of that time, as happened so often in India, their blood had become diluted, their race impure, their energy effete, and, as if at the touch of a magician’s wand, they disappear. The inartistic native races resumed their sway, and art vanished from the land, never, probably, again to reappear.
Boro Buddor.
There may be older monuments in the island of Java than Boro Buddor, but, if so, they have not yet been brought to light. The rude stone monuments of the western or Sunda end of the island may, of course, be older, though I doubt it; but they are not architectural, and of real native art we know nothing.
When Sir S. Raffles and J. Crawfurd wrote their works, no means existed of verifying dates by comparison of styles, and it is, therefore, little to be wondered at if the first gives A.D. 1360,[607] and the second A.D. 1344,[608] as the date of this building. The former, however, was not deceived by this date, inasmuch as at page 67 he says, “The edifices at Singa Sari were probably executed in the 8th or 9th century. They nearly resemble those of Brambanam and Boro Boddor. It is probable the whole were constructed about the same period, or within the same century; at any rate, between the sixth and ninth century of the Christian Era.” This, perhaps, errs a little the other way. Heer Brumund, on historical grounds, places Boro Buddor “in the ninth, perhaps even in the eighth century of the Christian Era.”[609] On architectural grounds I would almost unhesitatingly place it a century earlier. The style and character of its sculptures are so nearly identical with those of the latest caves at Ajunta (No. [26], for instance), and in the western Ghâts, that they look as if they were executed by the same artists, and it is difficult to conceive any great interval of time elapsing between the execution of the two. If I am correct in placing the caves in the first half of the 7th century, we can hardly be far wrong in assigning the commencement, at least, of the Javan monument to the second half of that century. This being so, I am very much inclined to believe that Boro Buddor may be the identical seven-storeyed vihara, mentioned by Aditya Dharma in his inscription at Menankabu.[610] Its being found in Sumatra does not appear to me to militate against this view. Asoka’s inscriptions are found in Gandhara, Saurastra, and Orissa, but not in Behar. At home he was known: but it may be that he desired to place a permanent record of his greatness in the remote portions of his dominions. The date of the inscription, A.D. 656, accords so exactly with the age I would assign to it from other sources, that it may at least stand for the present. Of course, it was not completed at once, or in a few years. The whole group, with Chandi Pawon and Mendout, may probably extend over a century and a half—down, say, to A.D. 800, or over the whole golden age of Buddhism in the island.
It certainly is fortunate for the student of Buddhist art in India that Boro Buddor (Woodcuts Nos. [362] and [363]) has attracted so much attention; for, even now, the five folio volumes of plates recently devoted to its illustration do not contain one figure too many for the