Flash-lights from the Seven Seas

by William L. Stidger

From Djodjakarta you go to the temples.

This great temple has, instead of the plain surfaces of the great pyramid, one mile of beautifully carved decorations, with 2141 separate panels depicting the life of Buddha from the time he descended from the skies until he arrived at Nirvana, or perfect isolation from the world. A history of more than a thousand years is told in its stone tablets by the sculptor's chisel, told beautifully, told enduringly, told magnificently.

One writer says: "This temple is the work of a master-builder whose illuminated brain conceived the idea of this temple wherein he writes in sculpture the history of a religion."

And again one says architecturally speaking of it:

"It is a polygonous pyramid of dark trachyte, with gray cupulas on jutting walls and projecting cornices, a forest of pinnacles."

There are four ledges to this hill temple and above each ledge or stone path are rows of Buddhas hidden in great 5-foot stone bells, and at the top crowning the temple a great 50-foot bell in which Buddha is completely hidden from the world, symbol of the desired Nirvana that all Buddhists seek.

Mysterious with weird echoes of a past age it stands, silhouetted against a flaming sky to-night as I see it for the first time. It is late evening and all day long we have been climbing the ancient ruins of that magnificent age of Hindu culture on the island of Java. This temple of Boroboedoer was to be the climax of the day, and surely it is all of that.

The fire dies out of the sky. The seven terraces of the stone temple begin to blur into one great and beautiful pyramid. Only the innumerable stone bells stand out against the starlit night; stone bells with the little peepholes in them, through which the stolid countenances and the stone eyes of many Buddhas, in calm repose, look out upon the four points of the compass.

Night has fallen. We have seen the great Temple by crimson sunset and now we shall see it by night.

The shadows seem to wrap its two thousand exquisite carvings, and its Bells of Buddha in loving and warm tropical embrace. But no warmer, is the embrace of the shadows about the Temple than the naked embrace of a score of Javanese boys who hold to their hearts naked Javanese beauties who sit along the terraces looking into the skies of night utterly oblivious to the passing of time or of the presence of curious American strangers.