Chapter XXIII: Garoet and Papandayang 312 (5)

A tall, grim, severe man in the dark cloth clothes of ceremony, with uniform buttons, waved a semi-military cap, and said curtly: “Ladies, it is my duty to inform you that you have no permission to visit Djokja.”

It took some repetitions for us to get the whole sensation of the heavens suddenly falling on us, to learn that a telegram had come from official headquarters at Buitenzorg to warn him that three American ladies would arrive that afternoon, without passports, to visit Djokja.

“Certainly not, because those Buitenzorg officials told us not to wait for the passports—that they would mail them after us.” Then ensued the most farcical scene, a grand burlesque rendering of the act of apprehending criminals, or rather political suspects. The assistant resident tried to maintain the stern, judicial manner of a police-court magistrate, cross-examining us as closely as if it were testimony in a murder trial we were giving, and was not at all inclined to admit that there could be any mistake in the elaborately perfect system of Dutch colonial government. Magnificently he told us that we could not remain in Djokja, and we assured him that we had no wish to do so, that we were leaving for Boro Boedor in the morning. The Pickwickian message from Buitenzorg had not given any instructions. It merely related that we should arrive. We had arrived, and the assistant resident evidently did not know just what to do next. At any rate, he intended that we should stand in awe of him and the government of Netherlands India. He “supposed” that it was intended that we should be sent straight back to Buitenzorg. We demurred, in fact refused—the two inflammable, impolitic ones of us, who paid no heed to the gentle, gray-haired elder member of our party, who was all resignation and humility before the terrible official. We produced our United States passports, and quite as much as told him that he and the noble army of Dutch officials might finish the discussion with the American consul; we had other affairs, and were bound for Boro Boedor. He waved the United States passports aside, curtly said they were of “no account,” examined the letters of credit with a shade more of interest, and gave his whole attention to my “Smithsonian passport,” or general letter “to all friends of science.” That beautifully written document, with its measured phrases, many polysyllabic words in capital letters, and the big gold seal of Saint-Gaudens’s designing, worked a spell; and after slowly reading all the commendatory sentences of that great American institution “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men,” he read it again:

“Hum-m-m! Hum-m-m! The Smithsonian Institution of Washington—National Geographic Society—scientific observation and study—anthropology—photography—G. Brown Goode, acting secretary! Ah, ladies, since you have such credentials as _this_,”—evidently the Smithsonian Institution has better standing abroad than the Department of State, and G. Brown Goode, acting secretary of the one, was a better name to conjure with away from home than Walter Q. Gresham, actual secretary of the other,—“since you come so highly commended to us, I will allow you to proceed to Boro Boedor, and remain there while I report to Buitenzorg and ask for instructions. You will go to Boro Boedor as early as possible in the morning,” he commanded, and then asked, “How long had you intended to remain there?”

“That depends. If it is comfortable, and the rains keep off, we may stay several days. If not, we return to-morrow evening.”

“No, no, no!” he cried in alarm; “you must stay there at Boro Boedor. You have no permission to visit Djokja, and I cannot let you stay in my residency. You must stay at Boro Boedor or go back to Buitenzorg.”

To be ordered off to the Buddhist shrine at sunrise put the pilgrimage in quite another light; to be sentenced to Nirvana by a local magistrate in brass buttons was not like arriving there by slow stages—meditation and reincarnation; but as the assistant resident seemed to be on the point of repenting his clemency, we acquiesced, and the great man and his minions drove away, the bearer of the _pajong_, or official umbrella of his rank, testifying to the formal character of the visit he had been paying. The landlord mopped his brow, sighed, and looked like one who had survived great perils; and we then saw that his sightseeing stroll down the street with us had been a ruse, a little clever scouting, a preliminary reconnaissance for the benefit of the puzzled magistrate.

We left Djokja at sunrise, with enthusiasm somewhat dampened from former anticipations of that twenty-five-mile drive to Boro Boedor, “the aged thing” in the Boro district of Kedu Residency, or Bára Budha, “Great Buddha.” We had expected to realize a little of the pleasure of travel during the barely ended posting days on this garden island, networked over with smooth park drives all shaded with tamarind-, kanari-, teak-, and waringen-trees, and it proved a half-day of the greatest interest and enjoyment. Our canopied carriage was drawn by four little rats of ponies, driven by a serious old coachman in a gay sarong and military jacket, with a huge lacquered vizor or crownless hat tied on over his battek turban, like a student’s exaggerated eye-shade. This gave the shadow of great dignity and owlish wisdom to his wrinkled face, ornamented by a mustache as sparsely and symmetrically planted as walrus whiskers. He held the reins and said nothing. When there was anything to do, the running footman did it—a lithe little creature who clung to a rear step, and took to his heels every few minutes to crack the whip over the ponies’ heads, and with a frenzied “Gree! G-r-r-_ee_! _Gr-r-r-e-e-e!_” urge the mites to a more breakneck gallop in harness. He steered them by the traces as he galloped beside them, guided them over bridges, around corners, past other vehicles, and through crowds, while the driver held the reins and chewed betel tobacco in unconcerned state. We rocked and rolled through beautiful arched avenues, with this bare-legged boy in gay petticoat “gr-r-ree-ing” us along like mad, people scattering aside like frightened chickens, and kneeling as we passed by. The way was fenced and hedged and finished, to each blade of grass, like some aristocratic suburb of a great capital, an endless park, or continuous estate, where fancy farming and landscape-gardening had gone their most extravagant lengths. There was not a neglected acre on either side for all the twenty-five miles; every field was cultivated like a tulip-bed; every plant was as green and perfect as if entered in a horticultural show. Streams, ravines, and ditches were solidly bridged, each with its white cement parapet and smooth concrete flooring, and each numbered and marked with Dutch preciseness; and along every bit of the road were posted the names of the kampongs and estates charged to maintain the highway in its perfect condition. Telegraph- and telephone-wires were strung on the rigid arms of cotton-trees, and giant creepers wove solid fences as they were trained from tree-trunk to tree-trunk—the tropics tamed, combed, and curbed, hitched to the cart of commerce and made man’s abject servant.

Every few miles there were open red-tiled pavilions built over the highways as refuges for man and beast from the scorching sun of one season and the cloud-burst showers of the rainy half of the year. Twice we found busy passers going on in groves beside these rest-houses—picturesque gatherings of men, women, and children, and displays of fowls, fruits, nuts, vegetables, grain, sugar, spices, gums, and flowers, that tempted one to linger and enjoy, and to photograph every foot of the passer’s area. The main road was crowded all the way like a city street, and around these passers the highway hummed with voices. One can believe in the density of the population—450 to the square mile[4]—when he sees the people trooping along these country roads; and he can well understand why every foot of land is cultivated, how even in the benevolent land of the banana every one must produce something, must work or starve. The better sanitary condition of the native kampongs is given as a great factor in the remarkable increase of population in the last half-century; but it took many years of precept and example, strict laws, and a rating of native rulers and village chiefs according to the cleanliness of their kampongs, before the native hamlets became tropical counterparts of Broek and the other absurdly clean towns of Holland. These careless children of the tropics are obliged to whitewash their houses twice a year, look to their drains and debris, and use disinfectants; and with the dainty little basket houses, one of which may be bought outright for five dollars, and the beautiful palms and shrubberies to serve as screens from rice-field vapors, each little kampong is a delight in every way.

Men and boys toiled to the passer, bent over with the weight of one or two monstrous jack-fruits or durians on their backs. A woman with a baby swinging in the slandang over her shoulder had tied cackling chickens to the back of her belt, and trudged on comfortably under her umbrella; and a boy swung a brace of ducks from each end of a shoulder-pole, and trotted gaily to the passer. The kampongs, or villages, when not hidden in palm- and plantain-groves behind fancy bamboo fences, were rows of open houses on each side of the highway, and we reviewed native life at leisure while the ponies were changed. The friendly, gentle little brown people welcomed us with amused and embarrassed smiles when our curiosity as to sarong-painting, lacquering, and mat-weaving carried us into the family circle. The dark, round-eyed, star-eyed babies and children showed no fear or shyness, and the tiniest ones—their soft little warm brown bodies bare of ever a garment save the cotton slandang in which they cuddle so confidingly under the mother’s protecting arm—let us lift and carry and play with them at will.

We left the main road, and progressed by a narrower way between open fields of pepper, manioc, indigo, and tobacco, with picturesque views of the three symmetrical and beautiful mountains, Soembung, Merbaboe, and Merapi—the first and largest one as pure in line, as exquisite and ideal a peak, as Fujiyama, and the others sloping splendidly in soft volcanic outlines. Soembung is the very center of Java, and native legends cling to the little hill of Tidar at its base—the “spike of the universe,” the nail which fastens the lovely island to the face of the earth. Merbaboe, the “ash-ejecting,” has wrought ruin in its time, and a faint white plume of steam waves from its summit still. The capitulations which delivered the Napoleonic possessions of the Dutch East Indies to England in 1811 were signed at the base of Merbaboe, and in our then frame of mind toward the Dutch government we wished to make a pilgrimage of joyous celebration to the spot. The third of the graceful peaks, Merapi, the “fire-throwing,” was a sacred peak in Buddhist times, when cave-temples were hewn in its solid rock and their interiors fretted over with fine bas-reliefs. A group of people transplanting rice, a little boy driving a flock of geese down the road, a little open-timbered temple of the dead in a frangipani-grove—all these, with the softly blue-and-purple mountains in the background, are pictures in enduring memory of that morning’s ride toward Nirvana.

A gray ruin showed indistinctly on a hilltop, and after a run through a long, arched avenue we came out suddenly at the base of the hill-temple. Instead of a mad, triumphant sweep around the great pyramid, the ponies balked, rooted themselves past any lashing or “gr-r-ree-ing,” and we got out and walked under the noonday sun, around the hoary high altar of Buddha, down an avenue of tall kanari-trees, lined with statues, gargoyles, and other such _recha_, or remains of ancient art, to the passagrahan, or government rest-house.

XV

BORO BOEDOR

The deep portico of the passagrahan commands an angle and two sides of the square temple, and from the mass of blackened and bleached stones the eye finally arranges and follows out the broken lines of the terraced pyramid, covered with such a wealth of ornament as no other one structure in the world presents. The first near view is almost disappointing. In the blur of details it is difficult to realize the vast proportions of this twelve-century-old structure—a pyramid the base platform of which is five hundred feet square, the first terrace walls three hundred feet square, and the final dome one hundred feet in height. Stripped of every kindly relief of vine and moss, every gap and ruined angle visible, there was something garish, raw, and almost disordered at the first glance, almost as jarring as newness, and the hard black-and-white effect of the dark lichens on the gray trachyte made it look like a bad photograph of the pile. The temple stands on a broad platform, and rises first in five square terraces, inclosing galleries, or processional paths, between their walls, which are covered on each side with bas-relief sculptures. If placed in single line these bas-reliefs would extend for three miles. The terrace walls hold four hundred and thirty-six niches or alcove chapels, where life-size Buddhas sit serene upon lotus cushions. Staircases ascend in straight lines from each of the four sides, passing under stepped or pointed arches the keystones of which are elaborately carved masks, and rows of sockets in the jambs show where wood or metal doors once swung. Above the square terraces are three circular terraces, where seventy-two latticed _dagobas_ (reliquaries in the shape of the calyx or bud of the lotus) inclose each a seated image, seventy-two more Buddhas sitting in these inner, upper circles of Nirvana, facing a great dagoba, or final cupola, the exact function or purpose of which as key to the whole structure is still the puzzle of archæologists. This final shrine is fifty feet in diameter, and either covered a relic of Buddha, or a central well where the ashes of priests and princes were deposited, or is a form surviving from the tree-temples of the earliest, primitive East when nature-worship prevailed. The English engineers made an opening in the solid exterior, and found an unfinished statue of Buddha on a platform over a deep well-hole; and its head, half buried in debris, still smiles upon one from the deep cavern. M. Freidrich, in “L’Extrême Orient” (1878), states that this top dagoba was opened in the time of the resident Hartman (1835), and that gold ornaments were found; and it was believed that there were several stories or chambers to this well, which reached to the lowest level of the structure. M. Désiré de Charnay, who spent an afternoon at Boro Boedor in 1878 in studying the resemblance of the pyramid temples of Java to those of Central America, believed this well-hole to be the place of concealment for the priest whose voice used to issue as a mysterious oracle from the statue itself.

A staircase has been constructed to the summit of this dagoba, and from it one looks down upon the whole structure as on a ground-plan drawing, and out over finely cultivated fields and thick palm-groves to the matchless peaks and the nearer hills that inclose this fertile valley of the Boro Boedor—“the very finest view I ever saw,” wrote Marianne North.

Three fourths of the terrace chapels and the upper dagobas have crumbled; hundreds of statues are headless, armless, overturned, missing; tees, or finials, are gone from the bell-roofs; terrace walls bulge, lean outward, and have fallen in long stretches; and the circular platforms and the processional paths undulate as if earthquake-waves were at the moment rocking the mass. No cement was used to hold the fitted stones together, and another Hindu peculiarity of construction is the entire absence of a column, a pillar, or an arch. Vegetation wrought great ruin during its buried centuries, but earthquakes and tropical rains are working now a slow but surer ruin that will leave little of Boro Boedor for the next century’s wonder-seekers, unless the walls are soon straightened and strongly braced.

All this ruined splendor and wrecked magnificence soon has an overpowering effect on one. He almost hesitates to attempt studying out all the details, the intricate symbolism and decoration lavished by those Hindus, who, like the Moguls, “built like Titans, but finished like jewelers.” One walks around and around the sculptured terraces, where the bas-reliefs portray all the life of Buddha and his disciples, and the history of that great religion—a picture-Bible of Buddhism. All the events in the life of Prince Siddhartha, Gautama Buddha, are followed in turn: his birth and education, his leaving home, his meditation under Gaya’s immortal tree, his teaching in the deer-park, his sitting in judgment, weighing even the birds in his scales, his death and entrance into Nirvana. The every-day life of the seventh and eighth century is pictured, too—temples, palaces, thrones and tombs, ships and houses, all of man’s constructions, are portrayed. The life in courts and palaces, in fields and villages, is all seen there. Royal folk in wonderful jewels sit enthroned, with minions offering gifts and burning incense before them, warriors kneeling, and maidens dancing. The peasant plows the rice-fields with the same wooden stick and ungainly buffalo, and carries the rice-sheaves from the harvest-field with the same shoulder-poles, used in all the farther East to-day. Women fill their water-vessels at the tanks and bear them away on their heads as in India now, and scores of bas-reliefs show the unchanging customs of the East that offer sculptors the same models in this century. Half the wonders of that great three-mile-long gallery of sculptures cannot be recalled. Each round disclosed some more wonderful picture, some more eloquent story, told in the coarse trachyte rock furnished by the volcanoes across the valley. Even the humorous fancies of the sculptors are expressed in stone. In one rilievo a splendidly caparisoned state elephant flings its feet in imitation of the dancing-girl near by. Other sportive elephants carry fans and state umbrellas in their trunks; and the marine monsters swimming about the ship that bears the Buddhist missionaries to the isles have such expression and human resemblance as to make one wonder if those primitives did not occasionally pillory an enemy with their chisels, too. In the last gallery, where, in the progress of the religion, it took on many features of Jainism, or advancing Brahmanism, Buddha is several times represented as the ninth avatar, or incarnation, of Vishnu, still seated on the lotus cushion, and holding a lotus with one of his four hands. Figure after figure wears the Brahmanic cord, or sacrificial thread, over the left shoulder; and all the royal ones sit in what must have been the pose of high fashion at that time—one knee bent under in tailor fashion, the other bent knee raised and held in a loop of the girdle confining the sarong skirt. There is not a grotesque nor a nude figure in the whole three miles of sculptured scenes, and the costumes are a study in themselves; likewise the elaborate jewels which Maia and her maids and the princely ones wear. The trees and flowers are a sufficient study alone; and on my last morning at Boro Boedor I made the whole round at sunrise, looking specially at the wonderful palms, bamboos, frangipani-, mango-, mangosteen-, breadfruit-, pomegranate-, banana-, and bo-trees—every local form being gracefully conventionalized, and, as Fergusson says, “complicated and refined beyond any examples known in India.” It is such special rounds that give one a full idea of what a monumental masterpiece the great Buddhist _vihara_ is, what an epitome of all the arts and civilization of the eighth century A. D. those galleries of sculpture hold, and turn one to dreaming of the builders and their times.

No particularly Javanese types of face or figure are represented. All the countenances are Hindu, Hindu-Caucasian, and pure Greek; and none of the objects or accessories depicted with them are those of an uncivilized people. All the art and culture, the highest standards of Hindu taste and living, in the tenth century of triumphant Buddhism, are expressed in this sculptured record of the golden age of Java. The Boro Boedor sculptures are finer examples of the Greco-Buddhist art of the times than those of Amravati and Gandahara as one sees them in Indian museums; and the pure Greek countenances show sufficient evidence of Bactrian influences on the Indus, whence the builders came.

Of the more than five hundred statues of Buddha enshrined in niches and latticed dagobas, all, save the one mysterious figure standing in the central or summit dagoba, are seated on lotus cushions. Those of the terrace rows of chapels face outward to the four points of the compass, and those of the three circular platforms face inward to the hidden, mysterious one. All are alike save in the position of the hands, and those of the terrace chapels have four different poses accordingly as they face the cardinal points. As they are conventionally represented, there is Buddha teaching, with his open palm resting on one knee; Buddha learning, with that hand intently closed; Buddha meditating, with both hands open on his knees; Buddha believing and convinced, expounding the lotus law with upraised hand; and Buddha demonstrating and explaining, with thumbs and index-fingers touching. The images in the lotus bells of the circular platforms hold the right palm curved like a shell over the fingers of the left hand—the Buddha who has comprehended, and sits meditating in stages of Nirvana. It was never intended that worshipers should know the mien of the great one in the summit chalice, the serene one who, having attained the supreme end, was left to brood alone, inaccessible, shut out from, beyond all the world. For this reason it is believed that this standing statue was left incomplete, the profane chisel not daring to render every accessory and attribute as with the lesser ones.

After Wilsen’s drawings.]

Humboldt first noted the five different attitudes of the seated figures, and their likeness to the five Dhyani Buddhas of Nepal; and the discovery of a tablet in Sumatra recording the erection of a seven-story vihara to the Dhyani Buddha was proof that the faith that first came pure from the mouth of the Oxus and the Indus must have received later bent through missionaries from the Malay Peninsula and Tibet. The Boro Boedor images have the same lotus cushion and aureole, the same curls of hair, but not the long ears of the Nepal Buddhas, who in the Mongol doctrine had each his own paradise or quarter of the earth. The first Dhyani, who rules the paradise of the Orient, is always represented in the same attitude and pose of the hands as the image in the latticed bells of these upper, circular or Nirvana terraces of Boro Boedor. The images on the east side of Boro Boeder’s square terraces correspond to the second Dhyani’s conventional pose; those on the south walls, to the third Dhyani; the west-facing ones, to the fourth Dhyani; and the northern ones, to the fifth Dhyani of Nepal.

There are no inscriptions visible anywhere in this mass of picture-writings, no corner-stone or any clue to the exact year of its founding. We know certainly that the third great synod of Buddhists in Asoka’s time, 264 B. C., resolved to spread Buddhism abroad, and that the propaganda begun in Ceylon was carried in every direction, and that Asoka opened seven of the eight original dagobas of India enshrining relics of Buddha’s body, and, subdividing, put them in eighty-four thousand vases or precious boxes, that were scattered to the limits of that religious world. Stupas, or dagobas, were built over these holy bits, and all the central dagoba of Boro Boedor is believed to have been the original structure built over some such reliquary, and afterward surrounded by the great sculptured terraces. Fa Hian, the Chinese pilgrim who visited Java in 414 A. D., remarked upon the number of “heretics and Brahmans” living there, and noted that “the law of Buddha is not much known.” Native records tell that in 603 A. D. the Prince of Gujerat came, with five thousand followers in one hundred and six ships, and settled at Mataram, where two thousand more men of Gujerat joined him, and a great Buddhist empire succeeded that of the Brahmanic faith. An inscription found in Sumatra, bearing date 656 A. D., gives the name of Maha Raja Adiraja Adityadharma, King of Prathama (Great Java), a worshiper of the five Dhyani Buddhas, who had erected a great seven-storied vihara, evidently this one of Boro Boedor, in their honor. This golden age of the Buddhist empire in Java lasted through the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries. Arts and religion had already entered their decline in the tenth century, when the Prince Dewa Kosoumi sent his daughter and four sons to India to study religion and the arts. The princelings returned with artists, soldiers, and many trophies and products; but this last fresh importation did not arrest the decay of the faith, and the people, relapsing peaceably into Brahmanism, deserted their old temples. With the Mohammedan conquest of 1475-79 the people in turn forsook the worship of Siva, Durga, and Ganesha, and abandoned their shrines at Brambanam and elsewhere, as they had withdrawn from Boro Boedor and Chandi Sewou.

When the British engineers came to Boro Boedor, in 1814, the inhabitants of the nearest village had no knowledge or traditions of this noblest monument Buddhism ever reared. Ever since their fathers had moved there from another district it had been only a tree-covered hill in the midst of forests. Two hundred coolies worked forty-five days in clearing away vegetation and excavating the buried terraces. Measurements and drawings were made, and twelve plates from them accompany Sir Stamford Raffles’s work. After the Dutch recovered possession of Java, their artists and archæologists gave careful study to this monument of earlier civilization and arts. Further excavations showed that the great platform or broad terrace around the temple mass was of later construction than the body of the pyramid, that a flooring nine feet deep had been put entirely around the lower walls, presumably to brace them, and thus covering many inscriptions the meanings of which have not yet been given, not to English readers at least. Dutch scientists devoted many seasons to the study of these ruins, and Herr Brumund’s scholarly text, completed and edited by Dr. Leemans of Leyden, accompanies and explains the great folio volumes of four hundred plates, after Wilsen’s drawings, published by the Dutch government in 1874. Since their uncovering the ruins have been kept free from vegetation, but no other care has been taken. In this comparatively short time legends have grown up, local customs have become fixed, and Boro Boedor holds something of the importance it should in its immediate human relations.

For more than six centuries the hill-temple was lost to sight, covered with trees and rank vegetation; and when the Englishmen brought the great sculptured monument to light, the gentle, easily superstitious Javanese of the neighborhood regarded these recha—statues and relics of the ancient, unknown cult—with the greatest reverence. They adopted them as tutelary divinities, as it were, indigenous to their own soil. While Wilsen lived there the people brought daily offerings of flowers. The statue on the first circular terrace at the right of the east staircase, and the secluded image at the very summit, were always surrounded with heaps of stemless flowers laid on moss and plantain-leaves. Incense was burned to these recha, and the people daubed them with the yellow powder with which princes formerly painted, and even humble bridegrooms now paint, themselves on festal days, just as Burmese Buddhists daub gold-leaf on their shrines, and, like the Cingalese Buddhists, heap champak and tulse, jasmine, rose, and frangipani flowers, before their altars. When questioned, the people owned that the offerings at Boro Boedor were in fulfilment of a vow or in thanksgiving for some event in their lives—a birth, death, marriage, unexpected good fortune, or recovery from illness. Other worshipers made the rounds of the circular terraces, reaching to touch each image in its latticed bell, and many kept all-night vigils among the dagobas of the Nirvana circles. Less appealing was the custom, that grew up among the Chinese residents of Djokjakarta and its neighborhood, of making the temple the goal of general pilgrimage on the Chinese New Year’s day. They made food and incense offerings to the images, and celebrated with fireworks, feasts, and a general May-fair and popular outdoor fête.

After the temple was uncovered the natives considered it a free quarry, and carried off carved stones for door-steps, gate-posts, foundations, and fences. Every visitor, tourist or antiquarian, scientist or relic-hunter, helped himself; and every residency, native prince’s garden, and plantation lawn, far and near, is still ornamented with Boro Boedor’s sculptures. In the garden of the Magelang Residency, Miss Marianne North found a Chinese artist employed in “restoring” Boro Boedor images, touching up the Hindu countenances with a chisel until their eyes wore the proper Chinese slant. The museum at Batavia has a full collection of recha, and all about the foundation platform of the temple itself, and along the path to the passagrahan, the way is lined with displaced images and fragments, statues, lions, elephants, horses; the _hansa_, or emblematic geese of Buddhism; the _Garouda_, or sacred birds of Vishnu; and giant genii that probably guarded some outer gates of approach. A captain of Dutch hussars told Herr Brumund that, when camping at Boro Boedor during the Javanese war, his men amused themselves by striking off the heads of statues with single lance- or saber-strokes. Conspicuous heads made fine targets for rifle and pistol practice. Native boys, playing on the terraces while watching cattle, broke off tiny heads and detachable bits of carving, and threw them at one another; and a few such playful shepherds could effect as much ruin as any of the imaginary bands of fanatic Moslems or Brahmans. One can better accept the plain, rural story of the boy herders’ destructiveness than those elaborately built up tales of the religious wars, when priests and people, driven to Boro Boedor as their last refuge, retreated, fighting, from terrace to terrace, hurling stones and statues down upon their pursuers, the last heroic believers dying martyrs before the summit dagoba. Fanatic Mohammedans in other countries doubtless would destroy the shrines of a rival, heretic creed; but there is most evidence in the history and character of the Javanese people that they simply left their old shrines, let them alone, and allowed the jungle to claim at its will what no longer had any interest or sacredness for them. To this day the Javanese takes his religion easily, and it is known that at one time Buddhism and Brahmanism flourished in peace side by side, and that conversion from one faith to the other, and back again, and then to Mohammedanism, was peaceful and gradual, and the result of suasion and fashion, and not of force. The old cults faded, lost prestige, and vanished without stress of arms or an inquisition.

XVI

BORO BOEDOR AND MENDOET

With five hundred Buddhas in near neighborhood, one might expect a little of the atmosphere of Nirvana, and the looking at so many repetitions of one object might well produce the hypnotic stage akin to it. The cool, shady passagrahan at Boro Boedor affords as much of earthly quiet and absolute calm, as entire a retreat from the outer, modern world, as one could ever expect to find now in any land of the lotus. This government rest-house is maintained by the resident of Kedu, and every accommodation is provided for the pilgrim, at a fixed charge of six florins the day. The keeper of the passagrahan was a slow-spoken, lethargic, meditative old Hollander, with whom it was always afternoon. One half expected him to change from battek pajamas to yellow draperies, climb up on some vacant lotus pedestal, and, posing his fingers, drop away into eternal meditation, like his stony neighbors. Tropic life and isolation had reduced him to that mental stagnation, torpor, or depression so common with single Europeans in far Asia, isolated from all social friction, active, human interests, and natural sympathies, and so far out of touch with the living, moving world of the nineteenth century. Life goes on in placidity, endless quiet, and routine at Boro Boedor. Visitors come rarely; they most often stop only for riz tavel, and drive on; and not a half-dozen American names appear in the visitors’ book, the first entry in which is dated 1869.

I remember the first still, long lotus afternoon in the passagrahan’s portico, when my companions napped, and not a sound broke the stillness save the slow, occasional rustle of palm-branches and the whistle of birds. In that damp, heated silence, where even the mental effort of recalling the attitude of Buddha elsewhere threw one into a bath of perspiration, there was exertion enough in tracing the courses and projections of the terraced temple with the eye. Even this easy rocking-chair study of the blackened ruins, empty niches, broken statues, and shattered and crumbling terraces, worked a spell. The dread genii by the doorway and the grotesque animals along the path seemed living monsters, the meditating statues even seemed to breathe, until some “chuck-chucking” lizard ran over them and dispelled the half-dream.

In those hazy, hypnotic hours of the long afternoon one could best believe the tradition that the temple rose in a night at miraculous bidding, and was not built by human hands; that it was built by the son of the Prince of Boro Boedor, as a condition to his receiving the daughter of the Prince of Mendoet for a wife. The suitor was to build it within a given time, and every detail was rigidly prescribed. The princess came with her father to inspect the great work of art, with its miles of bas-reliefs and hundreds of statues fresh from the sculptor’s chisel. “Without doubt these images are beautiful,” she said coldly, “but they are dead. I can no more love you than they can love you”; and she turned and left her lover to brood in eternal sorrow and meditation upon that puzzle of all the centuries—the Eternal Feminine.

At last the shadows began to stretch; a cooler breath came; cocoanut-leaves began to rustle and lash with force, and the musical rhythm of distant, soft Malay voices broke the stillness that had been that of the Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted castle. A boy crept out of a basket house in the palm-grove behind the passagrahan, and walked up a palm-tree with that deliberate ease and nonchalance that is not altogether human or two-footed, and makes one rub his eyes doubtingly at the unprepared sight. He carried a bunch of bamboo tubes at his belt, and when he reached the top of the smooth stem began letting down bamboo cups, fastening one at the base of each leaf-stalk to collect the sap.

Everywhere in Java we saw them collecting the sap of the true sugar-palm and the toddy-palm, that bear such gorgeous spathes of blossoms; but it is only in this region of Middle Java that sugar is made from the cocoa-palm. Each tree yields daily about two quarts of sap that reduce to three or four ounces of sugar. The common palm-sugar of the passers looks and tastes like other brown sugar, but this from cocoa-palms has a delicious, nutty fragrance and flavor, as unique as maple-sugar. We were not long in the land before we learned to melt cocoa-palm sugar and pour it on grated ripe cocoanut, thus achieving a sweet supreme.

The level valley about Boro Boedor is tilled in such fine lines that it seems in perspective to have been etched or hatched with finer tools than plow and hoe. There is a little Malay temple surrounded by graves in a frangipani-grove near the great pyramid, where the ground is white with the fallen “blossoms of the dead,” and the tree-trunks are decked with trails of white and palest pink orchids. The little kampong of Boro Boedor hides in a deep green grove—such a pretty, picturesque little lot of basket houses, such a carefully painted village in a painted grove,—the village of the Midway Plaisance, only more so,—such a set scene and ideal picture of Java, as ought to have wings and footlights, and be looked at to slow music. And there, in the early summer mornings, is a busy passer in a grove that presents more and more attractive pictures of Javanese life, as the people come from miles around to buy and to sell the necessaries and luxuries of their picturesque, primitive life, so near to nature’s warmest heart.

All the neighborhood is full of beauty and interest, and there are smaller shrines at each side of Boro Boedor, where pilgrims in ancient times were supposed to make first and farewell prayers. One is called Chandi Pawon, or more commonly Dapor, the kitchen, because of its empty, smoke-blackened interior resulting from the incense of the centuries of living faith, and of the later centuries when superstitious habit, and not any surviving Buddhism, led the humble people to make offerings to the recha, the unknown, mysterious gods of the past.

Chandi Mendoet, two miles the other side of Boro Boedor, is an exquisite pyramidal temple in a green quadrangle of the forest, with a walled foss and bridges. Long lost and hidden in the jungle, it was accidentally discovered by the Dutch resident Hartman in 1835, and a space cleared about it. The natives had never known of or suspected its existence, but the investigators determined that this gem of Hindu art was erected between 750 and 800 A. D. The workmanship proves a continued progress in the arts employed at Boro Boedor, and the sculptures show that the popular faith was then passing through Jainism back to Brahmanism. The body of the temple is forty-five feet square as it stands on its walled platform, and rises to a height of seventy feet. A terrace, or raised processional path, around the temple walls is faced with bas-reliefs and ornamental stones, and great bas-reliefs decorate the upper walls. The square interior chapel is entered through a stepped arch or door, and the finest of the Mendoet bas-reliefs, commonly spoken of as the “Tree of Knowledge,” is in this entrance-way. There Buddha sits beneath the bo-tree, the trunk of which supports a pajong, or state umbrella, teaching those who approach him and kneel with offerings and incense. These figures, as well as the angels overhead, the birds in the trees, and the lambs on their rocky shelf, listening to the great teacher, are worked out with a grace and skill beyond compare. Three colossal images are seated in the chapel, all with Buddha’s attributes, and Brahmanic cords as well, and the long Nepal ears of the Dhyani ones. They are variously explained as the Hindu trinity, as the Buddhist trinity, as Buddha and his disciples, and local legends try to explain them even more romantically. One literary pilgrim describes the central Adi Buddha as the statue of a beautiful young woman “counting her fingers,” the mild, benign, and sweetly smiling faces of all three easily suggesting femininity.

One legend tells that this marvel of a temple was built by a rajah who, when once summoned to aid or save the goddess Durga, was followed by two of his wives. To rid himself of them, he tied one wife and nailed the other to a rock. Years afterward he built this temple in expiation, and put their images in it. An avenging rival, who had loved one of the women, at last found the rajah, killed him, turned him to stone, and condemned him to sit forever between his abused partners.

A legend related to Herr Brumund told that “once upon a time” the two-year-old daughter of the great Prince Dewa Kosoumi was stolen by a revengeful courtier. The broken-hearted father wandered all over the country seeking his daughter, but at the end of twelve years met and, forgetting his grief, demanded and married the most beautiful young girl he had ever seen. Soon after a child had been born to them, the revengeful courtier of years before told the prince that his beautiful wife was his own daughter. The priests assured Prince Dewa that no forgiveness was possible to one who had so offended the gods, and that his only course of expiation lay in shutting himself, with the mother and child, in a walled cell, and there ending their days in penitence and prayer. As a last divine favor, he was told that the crime would be forgiven if within ten days he could construct a Boro Boedor. All the artists and workmen of the kingdom were summoned, and working with zeal and frenzy to save their ruler, completed the temple, with its hundreds of statues and its miles of carvings, within the fixed time. But it was then found that the pile was incomplete, lacking just one statue of the full number required. Prayers and appeals were useless, and the gods turned the prince, the mother, and the child to stone, and they sit in the cell at Mendoet as proof of the tale for all time.

With such interests we quite forgot the disagreeable episode in the steaming, provincial town beyond the mountains, and cared not for toelatings-kaart or assistant resident. Nothing from the outer world disturbed the peace of our Nirvana. No solitary horseman bringing reprieve was ever descried from the summit dagoba. No file of soldiers grounded arms and demanded us for Dutch dungeons. Life held every tropic charm, and Boro Boedor constituted an ideal world entirely our own. The sculptured galleries drew us to them at the beginning and end of every stroll, and demanded always another and another look. A thousand Mona Lisas smiled upon us with impassive, mysterious, inscrutable smiles, as they have smiled during all these twelve centuries, and often the realization, the atmosphere of antiquity was overpowering in sensation and weird effect.

Boro Boedor is most mysterious and impressive in the gray of dawn, in the unearthly light and stillness of that eerie hour. Sunrise touches the old walls and statues to something of life; and sunset, when all the palms are silhouetted against skies of tenderest rose, and the warm light flushes the hoary gray pile, is the time when the green valley of Eden about the temple adds all of charm and poetic suggestion. Pitch-darkness so quickly follows the tropic sunset that when we left the upper platform of the temple in the last rose-light, we found the lamps lighted, and huge moths and beetles flying in and about the passagrahan’s portico. Then lizards “chuck-chucked,” and ran over the walls; and the invisible gecko, gasping, called, it seemed to me, “_Becky! Becky! Becky! Becky! Becky! Becky!_” and Rebecca answered never to those breathless, exhausted, appealing cries, always six times repeated, slowly over and over again, by the fatigued soul doomed to a lizard’s form in its last incarnation. There was infinite mystery and witchery in the darkness and sounds of the tropic night—sudden calls of birds, and always the stiff rustling, rustling of the cocoa-palms, and the softer sounds of other trees, the shadows of which made inky blackness about the passagrahan; while out over the temple the open sky, full of huge, yellow, steadily glowing stars, shed radiance sufficient for one to distinguish the mass and lines of the great pyramid. Villagers came silently from out the darkness, stood motionless beside the grim stone images, and advanced slowly into the circle of light before the portico. They knelt with many homages, and laid out the cakes of palm-sugar, the baskets and sarongs, we had bought at their toy village. Others brought frangipani blossoms that they heaped in mounds at our feet. They sat on their heels, and with muttered whispers watched us as we dined and went about our affairs on the raised platform of the portico, presenting to them a living drama of foreign life on that regularly built stage without footlights. One of the audience pierced a fresh cocoanut, drank the milk, and then rolling kanari and benzoin gum in corn-fiber, lighted the fragrant cigarette, and puffed the smoke into the cocoa-shell. “It is good for the stomach, and will keep off fever,” they answered, when we asked about this incantation-like proceeding; and all took a turn at puffing into the shell and reinhaling the incense-clouds. The gentle little Javanese who provided better dinners for passagrahan guests than any island hotel had offered us, came into the circle of light, with her mite of a brown baby sleeping in the slandang knotted across her shoulder. The old landlord could be heard as he came back far enough from his Nirvana to call for the boy to light a fresh pipe; and one felt a little of the gaze and presence of all the Dhyani Buddhas on the sculptured terraces in the strange atmosphere of such far-away tropic nights by the Boedor of Boro.

When we came “gree-ing” back by those beautiful roads to Djokja, and drew up with a whirl at the portico of the Hotel Toegoe, the landlord of beaming countenance ran to meet us, greet us with effusion, and give us a handful of mail—long, official envelops with seals, and square envelops of social usage.

“Your passports are here. They came the next day. They are so chagrined that it was all a stupid mistake. The assistant resident at Buitenzorg telegraphed to the resident here to tell the three American ladies who were to arrive in Djokja that he had posted their passports, and to have every attention paid you. He wished to commend you and put you _en rapport_ with the Djokja officials, that you might enjoy their courtesies. Then the telegraph operator changed the message so as not to have to send so many words on the wire, and he made them all think you were some very dangerous people whom they must arrest and send back. The assistant resident knew there was some mistake as soon as he saw you.” (Did he?) “He is so chagrined. And it was all the telegraph operator’s fault, and you must not blame our Djokja Residency.”

Instead of mollifying, this rather irritated us the more, and the assistant resident’s long, formal note was fuel to the flame.

“LADIES: This morning I telegraphed to the secretary-general
what in heaven’s name could be the reason you were not to go
to Djokja. I got no answer from him, but received a letter
from the chief of the telegraph, who had received a telegram
from the telegraph office of Buitenzorg, to tell me there had
been a mistake in the telegram. Instead of ‘The permission is
not given,’ there should have been written, ‘The papers of
permission I have myself this moment posted. Do all you can
in the matter,’ etc. Perhaps you will have received them the
moment you get this my letter.

“So I am so happy I did not insist upon your returning to
Buitenzorg, and so sorry you had so long stay at Boro Boedor;
and I hope you will forget the fatal mistake, and feel yourself
at ease now,” etc.

Evidently the little episode was confined to the bureau of telegraphs entirely, the messages to the American consul, secretary-general, and Buitenzorg resident all suppressed before reaching them. Certainly this was no argument for the government ownership and control of telegraphs in the United States. There were regrets and social consolations offered, but no distinct apology; and we were quite in the mood for having the American consul demand apology, reparation, and indemnity, on pain of bombardment, as is the foreign custom in all Asia. Pacification by small courtesies did not pacify. Proffered presentation to native princes, visits to their bizarre palaces, and attendance at a great performance by the sultan’s actors, dancers, musicians, and swordsmen, would hardly offset being arrested, brought up in an informal police-court, cross-questioned, bullied, and regularly ordered to Boro Boedor under parole. We would not remain tacitly to accept the olive-branch—not then. The profuse landlord was nonplussed that we did not humbly and gratefully accept these amenities.

“You will not go back to Buitenzorg now, with only such unhappy experience of Djokja! Every one is so chagrined, so anxious that you should forget the little contretemps. Surely you will stay now for the great _topeng_ [lyric drama], and the wedding of Pakoe Alam’s daughter!”

“No; we have our toelatings-kaarten, and we leave on the noon train.”

And then the landlord knew that we should have been locked up for other reasons, since sane folk are never in a hurry under the equator. They consider the thermometer, treat the zenith sun with respect, and do not trifle with the tropics.

XVII

BRAMBANAM

“In the whole course of my life I have never met with such
stupendous and finished specimens of human labor and of the
science and taste of ages long since forgot, crowded together
in so small a compass, as in this little spot [Brambanam],
which, to use a military phrase, I deem to have been the
headquarters of Hinduism in Java.” (Report to Sir Stamford
Raffles by Captain George Baker of the Bengal establishment.)

There are ruins of more than one hundred and fifty temples in the historic region lying between Djokjakarta and Soerakarta, or Djokja and Solo, as common usage abbreviates those syllables of unnecessary exertion in this steaming, endless mid-summer land of Middle Java. As the train races on the twenty miles from Djokja to Brambanam, there is a tantalizing glimpse of the ruined temples at Kalasan; and one small temple there, the Chandi Kali Bening, ranks as the gem of Hindu art in Java. It is entirely covered, inside as well as outside, with bas-reliefs and ornamental carvings which surpass in elaboration and artistic merit everything else in this region, where refined ornament and lavish decoration reached their limit at the hands of the early Hindu sculptors. The Sepoy soldiers who came with the British engineers were lost in wonder at Kalasan, where the remains of Hindu art so far surpassed anything they knew in India itself; while the extent and magnificence of Brambanam’s Brahmanic and Buddhist temple ruins amaze every visitor—even after Boro Boedor.

We had intended to drive from Boro Boedor across country to Brambanam, but, affairs of state obliging us to return from our Nirvana directly to Djokja, we fell back upon the railroad’s promised convenience. In this guide-bookless land, where every white resident knows every crook and turn in Amsterdam’s streets, and next to nothing about the island of Java, a kind dispenser of misinformation had told us that the railway-station of Brambanam was close beside the temple ruins; and we had believed him. The railway had been completed and formally opened but a few days before our visit, and our Malay servant was also quite sure that the road ran past the temples, and that the station was at their very gates.

When the train had shrieked away from the lone little station building, we learned that the ruins were a mile distant, with no sort of a vehicle nor an animal nor a palanquin to be had; and archæological zeal suffered a chill even in that tropic noonday. The station-master was all courtesy and sympathy; but the choice for us lay between walking or waiting at the station four hours for the next train on to Solo.

We strolled very slowly along the broad, open country road under the deadly, direct rays of the midday sun,—at the time when, as the Hindus say, “only Englishmen and dogs are abroad,”—reaching at last a pretty village and the grateful shade of tall kanari-trees, where the people were lounging at ease at the close of the morning’s busy passer. Every house, shed, and stall had made use of carved temple stones for its foundations, and the road was lined with more such recha—artistic remains from the inexhaustible storehouse and quarry of the neighboring ruins. Piles of tempting fruit remained for sale, and brown babies sprawled content on the warm lap of earth, the tiniest ones eating the green edge of watermelon-rind with avidity, and tender mothers cramming cold sweet potato into the mouths of infants two and four months old. There was such an easy, enviable tropical calm of abundant living and leisure in that Lilliput village under Brobdingnag trees that I longed to fling away my “Fergusson,” let slip life’s one golden, glowing, scorching opportunity to be informed on ninth-century Brahmanic temples, and, putting off all starched and unnecessary garments of white civilization, join that lifelong, happy-go-lucky, care-free picnic party under the kanari-trees of Brambanam; but—