Chapter X The Soul of the Boro Budoor
Ciò ch’io vedeva, mi sembrava un riso
Dell’universo;...163
Dante Alighieri’s Commedia (Paradiso, Canto 27).
It has already been remarked that the natives knew of the existence of the chandi Boro Budoor long before Cornelius’ discoveries or, rather, that they never lost sight of it, and the place it occupies in the Javanese chronicles appears from the Babad Tanah Jawa.164 In the early years of the eighteenth century Ki Mas Dana, son-in-law of Ki Gedeh Pasukilan, incited the people of Mataram to a rebellion, which broke out in the dessa Enta Enta, a centre of sedition it seems, since only a short time before a certain Raden Suryakusumo, son of Pangeran Puger, had chosen the same village for his headquarters when rising against Mangku Rat II., who captured him and put him in an iron cage without, however, killing him, because the omens were unfavourable.165 Ki Mas Dana had many followers and appointed bupatis and mantris. Ki Yagawinata, bupati of Mataram, marched against him but was defeated and fled to Kartasura, acquainting his Majesty with what had happened. Thereupon Pangeran Pringgalaya was sent to suppress Ki Mas Dana’s revolt, with instructions to capture him alive because his Majesty had made a vow that he would exhibit him publicly as an example to the inhabitants of Kartasura and let him be rampokked166 with needles. Pangeran Pringgalaya departed and with him half of the bupatis of Kartasura. When he arrived at Enta Enta the battle began. Many rebels were killed. Ki Mas Dana fled to the mountain Boro Budoor. He was surrounded by the troops of Pangeran Pringgalaya and made a prisoner. Then they brought him to his Majesty at Kartasura, who ordered all the inhabitants of the town to assemble in the aloon aloon, each of them with a needle. It lasted three days before all the inhabitants of Kartasura had had their turn. When he was dead, his head was cut off and exhibited on a pole. After the execution of Ki Mas Dana, the news was received that his father-in-law Ki Gedeh Pasukilan had also revolted. His Majesty ordered the repression of that revolt too. Ki Gedeh Pasukilan was defeated and killed.
Dr. Brandes, observing that the chandi Boro Budoor must have been meant because there is no other place known of the same name and its strategical value, given ancient modes of warfare, is obvious, puts the date of its investment by Pangeran Pringgalaya to seize Ki Mas Dana, at 1709 or 1710. A native reference to the Boro Budoor of half a century later, is found in a Javanese manuscript, used by Professor C. Poensen for a paper on Mangku Bumi, first Sooltan of Jogjakarta.167 The conduct of the Pangeran Adipati, son of that Sooltan, grieved his father very much. Besides his ignorance in literary matters, he was proud and arrogant; he disdained his father’s advice and associated with the women of the toll-gate, which caused all sorts of annoyance. He went also to the Boro Budoor to see the thousand statues, notwithstanding an old prediction that misfortune would befall the prince who beheld those images, for one of them represented a satrya (a noble knight) imprisoned in a cage; but it was the Prince’s fate that he wished to see the statue of the satrya. Having gratified his desire, he remained in the Kadu, where he led a most dissolute life. This gave great sorrow to his father, the Sooltan, because the scandal reached such dimensions that the (Dutch) Governor at Samarang heard of it and reprimanded him. Ashamed and angry, he sent a few bupatis with armed men to order the Pangeran Adipati to return to Ngajogja (Jogjakarta); if he refused, they had to use violence and were even authorised to kill him. The Pangeran Adipati obeyed and was kindly received by his father, but soon after he fell ill, spat blood and died. A letter of the Governor-General J. Mossel, dated December 30, 1758,168 contains the passage: “His Highness’ eldest son, the pangerang Adipatty Hamancoenagara, having departed this life,...” and the profligate Crown Prince’s visit to the Boro Budoor may therefore be put at a few years less than fifty after Ki Mas Dana’s rebellion.
It is clear, says Dr. Brandes, that at the time referred to in this second record, the Boro Budoor was something more to the natives than simply a hill; they knew of the building with the thousand statues—a round number like that of the chandi Sewu, the “thousand temples”—and they knew of the images in the bell-shaped chaityas on the circular terraces. And though any one of those 72 statues or even the principal statue in the central dagob may have been meant, in which last case, however, another expression than kuroongan (cage) would appear more appropriate, we think involuntarily of the Sang Bimo or Kaki Bimo so-called, a statue of the Buddha promoted or degraded by popular superstition to the rank of a Pandawa, Arjuno’s chivalrous brother, seated in the chaitya of the lowest circular terrace, next to and south of the eastern staircase, still venerated by the natives, by the Chinese community and by more women and men of European extraction than are willing to confess it. Bimo or Wergodoro, to use the name given to him in the wayang lakons when they extol his youthful exploits, is the archetype of the satrya, the pattern of ancestral knighthood. Most probably it was Sang Bimo who, conformably to the ilaila or ancient prediction, executed the decree of fate on Pangeran Adipati Hamangkunagara. Disregarding the example set by the invisible power which resides in the Boro Budoor, a later Crown Prince of Jogjakarta visited that temple in 1900 without, so far, coming to grief. Has then the ilaila under special consideration lost its efficacy? We must presume so, notwithstanding that the occult forces identified with Sang Bimo and other statues of the ancient fane, are affirmed still to work miracles in plenty when propitiated by adequate sacrifice.
The greatest miracle of all is the elation of man’s thought by the irresistible charm which goes out from it. A night with the Boro Budoor is a night of purification, when Amitabha offers the lotus of the good law and the gift is accepted; when the wonderful edifice, rising to the star-spangled sky, unfolds terrace after terrace and gallery after gallery between the domed and pinnacled walls, as his flower of ecstatic meditation spreads its petals, opens its heart of beauty to the fructifying touch of heaven; when tranquil love descends in waves of contentment, unspeakable satisfaction. The dagob loses its sharp, bold outline and melts into boundless space, a vision of fading existence in consummation of wisdom. A mysterious voice, proceeding from the shrine, urges to search out the secret it hides. The summons cannot be resisted and going up, trusting to the murky night, mounting the steps to the first gate as in a somnambulistic trance, the seeker of enlightenment discerns the path, guided by his quickened perception when the voice dies of its own sweetness, the fragrant stillness appeasing the mind and extending promise of pity for passion and fleshly desire, the garment of sin left behind. Surely, it was the supreme wisdom, forgiving all things because it understands, which inspired a human intellect to devise, directed human hands to achieve in the delineation of mercy such powerful architectural unity, sustained by such sublimely beauteous ornament. Aided from above, the spirituality of the builder, creating this masterpiece, needed not the laborious tricks passed off on us in our days of feverish effect-hascherei by artists who dispense with the rudiments of their art to strive after the sensational. Neither was his originality of the cheap kind which tries to cloak crass technical ignorance and hopeless general ineptitude with paltry though pretentious artifices, displaying a deplorable lack of the conceptive faculty into the bargain. Proclaiming the doctrine glorious in veracity of thought and utterance, the Boro Budoor typifies honest endeavour and sincerity of purpose.
Entering the first of the porches through which from four sides the successive galleries and terraces are reached, we come under the spell of the rapture symbolised by those vaulted staircases, leading upward from reason to faith, constructed, it seems, to match the “evident portals” of the perfect state: composure, kindness, modesty, self-knowledge. The Banaspati, terrifier of the evil spirits, shelters him who proceeds on the path they indicate in clemency and charity. As we pass on, confiding in his protection, the sculptured walls gleam softly, impregnated by the sun’s light embedded in the stones, and the germ of truth, treasured in the dagob, radiates down in luminous substantiation of the word, making the invisible visible by degrees. The air hangs heavy and warm in the galleries and throbs with the emotion excited by the lustrous reliefs which picture the life of the Buddha. A flush of indescribable splendour, clear exhalation of his virtue and holiness, lifts veil after veil from the bliss this initiation portends. The transparent atmosphere lends new significance to the gestures of the Dhyani Buddhas, seated on their lotus cushions as stars half quenched in golden mist, while we feel more than see the serene calmness of their features still wrapped in obscurity. Their contemplation is the beginning of the highest; their ecstasy pierces eternity, opens the regions of infinite intelligence, complete self-effacement, absolute nothingness. Too much absorbed in abstract cogitation to occupy themselves with matters of mundane interest, they leave the government of the created worlds to their spiritual sons, and Padmapani is the Mahasatva on whom our age depends. Out-topping human knowledge, they teach the meaning of the universe: the Buddha of the East dreaming his dreams as the sun rises, the Buddha of the South blessing the day, the Buddha of the West unfolding the secret of the all-spirit as the sun sets, the Buddha of the North pointing the way from darkness to light, the Buddha of the Zenith lifting his hands to turn the wheel of the law. The statues smile beatitude in happiness at losing the consciousness of existence when they will be worthy of the Nirvana, the solution of life in non-being, death which disclaims resurrection in any form. And the highest attainable blessing, the Paranirvana, the Nirvana Absolute, is signified in the image of the central dagob: however interpreted as solitary indweller of the shrine of shrines built over the remains of the flesh which embodied the word, the Tathagata, the self-subsisting, preceded and to be succeeded in fullness of time, it figures the immanence in bodily imperfection of the energy for good which sanctified Ayushmat Gautama, who modified his carnality by dominating his senses; who, when questioned by his first disciples, could declare that he was the expected teacher of lucid perception and replete comprehension, the discerning monitor, the destroyer of error, the spotless counsellor impelled to release them from the bonds of sin and make them deserve the manifest favour of annihilation.
The rudely interrupted sleep of the recho bèlèt formulated, intentionally or not, a confession of faith in the reward of righteousness by complete dissolution, cessation of continuance, eternal rest undisturbed by gods or men, by feeling or thought. The pilgrim to the Boro Budoor, longing for the arahatship, accomplished in the science of conducting himself, must have hesitated before ascending to the highest terrace and seeking direct communion with the pure spirit of the son of virtue, born of a woman truly, but whose mother died seven days after his birth, in token of his eminence; the venerable one whose moral strength stands paramount, overcometh even the innate fear of extinction. The essence of the Triratna lies here within the grasp of the earnest inquirer, the precious pearl whose lustre divulges the principle of causation, the beginning and the end of all things, the primary source of what is and shall be. How to obtain it? By offerings to the symbolic stone? Not so, but by good works and self-examination which excels prayer and makes any place a Bodhimanda, a seat of intelligence. The Buddha was a man, no god surpassing the limits of humanity, who has to be propitiated by adoration. Whoso wishes the Rescuer’s saving grace, should remember the story of Upagoopta and the courtesan Vasavadatta, and ask: Has my hour arrived?169 Penance for errors committed, not by fasting and self-torture, but by persevering in the eight-fold path of right views, right aspirations, right speech, right behaviour, right search of sustenance, right effort, right mindfulness of our fellow-creatures, right exultation, should ward off the dire punishment of remorse which in well-balanced spirits cannot dwell. Self-restraint, uprightness, control of the organs of sense, makes the fell fire of the three deadly sins—sensuality, ill-will and moral sluggishness—die out in the heart by a proper arrangement of the precious vestments, the six cardinal virtues: charity, cleanness, patience, courage, contemplative sympathy with all creation and discrimination of good and evil. This leads to perfection, advancement to the highest of the four sublime conditions, the Brahma Viharas on which Buddhism improved by making equanimity with regard to one’s own joys and sorrows the test of progress on the road which leads to bliss in extermination of pain. Loosen the shackles of worldly existence by constant application to escape from the fatal thraldom imposed by birth and rebirth! Life is continued misery; no salvation from the distress caused by passion and sin is possible except by cessation of self, by merging individual in universal vacancy, mounting the four steps of the Dhyana in contemplative evolution of the Nirvana, refining perception and speculation to total impassibility, extinguishing reason itself in eternal voidness, where we have nothing to fear and nothing to hope for, taking refuge in non-existence, the only conceivable verity.
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.
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!