Borobudur

Several rivers on the way out of Yogya towards Magelang and Borobudur are clogged with lahar dingin, volcanic lava that has cooled down. The Kali Putih - white river, a ludicrous name under the circumstances as the cold lava is grey - in fact has completely disappeared under the lava. So have several houses by the road. This last becomes in fact a bottleneck as it passes through the areas where the lava hit the hardest. There is a Lahar Dingin Parkir Luas sign: namely, there is ample parking for the hundreds and hundreds who are obviously stopping to look at the destruction. We also stop but much further along the road, on our way back, to look at a river that, differently to Kali Putih, is still running in spite of the enormous quantities of lava it has received. The local newspapers have been full of front page news items about the lava floods.

One hypothesis has it that Borobudur may have been abandoned exactly because of Mount Merapi and its eruptions. It is amazing at any rate that the reliefs, though often considerably damaged, have survived many centuries and are still quite visible today. This is a very wet climate with occasional volcanic eruptions that spew all kinds of toxic materials into the atmosphere. By the early twentieth century however Borobudur was clearly slowly crumbling, and there was so much infiltration during the rainy season that there are photographs of water running out of the reliefs as if there was a fountain there. In fact the photographs in the modest local museum show a Borobudur that was in much worse shape than now. The stupas on the upper terraces were practically all largely destroyed, and the floor of the terraces was clearly giving in. Now both have been all restored. As I 'circumambulate' the terraces clockwise as prescribed by Buddhist tradition (and as prescribed again by the authoritative-sounding English language board at the entrance that mentions 'circumambulate') - an odd thing to do as I am not Buddhist - I hear the muezzin calling for prayers. The local population has in fact been resettled so that Borobudur stands now in a park with many commercial venues - in fact, hundreds and hundreds of stalls selling crafts, souvenirs and food. However, the call to prayer reminds me that the civilization that built Borobudur is long gone. Nonetheless, the local population still used to perform ceremonies of their own at the temple, until the government prohibited them to do so altogether: the site is too sacred for the nation-state to allow common people to use it. Of course, Brasília is a far cry from Borobudur, but all the same it is also on a monumental scale and was built by state power. I remember many years ago some people started going to Esplanada, behind the Congresso building. There was a bar there that remained open in the evening. Some people also began using other parts of the (almost entirely empty) city space in the evening. Then the government clamped down and prohibited it. Empty is good. It creates a distance between the State and its subjects where the power and sacrality of the nation-state can grow: the magic of the State, an anthropologist (Michael Taussig) calls it. This is perhaps particularly important in such postcolonial states as Brasil's and Indonesia's.

Borobudur is not empty, because it is a Sunday. However, compared to India, for instance, there are hardly any crowds though quite a few people have come to look at the temple complex. They are almost all Indonesian. I like that. One of us is an American who lives in Scotland and looks very approachable, so students stop him to interview him for a homework their teachers have prescribed them. They speak English with considerable difficulty, as if they were carefully reciting the sentences from memory. It is not entirely unlike learning a language that is no longer spoken. Of course a photograph is also going to be taken, and not only as proof of the interview. Here as in India the tourist is as much a tourist attraction as the temple itself.

Talking about language, there are as usual no inscriptions anywhere, except that in one of the panels a kitab suci - a sacred book or scripture - is exhibited. It is on the lap of a figure that is practically lying down on what looks like a couch. The phrase 'kitab suci' comes up in the museum where there is a photograph of the panel with a caption (together with more than 120 other similar photographs). 'Kitab' is of course Arabic (and Persian, Malay and so forth) for book. The local Buddhists probably did not have the word in their vocabulary more than a thousand years ago even though contacts with Arabia already existed. In fact, a couple of sea-going vessels are depicted on the reliefs. They are largish, in full sail and often have people hanging on to their various parts with their full bodies (including in one case the rudder itself. You get the impression that the ship was a people's ship that was much loved or else that the sailing was quite rough. The waves are depicted, however, and do not seem to indicate a rough sea). They are all of the same type too, a kind of vessel I cannot recognize. They must be South Indian ships. Therefore, there was writing in this civilization, and sacred scriptures from abroad. The temple however is utterly devoid of any script. Actually, the whole history of the complex rests on one inscription only if we are to believe the museum, a land grant to build the temple. A woman donated the land and the temple was accordingly built in the mid-eighth century. It is assumed she was the daughter of a local king of the Sailendra dynasty. However, that is only an assumption. We don't really know for sure. Even more than any other 'ruins' (it is however now more than a little uncharitable to call Borobudur a ruin: it has been so painstakingly restored and preserved over a period of more than a century now), Borobudur is therefore both deservedly world-famous - it is reputedly the largest Buddhist temple anywhere - and highly obscure in terms of its history and origins. The people who built it used it for about 150 years and then were gone, possibly to East Java though again we don't really know. 

After the long hours walking around the terraces of Borobudur in the sun and looking at the amazing panels one after the other, and a lunch at a very pleasant tourist trap in the middle of fish tanks and padi, we stop at Candi Mendut. This is very modest compared to Candi Borobudur, but strangely it is somehow more gripping. It now stands right next to a busy road, and is surrounded on one side by many houses (mercifully none of them stands higher than the temple. This last therefore still towers clearly above all of them). However, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it was 'discovered' in colonial times, it was engulfed by woods. Inside three large and attractive statues of Buddha had survived one thousand years most of which, we must assume, spent in total obscurity. Now there is a Buddhist monastery next door that is very attractive. On the candi grounds there is an old waringin tree with many long aerial roots. People are picnicking, looking at the mountains beyond, and children and even adults hang from the sturdy roots and even swing from them. Therefore, differently to Borobudur, Candi Mendut is no relic set in a large park attracting the attention of the world. On the contrary, it is beautiful and unexpected but is part and parcel of the surrounding landscape too. The top is missing. A restoration was carried out in the colonial time, in the first half of the twentieth century. However, as it is not a massive building such as Borobudur, it has apparently not attracted as much attention in postcolonial times. Nonetheless, the monastery next door is beautiful and clearly new. One of the imposing statues inside the candi has been partly clothed and you cannot approach the statues directly as there is a pagar - fence - with a warning. The temple is therefore a functioning Buddhist temple. Inside the monastery there are of course monks. The halls look spacious, clean and very new and the gardens and fish ponds very peaceful and quiet. There are some objects on the grounds that look clearly old. I am particularly taken by a stone naga that is half sunk in the pond by the entrance. It must come from some a similar site or perhaps was donated by someone. A Mauryan-style pillar towers above it. A closer architectonic reference to Buddhist imperial India would hardly have been possible.

I am very happy to be here. It is not overwhelming as Borobudur is. Also, Borobudur has a sense of emptiness in spite of its grandiosity. Here there is plenty of shade under the huge canopy of the towering waringin next to the candi. The three Buddha figures inside are shrouded in darkness (there is a lamp bulb though) and the inside of the candi is so humid that there are puddles on the stone floor (there is also inflitration of course). The figures seem peaceful. Outside it is lively and sunny but there is no glare and it is not really bustling with people and activity. The contrast between the apparent timelessness of the Buddhas inside and the outside of the temple is actually quite appealing. Also, there are reliefs here, though they are very few in number compared to Borobudur. There is also a terrace surrounding the temple. People stand on it and talk or else sit down against the temple wall. I surprise a couple who is sitting down very close together. I hesitate as to whether I should stay and look at the relief scene just above them or else move on. I move on. The temple is about as old as Borobudur but it has a wholly different atmosphere now. The magnificence of Borobudur set on a hill with surrouding fields and mountains is gone but so are the crowds and the inevitable crass commercialism surrouding the much larger candi (there are only a few shops just outside the complex. A couple of them turn on the monotone classical Javanese music as soon as the shop assistants spot us. They probably do not like it very much or at least do not like it all the time). This candi is also very local compared to Borobudur. Namely, it is a national treasure but there are no guards visible except at the entrance  (in Borobudur they are everywhere - the temple has been attacked by maniacs in the past. These have managed to destroy a couple of carved stones in it). It seems therefore quite well-integrated into the social landscape where it finds itself nowadays even though its grounds are fenced off from its surroundings.

Of course the three impressive Buddhas in the dark and moist interior of the candi (the roof peters out into a pyramid like shape and is very, very high) still reminds me of the origins of the candi jungle-covered temple in colonial times. That origin gives it an aura of mystery though frankly the Buddhas don't seem to be mysterious. They are impressive but they are also somehow worldly. Again, very little is known about this temple except for the Buddhist symbolism contained in the Buddha statues and the reliefs outside. No script is visible anywhere. There is a yard full of stones from the temple. They have been arranged according to size and type and must be leftovers from the old colonial restoration. There are many of them. There are now techniques that allow restorers to know where a specific stone may have belonged in the whole complex. But Jawa has so many candis. This is a somewhat modest one (on the way here we briefly stopped at the gate of another, much smaller and much more modest candi: the general opinion inside the van when we caught sight of it - it is in a small village by the roadside - was that we shouldn't bother and so we moved on to Candi Mendut. Almost all of us were historians or museum specialists. Abeng, the driver who was in fact from Magelang where we now were, smiled and complied at once). Indonesia is not a wealthy state even though, like much smaller Sri Lanka, it has a huge built heritage from the ancient past (I would not be surprised if I ever found that Sri Lanka's however is even larger though the country is much smaller).

The hundreds and hundreds of candis and remains of candis dotting the landscape are certainly impressive. Nonetheless, they are in a way just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. People did not live in them; the capitals of the kingdoms who built them were not necessarily right next to them either. In fact, we don't necessarily know where those capitals used to be or where exactly the people who worshipped at the temples lived. As they were very probably places of pilgrimage, the temples were not likely to be local temples only. Now a different kind of pilgrimage takes place.

Southeast Asia is therefore a very complex place. It is hard to understand it. Its written heritage is often incredibly modest compared to China's, for instance, and also compared to India's (much information on the region in fact comes from sources in China, and also from Arab sources. Next to Portuguese sources, these are the most important sources on the history of Jawa besides of course Javanese sources themselves as well as some Malay ones). The Candi Mendut was not only built by a Buddhist polity and its  subjects (these were perhaps also Buddhist though it is impossible to know for sure). It was also built by people who had obviously strong connections to South Asia (today's India and Sri Lanka) and just as obviously deep connections to the very place where they lived. The current use of the temple by picnickers and locals hanging around, therefore, modern as it may seem as it apparently replicates European-like ideas of public parks and what people do in them, may perhaps be not too dissimilar from the ways their ancient ancestors have used the temple grounds. Namely, the temple is predicated on a South Asian model imported lock, stock and barrel into Jawa well over a thousand years ago; however, it is not a South Asian temple. There is now a Buddhist monastery right next to it, but for many centuries there was padi perhaps, and then jungle, and a couple of villages. The villagers must have known throughtout of the existence of the candi and accordingly, just as in the case of Borobudur about half a century earlier, alerted the authorities who were by then famously hungry for antiquities. The temple was then 'discovered', i.e., revealed to Europe and local colonial society as well as to a new emerging historical consciousness that was highly necrophiliac in terms of the past as it saw itself as largely severed from it.

Interestingly, looking at the candi in this way also gives the lie to the colonial perspective on discovery: the Rudyard Kipling view, Mowgli-like, of an abandoned ancient temple in the forest, possibly full of monkeys - and monkey business - but not really part of society unless recovered for it by colonial authority through discovery, study, restoration, and preservation, preferably in the hands of or under the supervision of specialists (read in this case Dutch in colonial times. At the conference there were a couple of short documentary film excerpts on two such colonial archaeologists. The names, being Dutch names, are of course all long gone from my memory by now, but one of the archaeologists looked very large, very impressive and was famously a gluttonous eater and womanizer, as well as of course a devourer of Javanese antiquities. There is a photograph of him striding in the foreground, with the small shape of Rabindranath Tagore somewhere in the background and further back there is part of Borobudur). 

The Javanese are therefore not exactly historically indifferent to their antiquities. Only, they become part of the landscape, the social landscape included. As there was no Buddhist state power any more, there was no point in keeping the temple as it was and so the temple became strictly local and then, slowly, jungle must have covered it. There is also the very thorny (and as it turns out unanswerable for lack of evidence) question of whether Buddhism really made inroads into the beliefs of the locals. But I doubt there was ever a time when nobody really knew the candi was there. After all, it has never lain buried unlike many other candis and ruins all over Jawa. Also, the jungle is not the site of the unknown and the hidden - as in Brasil there must always have been people who knew the jungle well, including its trails, products, animals as well as its candis. Only, there was no state and public use for the knowledge of its existence until the late colonial era was ushered in. As an officially multi-religious state, Indonesia of course also has a place for Buddhist temples, and it is not surprising therefore that one of the halls in the monastery next to the candi sports above its entrance the national coat of arms with the official motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika or Unity in Diversity, a phrase derived in fact from an ancient Javanese source. However, even though state power is clearly back as far as the temple is concerned, the temple retains to me some uncanny connection to its days as a temple in the 'forest' with villagers living nearby the only ones in the know about its existence for a very long time. In this way, it is a Southeast Asian rather than a South Asian temple: its use has not been converted, namely, it has not been taken over by another religion (a favourite technique of Spanish conquest in the Americas, for instance, and of forced conversion from Buddhism to Hinduism in India). Also, the natural environment and its quakes and floods and volcanic ashes must have ensured that state power could not possibly have a new use for it as it evacuated the region to take refuge elsewhere.

We can therefore never retrieve Candi Mendut because it was perhaps never lost in the first place. Though very old, it is not really an antiquity as such. The monastery next to it is a fine complex (it is not grand nor in bad taste, on the contrary), but perhaps the ideal use for the candi is that given to it by local people. They will go into the temple, take photographs next to the statues, then walk around the terrace, and next go for their picnics under the tree. They will hang from the huge roots dangling from the high branches. As they squat around their food - the bakso, the soto - and look into the mountains visible in the distance, I am certain the candi must be part and parcel of their lives. The fact that so little is known about its history (perhaps only little more than the information displayed in both Bahasa and English in the explanatory board at the entrance) is also not necessarily a lack in this regard. What you see is what you get.

And that is an enormous amount as the builders of Candi Mendut and Candi Borobudur both knew as they carefully commissioned the skilful carving of Buddhist tales, morals and stories - and histories - on the walls for all to see, besides the fashioning of the Buddha statues.