A History of the World in 100 Objects (51 page)

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People started to make pilgrimages to the mountain because they found the landscape quite spiritual and holy, a suitable abode for gods. For example, the white snow that stays for a long time had spiritual significance. So the pond itself became a centre of worship, and people thought that there was a god in that pond. There was a belief among the Japanese people that in order to be reborn you had to do good things in this life. It was probably an extension of this idea that these exquisitely made and expensive mirrors were offered, entrusted, to a Buddhist priest, as a sign of piety – to dedicate to the god so that the giver could come back to the world again.

 

So we can now make an informed guess at the entire life story of our mirror. It was made in the sophisticated bronze-casting workshops of Kyoto around 1100, to be used in the rarefied world of courtly ritual and display, an indispensable tool for any lady or gentleman to prepare themselves for an aesthetic public appearance. At some point its owner decided to despatch it, in the care of a priest, on a long journey to the northern shrine, and there it was thrown into the sacred pond – still holding within it the likeness of its owner and carrying a message to the other world. What neither owner nor priest could have guessed was that it would one day be a message to us. And like the ‘Great Mirror’ itself, it tells to a modern audience a chronicle of Old Japan.

59
Borobudur Buddha Head
 
Stone head of the Buddha, from Java, Indonesia
AD
780–840
 

We are tracing the great arcs of trade that linked Asia, Europe and Africa around a thousand years ago. Through this stone head of the Buddha we can plot an extensive network of connections across the China Sea and the Indian Ocean by which goods and ideas, languages and religions, were exchanged among the peoples of south-east Asia. It comes from Borobudur, on the Indonesian island of Java, just a few degrees south of the equator. Borobudur is one of the greatest Buddhist monuments in the world and one of the great cultural achievements of humanity – a huge, square, terraced pyramid, representing the Buddhist view of the cosmos in stone, decorated with well over a thousand relief carvings and peopled with hundreds of statues of the Buddha. As pilgrims climb it, they are treading a physical path that mirrors a spiritual journey, symbolically transporting the walker from this world to a higher plane of being. Here, on the rich and strategically important island of Java, at the monument of Borobudur, is the supreme example of how the network of maritime trade allowed Buddhism to spread beyond the boundaries of its birth and become a world religion.

Dominating a volcanic plain in the middle of the island, Borobudur is a stepped pyramid built from more than one and a half million blocks of stone, around the year 800. It consists of seven mounting terraces, diminishing in size as they rise: four square terraces below, then three circular ones above. At the top of the whole structure is a large domed shrine.

As you climb through the different levels, you take a material road to a spiritual enlightenment. On the lowest level, the sculptured reliefs
present us with the illusions and disappointments of ordinary life, with all its troubles and shortcomings; they show us the punishments meted out to adulterers, murderers and thieves – a Dante-like vision of sin and its inevitable punishment. Higher up, the reliefs show the life of the historical Buddha himself as he negotiated this imperfect world, moving from his princely birth and family wealth to renunciation and eventual enlightenment. After that come single statues of the Buddha, meditating and teaching, showing pilgrims how to continue their journey of renunciation towards the realms of the spirit.

When Islam became the dominant religion in Java in the sixteenth century, Buddhist Borobudur was abandoned, and for centuries it lay overgrown and almost invisible. Three centuries later, in 1814, it was rediscovered by the first modern visitor to describe it, the British administrator, scholar and soldier Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles. Raffles had been appointed lieutenant-governor of Java after the British captured the island during the Napoleonic Wars, and he became passionate about the people and their past. He heard about a ‘hill of statues’ and ordered a team to investigate. The news they brought back was so exciting that Raffles went to see for himself the monument which at that time he knew as Boro Boro:

 

Boro Boro is admirable as a majestic work of art. The great extent of the masses of building covered in some parts with the luxuriant vegetation of the climate, the beauty and delicate execution of the separate portions, the symmetry and regularity of the whole. The great number and interesting character of the statues and reliefs, with which they are ornamented, excite our wonder that they were not earlier examined, sketched and described.

 

The monument had been badly damaged by earthquakes and largely buried under volcanic ash. Even today, many stone fragments stand in rows around the site, surrounded by grass and flowers. Nevertheless, Raffles was enraptured; he knew at once that this was a supreme architectural and cultural achievement, and he collected two of the fallen stone heads of the Buddha.

 

Borobudur, covered with relief carvings and statues of the Buddha

 

Raffles’ rediscovery of Borobudur, and his later uncovering of important Hindu monuments on the island – for Java had embraced both Hinduism and Buddhism – led to a fundamental reassessment of Javanese history. Raffles wanted to persuade Europeans that Java was indeed a great civilization, as the anthropologist Dr Nigel Barley explains:

 

Raffles believed fervently in the concept of civilization; he never defines it, but it has a number of clear markers. One of them is the possession of a writing system, another is social hierarchy, and yet another is the possession of complex stone architecture. So, if you like, Borobudur was one of the proofs that Java was a great civilization – the equal of ancient Greece and Rome – and the whole of his collection at the British Museum, the Raffles Collection, and the whole of that book he wrote,
The History of Java
,
is an attempt to establish that proposition.

 

The Raffles Collection includes the two heads and some fragments gathered at Borobudur, and a modest number of Hindu and Islamic works of art; but Raffles also collected objects that for him summed up the Javanese culture of his own day. This was a very particular kind of collecting: he hoped that the objects themselves would plead the cause of this Indonesian civilization, and would make it clear that the culture of Java was part of a great south Asian cultural tradition, which Europeans should recognize as the equal of their own. Raffles was attempting a cultural revolution – a view of world history that did not have the Mediterranean at its centre and its climax.

One of the fallen stone heads of the Buddha that Raffles found in the ruins at Borobudur stands in the section of the East Asia gallery in the Museum devoted to Java. It is slightly larger than life-size and it shows the Buddha with his eyes lowered, in a state of peaceful inner contemplation. His mouth has the classic serene half-smile, his hair is tightly curled, and the elongated earlobes, intended to suggest long years of wearing heavy gold earrings, tell us of his life as a prince before he became enlightened. We are immediately reminded of the first human images of the Buddha made about 500 years earlier, in north-western India, described in
Chapter 41
. Raffles knew India very well, and it was clear to him that the statues of Borobudur, and indeed of much of Javanese culture, owed a great deal to long and sustained contacts with India.

These contacts had been taking place for well over a thousand years before Borobudur was built. People used to think that these connections were the result of conquest or emigration from India, but we now see them as part of a great land and sea trading network, which inevitably transported not just people and goods but skills, ideas and beliefs. It was this network that brought Buddhism to Java and beyond, travelling along the Silk Road to China, Korea and Japan, and sailing across the south Asian seas to Sri Lanka and Indonesia. But Buddhism was never an exclusive faith, and, at roughly the time that Borobudur was rising out of the landscape, great Hindu temples were being built nearby on a comparable scale.

To construct monuments like these required manpower and money. Manpower has never been a problem in Java – it is so fertile that it has always supported a huge population – and in the years around 800 the island was immensely rich. Beside its agriculture, it was a key staging post for international trade, especially the spices – cloves above all – coming from further east. From Java these luxury goods were shipped on to China, and all over the Indian Ocean.

One of the reliefs at Borobudur, a superb carved panel showing a ship of around 800, gives us the best and most vivid evidence for this kind of seaborne contact. It is an image of great vigour and skill, deeply carved, with a lot of energy and, indeed, humour – right at the front under the figurehead you can see a sailor grimly clinging on to the anchor. But, above all, it offers us visual evidence for the kind of ship that was able to make these long sea journeys, a ship with multiple sails and masts well suited to the long runs from China and Vietnam to Java, Sri Lanka, India and indeed to East Africa.

 

Carving of a ship at Borobudur

 

I suppose it is true of all great religious buildings, but on a visit to Borobudur I was particularly struck by what I think is a universal paradox: that you need huge material wealth, acquired through intense engagement with the affairs of the world, to build monuments which inspire us to abandon wealth and to leave the world behind. The Buddhist teacher and writer Stephen Batchelor agrees:

 

It clearly was a very grandiose equivalent to one of these great Gothic European cathedrals, and it would have taken probably seventy-five to a hundred years to construct it, similar to the cathedrals here in Europe. And so it’s a great symbol of the Buddhist world, the Buddhist vision, and it’s an intellectual exercise at some level, but because it is so brutally physical, it is so concrete, it’s more than that. It embodies something that goes beyond just metaphysics or religious doctrine and stands for something vital about what the human spirit can achieve.

 

The experience of climbing the terraces of Borobudur is a powerful one. As you emerge from the enclosed corridors of the lower terraces into the clear open spaces above surrounded by a circle of volcanoes, you are very conscious of having escaped from physical constraints and entered a larger world. Even the most hardened tourist has the sense that this is not a site visit, but a pilgrim’s progress. The builders of Borobudur understood perfectly how stone can shape thought.

BOOK: A History of the World in 100 Objects
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