Monumental JavaScheltema, J. F. (Johann Friedrich )
History
Monumental Java
Scheltema, J. F. (Johann Friedrich )
Indonesia -- Antiquities; Java (Indonesia) -- Antiquities; Monuments -- Indonesia -- Java
of Mongolian extraction, as Sivaïsm among the Balinese, their creative
thought moulding old fundamental ideas in unexpected new forms. If
Buddhism brought new elements into Chinese art, stimulating ideals and
religious imagery, as the Count de Soissons remarks,[98] leading, for
instance, to sublime personifications of Mercy, Tenderness and Love,
the debt is repaid and emigrating Chinese decorators shower the graces
of their benign goddess Kwan Yin on their labours in distant climes.
As to Java, with which China entertained relations from the remotest
Hindu period, they animated and reshaped in endless variation the
ornament they found, the _makaras_, the _kala_-heads, at last, in their
_saï-shiho_ tracery, being gradually supplanted by the bat-motive.
[Illustration: XVIII. _CHANDI_ PANATARAN
(Archaeological Service through Charls and van Es.)]
The _chandi_ Panataran is the most beautiful, for many reasons also
the most remarkable temple in East Java and, with the exception of the
Boro Budoor, the largest in the whole island. It was discovered by the
American explorer Thomas Horsfield. Its foundations and the interior
of its sepulchral pit are constructed in brick; its terraces are in
general design not unlike those of the _chandi_ Toompang; among its
statues, stolen and scattered far and wide, it may have contained images
of Buddhist purport and inspiration. Sivaïtic in aspect, however, as it
stands now, it is the only one of the monuments in Kediri sufficiently
preserved to determine its religious origin. Fergusson classes
the _chandi_ Panataran with the tree- and serpent-temples whose most
peculiar feature in the residencies Malang and Kediri consists in having
“a well-hole in the centre of their upper platform, extending apparently
to their basement,” and the suggestion occurring to him “as at all
likely to meet the case, (is) that they were tree-temples, that a sacred
tree was planted in these well-holes, either in the virgin soil, or that
they were wholly or partially filled with earth and the tree planted
in them.” He compares the _chandi_ Panataran with the Naha Vihara or
Temple of the Bo-tree in Ceylon and bases its claim to being called a
serpent-temple on the fact that “the whole of the basement moulding
is made up of eight great serpents, two on each face, whose upraised
breasts in the centre form the side-pieces of the steps that lead up
to the central building, whatever that was. These serpents are not,
however, our familiar seven-headed Nagas that we meet with everywhere
in India and Cambodja, but more like the fierce, crested serpents of
Central America.” So far Fergusson; but the well or pit, notwithstanding
the veneration of which the bo-tree was the object, seems rather to have
been a receptacle for the ashes of the princes of Mojopahit whose memory
the founder of this mausoleum, probably Queen Jayavisnuvardhani,
the above-mentioned Ratu Kenya, immortalised in the _Damar Wulan_,
intended to perpetuate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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