Except during a period of some four centuries and a half, from about 940 till the palmy days of Mojopahit, when declining Hindu civilisation, for reasons as yet unexplained, sought a refuge farther east, Central Java and especially that part of it known in our time as the Principalities, _i.e._ Surakarta and Jogjakarta, has always been the heart of the island. There lived and live the true Javanese, the people of heaven’s mercy, cherishing their old traditions; these and the beautiful scenery of their fire-mountains and fertile valleys are still theirs, whatever else may fail: glory, power and freedom. They lived and live in their world of custom and formality a life unintelligible in its inner workings to the western brain, impenetrable to the western eye. There are forces hidden in the Javanese mind, the resultant of a strangely moved past, which we can never understand, though we may admire their creative energy, revealed in the now conventional designs guiding the hand of the potter, the wood-carver, the goldsmith, the armourer, the _batikker_,[49] hereditary practisers of dying arts and crafts; in the remains of a marvellous architecture long since altogether dead. No chapter in the whole history of eastern art, says Fergusson, is so full of apparent anomalies or upsets so completely our preconceived ideas of things as they ought to be, as that which treats of the architectural history of the island of Java ...; the one country to which they (the Hindus) overflowed, was Java, and there they colonised to such an extent as for nearly a thousand years to obliterate the native arts and civilisation and supplant it by their own ...; what is still more singular is, that it was not from the nearest shores of India that these emigrants departed but from the western coast.... A _linga_, erected in the Kadu in the year 654 Saka (A.D. 732), a Sivaïte symbol of generation, marks the origin of an artistic activity whose most brilliant period, the classical one of central Javanese architecture, as G. P. Rouffaer styles it rightly, begins with the construction of such buildings as the Buddhist _chandi_ Kalasan or Kali Bening. The inscription of King Sanjaya in Venggi characters, and vestiges of Vaishnav tendencies in the Suku and Cheto temples of a much later date, point to the worship of Vishnu, while Brahma’s four sublime conditions and more subtle transcendentalism do not seem to have attracted the Javanese converts to Hinduïsm. They could grasp the unity of Siva’s threefold functions much better and accepted him as Mahadeva at the head of the Trimoorti. The advent of Buddhism in its _mahayanistic_ form, the creed of the northern church so called, served to emphasise native tolerance. Sivaïsm and whatever there was of Vishnuïsm, harmonised with Buddhism to the extent of borrowing and lending symbols, emblems and divine attributes; Hindu gods played puss in the corner with Bodhisatvas, as already remarked upon in the preceding chapter;