After having walked through the umbrageous _kĕnari_-avenue and the village of _Bårå_ which we meet on our way when starting from the dukuh of _Bråjånålå_, we shall arrive within half an hour at the hill upon which we see stand the pasanggrahan, and the colossal ruin. By carriage in less than a quarter of an hour. The first sight of this wonder of architecture is a rather disappointing one because, when standing at the end of the avenue, we only perceive the outer-walls of its south-easterly angle. But this becomes quite otherwise as soon as we have reached the top of the hill, and got out of our carriages in front of the mentioned pasanggrahan lying opposite the north-west corner of the ruin, but which has been built as high as its foot. We then overlook the enormous mass of stone gradually developing itself in majestic lines and forms, in all the terraces, following each other in a regular range of succession till we see rise in their centre the high cupola now covered again by a cone with three sun-shades[15]. If we want to understand the overwhelming beauty of this ruin we must first try to know the whole in its different parts, and best of all, examine to what purpose this work of art had been produced by the Buddhists of Central Java who are said to have existed there more than eleven centuries ago. I suppose that, when their predecessors left India for Java, they are likely to have brought a vase or urn containing some real or pretended ashes of the Buddha himself in order to bury them under a simple hill or in an artless _dagob_ as soon as they had reached the place of their settling, to render these ashes to the worship of the believers, and to make them suppose as if this hill or cairn were the real grave of the Master himself. [Illustration: The Tyanḍi Båråbudur (N. W. front).] But after a lapse of an uncountable number of years or, perhaps some centuries, this colony became a large and powerful empire, and—just as the Christians first assembled in grottoes or catacombs, and afterwards built churches rich and magnificent like St. Peter’s at Rome, and the Cologne cathedral—the Buddhists also disregarded their simple cairn, and wanted something better, something more worthy and beautiful, in consequence of which they built a _dagob_ large and in solemn style, surrounded by many gradually descending terraces, walled in and covered with sculptures abundantly hewn, which was to speak, with the clearness of plastic art or in the poetic language of symbolism, of the Master and his doctrine, of the Redeemer and redemption, of life’s insufficiency and of victory after death.[16]