A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [150]
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