The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

java • 449
Isles' who, setting out from southern India,
made himself an Empire of the Malay Peninsula,
Sumatra, and Java in the middle of the
eighth century a.d. From the time of the decline
ninth storey is present, though unseen, in the
form of the hidden basement.
A great many scholars have busied themselves
trying to prove that the Barabudur we see to-day
383. Barabudur
of the Sailendra power in the ninth century,
until the rediscovery of Barabudur in the nineteenth,
nothing is known of the history of the
temple - beyond the usual story of decay and
neglect that has been the lot of so many great
sanctuaries of the Eastern world. There is no
need to linger over the details of the restorations
and depredations that went on during the nineteenth
century, following the excavation of the
shrine by Sir Thomas Raffles, except to mention
the discovery made in 1885 that the ground
immediately around the foot of the monument
had at some time been filled in to cover a whole
series of reliefs decorating what was the original
basement storey of the building.
Let us at this point examine the architectural
arrangement of the temple and then the reasons
for this arrangement. It consists of five walledin
galleries or terraces on a rectangular plan
[384]; above these are three round platforms
open to the sky, on which are seventy-two bellshaped
stupas and a sealed terminal stupa at the
verv summit and centre of the monument: a
is the result of innumerable alterations and
architectural refinements, and that we must
therefore assume the existence of a primitive
Barabudur, limited to three galleries. One of
the proponents of this theory points out -
among other things - that the reliefs illustrating
scenes from the life of Buddha were deliberately
terminated with the portrayal of Sakyamuni's
First Preaching, and that the later masterbuilder
arbitrarily decided to devote the subsequent
gallery to a different legend: actually
the Buddha legend at Barabudur ends with the
First Sermon, because the reliefs are illustrations
of the Lalita Vistara sutra which concludes with
this event in the Buddha's career and not for
any architectural reason. If space allowed, it
would be possible likewise to refute all the
other arguments on the remodelling of Barabudur.
These arguments constitute a warning
to those who, with no knowledge of the details,
attempt to approach the Buddhist art of this
period only through the architectural technique,
forgetting that we have here an art and a religion