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

456 CEYLON AND SOUTH-EAST ASIA
in the lower galleries.
We have a change from
the upper terraces really implies the transition
exoteric to esoteric doctrine, suggesting the
similar division in the text of the Lotus Sutra
(Saddharma Pundarika). The change coming
here at the fifth level is significant, for it is on
leaving the fourth and entering the fifth level of
his trance that the yogin begins to become integrated
with the One. Moreover, it does seem
probable that what we describe as generally
more empty and static in the compositions of
these final reliefs in the Barabudur cyclorama
in stone may be deliberate in another way: they
are preparing the pilgrim for the great emptiness
of the upper terraces where sit the Buddhas of
the world beyond form and thought. These
from exoteric to esoteric, from the material
world to the spiritual world. The limited, fixed
square is expressive of the world of experience
and material phenomena. The circle has no
corners, no directions, it implies an infinite
radiation from its centre - without limit - the
realm of boundless spirit, the empyrean. With
the pilgrims to Barabudur we, too, have emerged
from the long stone corridors girdling the pyramid,
and are now face to face with the last great
mysteries.
The innermost secrets of Barabudur are
linked up with the identity and function of the
Dhyani Buddha images that cover the monuimages
on the last platforms, isolated against the
ment from top to bottom :
Aksobhya, Ratnasambhava,
Amitabha, Amoghasiddhi [390];
these
sky, are the most eloquent and dramatic representation
that art could devise of the great void
which is the Creator and the last home of the
soul that has wandered down the worlds so long
and wearily.
The idea of this final emptiness and absence
of form is already prophesied in the austerity of
setting, the frozen and solemn formality of the
reliefs that illustrate the more esoteric texts of
the fourth gallery. The transition from the
square terraces of the pyramid to the circles of
are the mystic Buddhas associated with the four
directions, who are all recognizable by their
characteristic mudras and are placed in niches
on the exterior of the balustrades of the first
four galleries on the East, South, West, and
North respectively. On the fifth gallery on all
four sides are images of another Buddha in
teaching mudra, who is to be identified as a
form of Vairocana. There are also seventy-two
Buddhas in dharmacakra mudra, half-hidden