: 'Twas the Night Before Christmas by Moore Clement Clarke - Santa Claus Juvenile poetry; Christmas Juvenile poetry; Narrative poetry; Children's poetry American

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Page. Preface 3 Buddhistic temples in Pr?g?-valley 5 Tyan?i M?ndut 13 Tyan?i Pawon 23 Tyan?i B?r?budur 26 Concluding word 90 Errata 92

Ruins of Buddhistic temples in Pr?g?-valley.

This Buddhism taught that mankind might be freed from any sensual passion, and sin by following a pure conduct of life, and from the curse of being continually reincarnated in either a human or animal being, and that it could gain eternal rest as the highest reward of virtue on earth. And therefore Buddhism taught self-command, self-denial and self-conquest; the love of all beings either man or beast: patience with others, the sons of different castes, and patience too with the followers of all other religions.

But the southern church, the H?nay?na swerved less far from the ancient doctrine, though it may be true that it did not always keep its originality, for in its pagodae, are also found a few sculptures honoured there as the representations of Buddha himself.

Since some centuries Buddhism has been repelled from its country of birth by the ancient Hinduism. Its place was taken by the shivaistic and other Hindu religions which at their turn again were partly superseded by Isl?mism.

This was death after life; slavery after the command of senses; the decline of a civilisation lost for ever, and of a highly developed art whose products, by time's tooth changed into ruins, still testify to her lost greatness.

And when we wish to judge and understand the temples built by these Buddhists, we also ought to start from that point of view, and accept the hero of the legend as if he should have really lived, and suffered in order to redeem the world from the burden of the sin of life, and from the curse of death, and infinite regenerations.

We understand them to have come from India, probably from the North, but we don't know when this happened, and when they first began to deposit their Buddha ashes worthily.

That the Buddhists of Central Java were a powerful nation at that period of time may fully appear from the extent and splendour of the building which surpasses all other Buddha- and Hindu temples on all the earth.

This harmony supports the opinion of this building's having been built after the scheme of one and the very same architect; a man of a surprising intellectual capacity indeed, who could have conceived such a scheme to be carried out in an incalculable number of years by hundreds of thousands of labourers.

We cannot possibly believe that so much labour and time would have been spent on the building of a prince's mausoleum, however powerful he might have been.

Upwards of a thousand years have rolled since over these colossal ruins. Earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions replaced their masses of stone, solar heat and torrents introduced and supported their decay, parasitic plants dispersed their foundations, and narrow-minded slaves of ignorance and fanaticism damaged or spoilt many of their produce of art--still the ruins stand there as an impressive fact scarcely no less uncredible than undeniable; a majestic product of a master-mind of the past, a stone epic immortal even in its decline.

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