Volcanic Grace: Tārā, Goddess of Compassion, from Central Java (Indonesia)

Central, Java, Indonesia via Singapore --  8th or 9th century CE via Singapore 2022 or so

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In the quiet of our home in Bahi Pantad, a volcanic stone bust rests—serene, enigmatic, and steeped in centuries of spiritual resonance. Acquired several yesrs ago through Singapore’s Hotlotz auction house and carried via public transport to our suburban Lion City condo, this sculpture has ventured far beyond the Dieng Plateau in the Javan highlands where it was crafted. The accompanying documentation identifies the stone sculpture as the Goddess Tārā, the Buddhist embodiment of compassion, whose form once graced temple walls and shrines across the sacred landscapes of Central Java. And no matter where she is on display, she carries a whisper of ancient devotion

The bust is believed to date from the 8th or 9th century CE, a time when the Shailendra dynasty ruled Central Java and patronized the construction of monumental Buddhist architecture. This was a period of remarkable cultural synthesis, when Hindu and Buddhist traditions intertwined, giving rise to works of divine serenity and princely ornamentation. Tārā’s elaborate headdress, layered jewels, and tranquil gaze are hallmarks of this Shailendra-era artistry, a sculptural language that sought to make visible the invisible— representing enlightenment itself.

Tārā’s likely origin on the Dieng Plateau, a mist-shrouded volcanic highland whose name derives from Old Javanese di-hyang, “place of the ancestors” or “where the gods reside,” would have placed her in one of the many temple complexes in the area. Dieng is the highest plateau on Java, a caldera complex dotted with steaming craters, mountain lakes, and the remnants of numerous ancient temples. The shrines there, some of the earliest surviving in Indonesia, predate world famous Borobudur by perhaps a century and represent the cradle of Javanese temple architecture. In the early 19th century, explorers such as Stamford Raffles counted hundreds of temple structures in the region, many of which have since vanished, swallowed by time and earth.

The andesite stone from which Tārā is carved is the same volcanic material used in Borobudur and the Arjuna temple complex of Dieng. Its granular texture and weathered surface testify to both the age and durability of the piece. The gentle contours of the goddess’s face, the subtle downward gaze, the elaborate headress and the extended earlobes and adornment all speak to the Central Javanese sculptor’s mastery—a balance between sensuality and sanctity, between earthly beauty and divine stillness.

I first encountered this sacred central region of Indonesia in 1987, having taken a bus from the royal city of Yogyakarta that delivered me to the medieval wonder of Borobudur at dawn. There, in the hush before and after sunrise, I wandered the temple’s concentric terraces, tracing the stone reliefs with reverence. I imagined myself a disciple of the original builder’s faith—one of the many who ascended the stupa’s spiral path toward enlightenment. That journey etched itself into my memory, a spiritual imprint that lingered long after I’d left Java’s historical heartland.

Decades later, the availability of the bust of Tārā startled me as I browsed an auction catalogue. The stone head’s ancient provenance and opulence, together with affordable pricing, allowed me to bridge two very different worlds: the spiritual highlands of Java and the domestic quiet of our home.

Placed on a lotus-petal pedestal of carved wood, the statue seems to evoke the eternal emergence of spirit from matter, religious belief from hard stone. Her calm countenance now inhabits a new sanctuary here in Bohol, far from her Javan origins yet still steeped in the same meditative silence.

Tārā is not merely an artifact; she exudes devotion while also being a survivor of eons of change and cultural transition. Viewing her, our imagination can take flight when we recall that she once stood in a candle-lit temple alcove, watching pilgrims pass, or maybe rested in a shrine where incense curled around her brow. Now, in a corner of our home, she continues to invite that and other reflections—on her resilience, her beauty, and on the quiet power of things that lasts through the ages. Tārā endures as both a relic and a revelation. Her stillness transcends geography; her weathered contours hold the pulse of countless dawns.

 

Threads of History Underfoot: The Armenian Carpet

Armenia -- late 19th to early 20th Century
via Singapore circa 2022

With the help of ChatGPT, Copilot, and a lifelong fascination with Oriental carpets, I believe this heavy handwoven rug is a likely Armenian Lori–Pambak carpet, woven sometime between 1910 and 1930 in the mountain villages of the South Caucasus.

It measures 6 ft 2 in × 9 ft, but what it really carries is history.

I found it not in an auction room or specialist carpet dealer, but on a Singapore Facebook buy-and-sell page. The asking price was S$500 for what was simply described as a "used rug."

That immediately caught my attention.

I'd been studying traditional textiles since my university days and had gradually built a modest collection. Something about the colours, the geometry and the confidence of the design suggested this wasn't just another old carpet.

The sellers were an elderly Chinese couple living in an HDB flat. They knew very little about its history, and I never learned how it had entered their family. It may have been purchased decades earlier, inherited, or perhaps rescued from a pawn shop. Its earlier life remains a mystery.

Once I got it home—by taxi, naturally—I began looking more closely.

The design reads almost like a woven prayer.

At its centre lies a great stepped yellow diamond surrounding a crimson medallion, with a smaller cross-shaped device enclosed within. Similar motifs appear in many Armenian and Caucasian village carpets and are often interpreted as symbols of divine light, protection and eternity, blending Christian imagery with much older regional traditions.

Running through the field is a simple Tree of Life, connecting earth and heaven. Around it are stylised forms that resemble church roofs crowned with crosses, while the surrounding borders contain rosettes, ram's horns, vine motifs and protective geometric devices that create a symbolic enclosure around the entire composition.

Even the colours seem deliberate:

🔴 Red for vitality and protection.

🟡 Yellow for light, joy and blessing.

🟢 Green for life, fertility and paradise.

🔵 Blue for faith, heaven and eternity.

The carpet's construction supports a Caucasian origin: symmetrical Turkish (Ghiordes) knots, heavy wool foundations and naturally dyed wool pile—all characteristic of village weaving from the early twentieth century.

Today this remarkable survivor lives in our home in Bohol.

Its journey may have begun in an Armenian Christian village high in the Caucasus. It may have passed through colonial Malaya, perhaps in the home of an Armenian merchant family, before finding its way into a Singaporean Chinese household. Eventually it crossed the sea once again, this time to the Blackstone home in the Philippines.

Of course, parts of that journey remain speculation. The carpet itself cannot tell us every chapter of its story.

But it has certainly travelled.

And every morning, as we walk across it barefoot, we become part of that journey too.

The Dragon From Beneath Robson Hill

Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia — early 2007

In March 2007 I moved from a house in rural Yuwa-machi, Akita-ken, Japan, to a condo on a hill in central Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Robson Hill rises quietly above the Klang River Valley, its slopes once thick with jungle. Before the condominiums and the arterial roads, this ridge was home to Chinese settlers who carved out lives in the wilds—clearing land, building shrines, burying their dead. By the late 19th century, this very hill had become a spiritual anchor: temples bloomed, cemeteries expanded, and dragons—those fierce, protective emblems—began to appear in stone and plaster, watching over the living and the departed.

Urbanisation creeps in. Roads are widened. The Klang-Kuala Lumpur Highway was started in the late 1950s and by the 80s -- when I first lived in the area -- it was a full-fledged highway just below Robson. Many of the hills of central KL were cut up in the name of progress. By the 1990s, Robson Heights Condominium was built on the crest of Robson Hill, a modern sentinel overlooking the Thean Hou Temple with the vast Kwong Tong (Chinese) cemetery behind it. Rumors circulate: an old temple building may have been razed during construction. No records that I know of confirm it, but the land bears scars—terraces carved and slopes reinforced.

While I’m living in Robson Heights, and on a quiet afternoon, I wander down the mostly clear cut hillock below the condo. The air is still, the ground hard from a lack of recent rain. Bamboo and saplings lean in from a more densely forested edge of the large clearing just beneath the condo’s outer wall. I’m not searching for anything—just walking, looking for a path that will take me even further down to a city road that leads directly into the cemetery.

Then I see it. A shard in the soil, half-buried. I kneel. Brush away the earth. A dragon’s face stares at me—flared nostrils, fierce eyes, stylized mane curling like smoke. The fragment is cast from concrete or grout, not carved stone. Its texture is rough, its edges broken. It’s clearly part of something larger, now lost.

I lift it gently. The weight is modest, but its presence is immense. Mounted later on the stand shown in the photos, it reveals more: scales etched with care, a mouth mid-roar, the suggestion of eagle-like talons. This is no garden ornament. It’s a guardian—perhaps once affixed to a temple wall, a funerary gate, or a ceremonial arch. Its style echoes the dragons of nearby Thean Hou and other Chinese folk architecture: protectors, boundary markers, symbols of power and continuity.

I speculate. Could the fragment have belonged to the vanished temple mentioned during the condo’s construction? Was it discarded in rubble, buried in fill, forgotten as the hill was reshaped? Or did it fall from a grave marker, a silent sentinel dislodged by time?

Whatever its origin, the dragon shard speaks to the Chinese presence on Robson Hill and throughout the Klang Valley—their labor, their rituals, their resilience. The dragon, in this context, is more than myth. It’s a declaration: We are here. We guard this place. We shape the land and honor our dead.

This piece, found by chance, becomes a portal for me. It links KL's urban present to a spiritual past. It’s testament to the fact that history isn’t just preserved in museums—it can be scattered in the soil, waiting for someone to notice.