Ocean of Objects: Ideas

The ocean and its inhabitants have inspired stories for the people who have lived around and with this ocean for thousands of years. Stories of creation, strange visitors, fantastic creatures, or magic and danger, these stories have often been made real in paintings, carvings and objects.

The ocean has also carried religions and beliefs across its waters and beyond. Traders and sailors have often spread new religions such as Islam and Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity. Pilgrims and others refreshed ideas and beliefs through their travels. As people moved to live in new places they brought their beliefs with them. While sometimes rulers and the powerful have chosen new religions to follow.

The connections that thousands of years of trade and travel have made and re-made have led to ideas travelling across the sea. Designs and patterns have been borrowed and transformed. New ways of doing things and technologies have spread. Religious and political ideas found new places to transform.

A God as a Fish

Matsya sculpture
India, 800 to 1000 CE
The British Museum, 1872,0701.50

This giant fish can carry a building and a tree on his back. Made in India more than a thousand years ago, this carved stone from a Hindu temple shows the story of when the seas rose to flood the land and a fish saved humanity.

The fish, called Matsya, was tiny when found by the first man who ever lived, but grew to a massive size. Matsya warned the first man a flood was coming and to build a ship. As the waters rose, the fish guided the ship to find dry land on the Himalaya mountains. No ordinary fish, Matsya is actually the Hindu god Vishnu in fish form. This is one of many legends and religious stories from around the Indian Ocean where the sea and its creatures have important roles.

This striking sculpture is now eroded, the tiny figures include half-cobra and half-human nagas along the bottom, holy men and other gods.

Amitabha Buddha

Amitabha Buddha
Java, 750-850
Art Gallery of New South Wales, 144.2000

Made in Java, this very recognisable image of the Buddha is more than a thousand years old. Shown sitting cross-legged with the bottoms of both feet upwards, and hands held in his lap, the Buddha is deep in meditation. This particular sculpture looks very similar to the nearly five hundred statues of Buddha at the monument of Borobudur.

Similar images of the Buddha were made and used from India and Sri Lanka through Southeast Asia. Buddhism originally spread from India, along with Hinduism across the Indian Ocean along trade routes, before becoming favoured by local rulers. Monks and pilgrims travelling to important places in the Buddha’s life, to learn in monasteries or visit relics, continued these ocean contacts.

Doorway to Indonesia, India, China and Egypt?

Temple doors
Bali, 18th-19th century
Art Gallery of South Australia, 20115A28

More than 100 years old, these are carved doors or the pamedal from a Hindu temple in Bali. Look more closely, and they show how ideas travelled to the island to be adopted by Balinese carvers and carpenters. Doorways are spiritually significant in Southeast Asia and are viewed as thresholds between inner and outer realms. No two temples in Bali are the same due to the practice of basing the architectural measurements on the proportions of the priest who is responsible for it. The door is guarded by two Singa Ambara Raja or King Heavenly Lions. The fretwork motif appearing as a border on the double doors copies Chinese designs called banji. Balinese carvers understood this pattern came from outside the island but called it curiously, the patra Mesir meaning ‘Egyptian design’. Traders from both the Middle East and China have travelled to Bali and other Indonesian islands in the past. Two panels on each side of the doors display painted characters from the Ramayana—the epic story of the Hindu God Rama that came originally from India to Southeast Asia more than a thousand years ago.