Borobudur

01A mountain to walk up

Borobudur has no hall inside. It is built over a natural hill as six square terraces and three round ones, crowned by a great bell-shaped stupa. The pilgrim walks round each level keeping it on the right, in pradakshina, and climbs. The hidden foot, covered over even in the builders’ time, is carved with the workings of karma. The square galleries tell the life of the Buddha from the Lalitavistara, the Jatakas, and the search of the youth Sudhana for wisdom in the Gandavyuha. On the round terraces the carving stops: 72 perforated stupas each hold a seated Buddha, seen only through the stone lattice, and the central stupa above them is closed.

02Buddhist and Shaiva on one plain

The Shailendras who built Borobudur were Mahayana Buddhists with close ties to Bengal; the Kelurak inscription of 782 names a guru from Gauda. Within a day’s walk stood the Shiva temples of the Sanjaya house of Mataram. The two families were joined when Samaratungga’s daughter Pramodhawardhani married Rakai Pikatan, who went on to build Prambanan, consecrated in 856. Borobudur stands in a line with two smaller temples to the east, Pawon and Mendut, on the plain where the Progo and Elo rivers meet below the volcano Merapi. It is a Buddhist monument and is honoured here as such, as the work of a Dharmic sibling tradition carried across the sea from Bharat.

03Lost, found, restored

After the court moved to East Java in the tenth century the monument was left to ash from Merapi and to the jungle. In 1814 Thomas Stamford Raffles, then ruling Java for the British, sent the engineer H. C. Cornelius, whose men cleared it in about six weeks. Theodoor van Erp restored the upper terraces between 1907 and 1911. A larger restoration with UNESCO, from 1975 to 1982, took the galleries apart stone by stone, laid drainage and set them back. On 21 January 1985 bombs planted by extremists damaged nine of the stupas; they were repaired. Borobudur was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1991, and each Vesak monks walk in procession to it from Mendut.

The life of this place