Borobudur

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Borobudur is a ninth-century Buddhist monument on the Kedu Plain of central Java, the largest such structure in the world: a stepped stone pyramid of nine terraces, six square and three circular, rising to a single great stupa at the summit. It was built under the Sailendra dynasty, probably around 800, and it holds no inner chamber and no interior at all. The whole mass is solid — a monument to be walked upon and around rather than entered. Its square footing runs roughly a hundred and eighteen meters to a side, and it stands some thirty-five meters above the plain, set on and around a low natural hill that forms its core, so that the builders raised a mountain of dressed andesite over the back of a mountain that was already there.

That choice — mass without cavity — sets Borobudur apart from the temple as it is usually imagined. There is no sanctuary to enter, no cult image housed in a dark cell, no threshold across which the lay world is left behind. The building admits no inside. Everything it has to say is carried on its skin and in the order of its levels, and the only way to receive it is to climb. A pilgrim enters not a room but a route, circling each terrace clockwise — keeping the monument on the right hand, in the gesture of reverence the tradition calls circumambulation — and rising one gallery at a time until the carved world falls away.

The read-from-form program

What the building is for has to be read from its form. Around the square terraces run more than a kilometer of carved relief galleries: some fifteen hundred narrative panels in all, with another twelve hundred decorative ones, walls of stone telling stories in a fixed sequence to anyone who walks them in order. The lowest band, hidden today behind an encasing base added in antiquity, illustrates the Karmavibhanga — the law of cause and consequence, the workings of karma, act ripening into condition — in a hundred and sixty panels. Above it the Lalitavistara gives the life of the Buddha from his descent and birth through his awakening, and bands of jataka and avadana scenes recount his former lives and the deeds of exemplary beings. Higher still, across the upper galleries, the walls turn almost wholly to a single text: the Gandavyuha, a Mahayana scripture, and the pilgrimage of the youth Sudhana, a merchant’s son who sets out in search of awakening and consults teacher after teacher — fifty-three spiritual friends in the telling — among them the future Buddha Maitreya, whose discourse alone covers most of three walls, before he comes at last to the bodhisattva Samantabhadra and the vision of the whole interpenetrating cosmos, the dharmadhatu. The concluding panels draw on the Bhadracari, the hymn of vows that closes the Gandavyuha.

The sequence is not random ornament. To climb Borobudur in order is to be walked through a curriculum: first the iron mechanics of consequence, then a life in which a human being broke the mechanism, then the long road of a seeker who spends himself learning from everyone he meets. The reliefs are pitched at the walker’s eye and unfold only to a body in motion, so that the doctrine is not read off a page but paced out underfoot, one panel and one step at a time.

The ascent toward the formless

The circular terraces above the galleries carry seventy-two perforated bell-shaped stupas, each enclosing a seated Buddha glimpsed through the stonework, and crown the whole with a single closed central stupa. Counting the images in the open niches of the square terraces, the monument holds five hundred and four Buddhas in all. The shift between the two zones is sharp and deliberate. The lower levels are crowded with story and figure and incident; the upper terraces are bare, open, almost empty — no narrative wall, only a ring of latticed bells and sky. The eye, having been fed for a kilometer, is suddenly starved.

In the cosmology of the tradition that raised it, the monument is divided into three: the realm of desire (kamadhatu) at the encased base, the realm of form (rupadhatu) in the galleried square terraces, and the formless realm (arupadhatu) on the circular platforms and the summit stupa. The climb maps the stages by which a mind moves from the world of appetite, through the world of disciplined form, toward emptiness and release — the cessation the broader tradition of Buddhism sets as its end, and which the Heart Sutra and the dialectic of the Madhyamaka school articulate as the voidness of all fixed things. Read this way the monument is a mandala built to be ascended — a diagram of the cosmos and of the path, laid not on cloth or sand but in basalt, and entered not with the eye but with the legs. The central stupa, sealed and empty, sits where the diagram resolves: form perforated into form, then form withheld altogether.

A mandala in stone

The mandala reading has a long scholarly history, and the most ambitious versions tie Borobudur to the two great mandalas of esoteric Buddhism. The art historian Hiram Woodward argued that the monument encompasses both the Diamond-realm (vajradhatu) and the Womb-realm (mahakarunagarbhadhatu) mandalas, taking his bearings from the paired-mandala system best preserved in Shingon, the Japanese esoteric school whose founder studied in Tang China within a generation of Borobudur’s building, and read the whole structure as a dharmadhatu mandala — the cosmos as the field of awakening. Others, among them Lokesh Chandra, have matched the geometry of the terraces and the count of the Buddhas to specific mandalic schemes. No single reading commands the field, in part because the monument keeps its own counsel: the configuration of the upper Buddhas, their hand-gestures, and the family of texts that lies behind the design all admit more than one reconstruction. What is not in dispute is the basic grammar — a centered, oriented, ascending form, gated and circumambulatory, of the kind the tradition builds when it wants to put a cosmos into a shape a body can walk.

The textual and scholarly record

The monument’s program can be read because the texts behind it survive and have been edited and translated, and because more than a century of fieldwork has matched panel to scripture. The Gandavyuha that governs the upper galleries forms the climactic section of the vast Avatamsaka (Flower Ornament) corpus; Thomas Cleary’s complete English rendering, The Flower Ornament Scripture (Shambhala, 1984–1987), carries Sudhana’s pilgrimage in full. The Mahayana scriptures most closely tied to the monument’s doctrine of emptiness are gathered in older form in the Sacred Books of the East volume of Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts edited by F. Max Müller (1894). The standard photographic and descriptive survey of the monument is John Miksic’s Borobudur: Golden Tales of the Buddhas; Jan Fontein’s Entering the Dharmadhatu (Brill, 2012) is the modern study of the Gandavyuha reliefs and Sudhana’s sequence, building on N. J. Krom’s monumental 1920s documentation of the whole carved program. The reading of the monument as a unified mandala — and the contested attempt to map it onto the paired Diamond- and Womb-realm mandalas of esoteric Buddhism — is laid out by Hiram Woodward in his survey of the question, and a recent synthesis of the monument as a mandala-stupa treats its form as deliberately polysemic, a single shape carrying several overlapping cosmic diagrams at once. The body of charters that fixes the monument in time — among them the Karangtengah inscription of 824 — names the Sailendra dynasts but never the monument itself beyond doubt, and the monument’s continuing care is documented through the UNESCO World Heritage record of the 1973–1983 campaign and the 1991 inscription.

What the record does and does not say

How exactly it functioned is less certain than its grandeur suggests. No foundation inscription survives to name a patron or a purpose, and the Sailendra court left little to explain what rites, if any, were performed there. A handful of nearby charters touch its world: the Karangtengah inscription of 824 records the Sailendra ruler Samaratungga and a sacred building inaugurated by his daughter Pramodawardhani, and the Tri Tepusan inscription of 842 grants tax-free land for the upkeep of a sanctuary called Bhumisambhara — a name many read as the seed of “Borobudur” and gloss as the mountain of accumulated virtue, the heaped merit of the bodhisattva’s stages. None of these names the monument beyond question, and the original purpose of the encasing base that buried the Karmavibhanga reliefs — whether a structural remedy against subsidence or a correction to a flawed design — is still argued. The hidden foot itself went unseen until 1885, when the encased band of carving was found beneath the visible base.

Within roughly a century or two of completion the center of Javanese power shifted east, and Borobudur fell out of use; later, the volcanic landscape and the spread of Islam left it overgrown and half-buried, known to nearby villagers but absent from the wider record. European attention came in 1814, during the brief British interregnum under Stamford Raffles, who, told of a great ruin in the jungle, sent the Dutch engineer H. C. Cornelius to investigate; Cornelius and a crew of some two hundred spent weeks cutting back vegetation and clearing ash to expose the terraces. Through the nineteenth century the site was surveyed, photographed, and quarried for souvenirs in equal measure. A first major restoration came under the Dutch engineer Theodoor van Erp between 1907 and 1911, which stabilized the upper platforms and reset the stupas. Between 1973 and 1983 a far larger campaign, mounted by the Indonesian state with assistance coordinated through UNESCO, dismantled the lower square terraces stone by stone, cleaned and treated more than a million blocks, and rebuilt the galleries over a new drainage system to arrest the seepage that was rotting the hill from within. Borobudur was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1991.

A monument among monuments

Borobudur does not stand alone on its plain. It sits near the Hindu temples of Prambanan, raised in the same region within decades of one another, so that Buddhist and Hindu architecture of the first rank rose side by side on Java in a single brief age — a coexistence legible in the stone before any text explains it. Set against the wider Asian field of cosmic architecture, it is its own kind. The Khmer Angkor Wat, raised three centuries later for Vishnu and later turned to Buddhist use, models the Hindu cosmos as a walled, towered, water-ringed image of Mount Meru that one penetrates inward toward a central sanctuary; Borobudur inverts that logic, a solid mountain one ascends with no sanctuary to reach. And where Mount Kailash is a natural peak held sacred and left unclimbed, walked only at its base, Borobudur is a mountain made by hand precisely so that it can be climbed — the cosmic mountain rebuilt to scale, with the path cut into it.

For practicing Buddhists it remains a living site. Each year at Vesak the monument is the destination of a procession that moves along the old straight axis from the temples of Mendut and Pawon to the great stupa, with chanting and lamps and the release of lanterns into the dark — an act of devotion enacted within a modern Indonesian republic that is overwhelmingly Muslim and home to many faiths, where the monument belongs at once to a minority community’s living practice and to a whole nation’s heritage. The stone says little in words. Its argument, if it has one, is made by the shape of the climb.

→ In the library: Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts (Müller et al., 1894) · Arnold — The Light of Asia (1879)

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