Horizons: The Cosmic Mountain: Borobudur

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Now the most populous Muslim nation in the world, Indonesia was once home to powerful Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms. (Today, however, the island of Bali remains the only Hindu enclave in Indonesia.) In the late eighth century A.D., a Buddhist kingdom, the Sailendra dynasty of Central Java, created one of the most enduring monuments to human spirituality ever built: the Borobudur Temple.

Although little is known about early Javanese history, the Borobudur Temple was clearly deliberately set in the midst of soaring volcanic mountains. The temple’s many stupas (mound-shaped objects or structures, a form used by Buddhists for shrines and reliquaries) resemble cone-shaped volcanic mountains, and the temple was built of yellowish brown andesite, a volcanic rock that covers much of Java. By the 15th century, Java had become thoroughly Islamic, and the Borobudur temple fell out of use and into neglect. It was rediscovered in 1814 by the British explorer Thomas Raffles, who found the temple buried and in ruins. It was rebuilt in the early 20th century and massively restored—with each of its 2,000,000 blocks removed and cleaned—between 1973 and 1983.

An inscription dating to 842 A.D. suggests that ancient Buddhist pilgrims visited the Borobudur Temple for contemplation and prayer—and, indeed, to visit the temple is to contemplate the universe in microcosm. It was constructed in the form of a mandala, an Eastern symbol of the universe consisting of a series of concentric geometric figures. In the case of the Borobudur Temple, the mandala is a circle inscribed within a square. The base of the temple is a large, square, stepped platform (similar to a ziggurat), 400 feet long on each side at the lowermost step. This platform supports three circular terraces surmounted by a large stupa that rises to a height of 140 feet above the ground.

The temple is entered by staircases in the middle of each side. Running around each of four levels of the stepped platform are galleries lined with 6-foot-wide relief carvings. These panels not only illustrate Buddhist songs, poems and sacred texts, but they also depict stories from Buddhist history, such as the life of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha (c. 563–483 B.C.), who lived in northern India. One 054panel even shows a ship transporting Buddhist missionaries to Java.

On the three circular terraces are 72 bell-shaped (or volcano-shaped) trellised stupas, each almost 10 feet in diameter at the base. Inside each of these stupas is a statue of the Buddha with his hands gesturing in one of the sacred Buddhist signs (mudras). At the center of the upper terrace, and thus at the very center of the temple, is the large central stupa (36 feet in diameter), which may once have housed a golden Buddha—representing the state of perfect enlightenment. The temple is designed so that this stupa cannot be seen from the galleries of the stepped platform (and the trellised Buddhas can only be glimpsed from certain angles)—symbolizing both the chasm between heaven and earth (or enlightenment and non-enlightenment) and the means by which that chasm is to be bridged (the gallery carvings show the path to enlightenment, and the Buddha statues represent enlightenment itself).

Curiously, the Borobudur has no enclosed spaces, no real interiors. It is a kind of mountain, a cosmic mountain, which, once climbed, reveals itself as The Way.

What is so moving about the Borobudur Temple, beyond its exotic setting, is its seeming resolution of opposites, thus symbolizing the harmony of the universe. It brings together the mandala’s sharp-cornered square and angle-less circle, the worldly complexity of the thousands of relief carvings and the soaring simplicity of the stupas, the careworn confinement of the galleries and the joyous freedom of the open terraces.

So when ancient pilgrims arrived at this sacred precinct, they found something that talked back to them—a world in miniature somehow reflecting their own world. They would have climbed from the base earth into the labyrinth of galleries, pausing to reflect on the pains, sorrows and joys of life. As they ascended this cosmic mountain, mere desire gave way to the forms of the world, represented by the life of Buddha and Buddhist songs and history. Nearer the summit, they would glimpse the trellised stupas and then, suddenly, break into the open, surrounded by Buddhas, no longer confined within a world of divisions and death, knowing their destination was that perfect enlightenment symbolized by the high, still central stupa, around which the universe turned.