Borobudur is a teaching that has to be climbed, and what exactly it teaches is less settled than most descriptions suggest.
The ascent
Nine terraces: six square, three circular, with a great stupa on top. More than two thousand relief panels and five hundred Buddha figures.
The pilgrim walks clockwise at each level before ascending, covering something over five kilometres in total. The reliefs are arranged so that the sequence moves upward through the Buddhist cosmology:
- Kamadhatu, the realm of desire, at the base, largely hidden behind later stone encasement.
- Rupadhatu, the realm of form, in the square galleries, carrying the narrative reliefs.
- Arupadhatu, the formless, on the open circular terraces, where the walls, and the stories, stop.
On the upper platforms the Buddhas sit inside perforated stupas, visible but not clearly, reachable through the gaps. Then the crowning stupa, which is empty.
The building's argument is made by making you climb it, and by taking the pictures away as you rise.
The mandala question
It is routinely described as a mandala in stone. This is contested. Some scholars read the structure as encoding a specific tantric mandala; others hold that the mandala reading is imposed and that the monument is better understood through the texts its reliefs actually illustrate, the Gandavyuha, the Lalitavistara, the Karmavibhangga.
It is Mahayana beyond dispute. Whether it is also tantric, and whether the mandala framing is anything more than a modern convenience, is genuinely open.
Loss and recovery
Built between roughly 780 and 833 under the Sailendra dynasty; abandoned within about two centuries, probably when the Mataram capital moved east after volcanic eruptions. Java's later conversion to Islam left it under ash and vegetation.
Local people led Stamford Raffles to it in 1814; he sent an engineer and never saw it himself, and takes the credit anyway.
Theodoor van Erp rebuilt the upper terraces between 1907 and 1911. The great UNESCO campaign of 1975-1982 dismantled the lower galleries entirely, catalogued and cleaned over a million stones, and rebuilt them on a new hidden drainage and reinforced foundation, one of the largest archaeological operations ever undertaken.
Nine stupas were damaged by bombs in January 1985.
In use
It is a working Buddhist site again. Waisak, the full moon of the Buddha's birth, awakening and death, brings a procession from Mendut and Pawon along the old axis to the monument.
Access is now capped at roughly twelve hundred visitors an hour, in soft sandals, to slow the wear the tourism of the intervening decades put into the stone.