Borobudur

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.

Borobudur spent centuries buried under volcanic ash and jungle growth before anyone outside the immediate area treated it as a monument again.

Abandoned, then buried

Building activity around the temple appears to have declined by the fifteenth century as Java's population shifted toward Islam and political centres moved elsewhere, and volcanic ash falls from nearby eruptions along with dense vegetation gradually covered much of the structure. Local memory of it as a place did not vanish entirely, but its scale and meaning had been lost by the time colonial administrators took an interest.

Raffles and the Dutch restorations

Thomas Stamford Raffles, then British lieutenant governor of Java, ordered the site cleared and surveyed in 1814. Dutch colonial authorities carried out partial restorations from the early twentieth century, but rising damp and structural instability were not properly addressed until a major UNESCO-backed restoration between 1975 and 1982, which dismantled and rebuilt much of the lower structure with improved drainage and waterproofing.

The 1985 bombing

On 21 January 1985, nine of the monument's stupas were badly damaged by bombs planted by an Islamist extremist group; the perpetrators were later tried and convicted. The damage was repaired, and the site now operates under tightened security alongside its continued function as an active Buddhist pilgrimage destination, particularly during the annual Vesak observance.