Borobudur

Stand at the top of Borobudur and the building has quietly stopped telling you anything. Lower down, every wall is crowded with carved ships, markets, elephants, dancers and princes. Up here, on the three round terraces, there are no pictures at all. Just seventy-two stone bells, each pierced with a lattice of holes, and inside each one a seated Buddha you can only half see. In the middle, the largest bell of all is sealed and empty. You have walked several kilometres in a slow spiral to reach a place where the architecture says, in effect, there is nothing more to show you. That was the point.

Building A Mountain On A Hill

There is no inscription that names the patron or the date. Scholars reading the style of the carved script and the records of neighbouring kingdoms place construction between the late eighth and the first half of the ninth century, under the Sailendra dynasty, which championed Buddhism in central Java. Call it seventy-odd years of work, a few generations of masons, one monument.

The clever part is that Borobudur is not a building you enter. It is a natural hill wrapped in stone, something like fifty-five thousand cubic metres of andesite fitted together without mortar, the blocks cut with knobs and indentations so they lock into each other. Five square terraces at the bottom, three circular ones on top, one great stupa at the summit. Pilgrims move clockwise around each level, climb to the next, and keep going. The whole route, if you follow every gallery, runs to roughly five kilometres.

The route is also a lesson. The more than 2,600 relief panels along the square galleries begin with the world of desire and work upward through the life of the Buddha and his previous lives. The lowest levels are all detail and noise; the higher you climb, the calmer the carving becomes, until it stops altogether. Form dissolving into formlessness. Few buildings anywhere explain a single idea this clearly with nothing but stone and a staircase.

Being Forgotten

How Borobudur was abandoned is murkier than how it was built. Java's political centre shifted east in the tenth century, perhaps because of eruptions from nearby Mount Merapi, perhaps because of court politics. As Islam spread across the island over the following centuries, the temple faded from importance and then from memory. Merapi's ash and the tropical forest did the rest. Eighteenth-century Javanese chronicles mention it only as a place of bad luck, where a prince went and fell ill. The monument was still there. Nobody remembered what it was.

In 1814, while Java was briefly under British rule, Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Stamford Raffles heard about a buried monument and sent the engineer H.C. Cornelius, who spent months with around two hundred labourers hacking trees and earth off a hill until terraces, stairs and stone heads emerged. Local villagers had of course always known it was there. For the rest of the world, that was the moment Borobudur came back.

Rediscovery brought its own damage. Buddha heads were removed for collectors, panels were prised off, and crates of statues were shipped to the King of Siam as gifts. The first serious restoration, led by Theodoor van Erp between 1907 and 1911, reassembled the upper terraces and re-erected the stupas. The real problem was underneath: rainwater seeping into the hill was slowly rotting the whole structure from below.

The Hidden Foot

In 1885 a Dutch engineer named J.W. IJzerman looked behind the stone casing of the lowest terrace and found another hundred and sixty relief panels nobody had seen for a thousand years. They illustrate a text called the Karmawibhangga, about the consequences of good and bad deeds, complete with hells and punishments. All of it had been deliberately covered during the original construction. The most accepted explanation is that the base began to slide under the monument's weight, so the builders wrapped it in a thick stone skirt for support. Borobudur's darkest chapter buried itself before the building was even finished. Today only a handful of those panels, at the south-east corner, are left exposed.

Today

Between 1975 and 1982, UNESCO and the Indonesian government took the monument almost entirely apart. More than a million stones were numbered, cleaned, laid over new drainage and concrete slabs, and put back. The temple was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1991. A bomb attack in 1985 damaged nine stupas on the upper terraces. Merapi erupted again in 2010 and buried the monument in ash, which took weeks to brush off.

Borobudur is now managed by the Indonesian state, and every year on Vesak, Buddhist monks walk the same spiral to the top. The threat has changed shape. It is no longer jungle or ash but feet: millions of visitors wearing down the stairs and reliefs. Access to the upper terraces is now limited, and those who climb wear special woven sandals. The stone survived twelve centuries of being forgotten. What wears it now is being remembered by everyone at once.