The dawn of serenity: letter from Borobudur - Indonesia

The Buddhist sanctuary of Borobudur (Indonesia) is one of the jewels of the world cultural heritage. Eiji Hattori, a specialist in Buddhist art and thought, has long been fascinated by this great monument. Here he suggests a new interpretation of its symbolism.

DAWN. The endless forest of coconut trees is sleeping beneath white mist, while to the east the elegant silhouette of Mount Merapi stands out against a background of golden light. Smoke is rising gently from the volcano. Here and there on the awakening plain below a cock crows and breaks the silence. The lines of stupas stand like silent shadows in the cool of the early morning. Among them I can see the statue of a Buddha facing the rising sun; the new day's light does not seem to disturb his meditation for an instant.

It is the dawn of serenity.

In the half light I can make out a man dressed in white sitting at the foot of the central stupa. A strange vibration emanates from him. I listen. He is murmuring a sutra. Perhaps one of Java's few Buddhists,(1) his hands are joined as he calmly greets the sun that by now is shining on Mount Merapi. Then he goes silently away.

This is not my first visit to Borobudur. The more I get to know this monument, the more I am dazzled by its beauty. Some twenty years ago UNESCO launched an appeal to the international community to save it. Twenty-seven countries responded and worked with UNESCO and Indonesian experts to move a million stones over a ten-year period so that this chandi(2) could live again in its original form. Borobudur is an exceptional place. It is not a temple--it has no place for worship nor for making offerings--but a huge Buddhist sanctuary that is both a stupa(3) and a mandala (a cosmic image).

In eighth-century Java the rulers of the prosperous Sailendra (saila indra: king of the mountains) dynasty converted to Mahayana(4) Buddhism, a form of Buddhism that came into being around the same time as the beginning of the Christian era. Using the most advanced techniques available, they built this brilliantly designed stone mandala some time around the year 800. Thousands of labourers, craftsmen and artists worked on it. But how brief was the life-span of their masterpiece! Less than a century after its completion Borobudur had disappeared into oblivion, rather like the earth mandala in ancient India that returned to dust after seven days of use.

Why did the dynasty, which had built other masterpieces in central Java, abandon it in the tenth century and turn its attention to the eastern pan of the island? Could it have been because of an eruption of Mount Merapi and the violent earthquake that would have followed? Like Pompeii beneath its shroud of ash, Borobudur fell into a thousand-year sleep. It was not until 1814 that the legendary chandi, buried deep in the jungle, was rediscovered by an agent sent out by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, at that time the British governor of Java.

The three spheres

Let us take a closer look at Borobudur. On the Kedu plain, formerly known as the garden of Java, the sanctuary stands on the top of a decapitated hill and is built of andesite, a bluish-grey volcanic rock. It is a colossal pyramid of superimposed tiers that are crowned by an enormous bell-shaped stupa. From a distance you can tell that the whole construction is organized around this stupa.

At closer range you can see a heavy stone encasement around the base that was probably built to shore up the monument during its construction. It hides the real base or "hidden foot", which is decorated with 160 reliefs, all of which were photographed shortly after they were discovered in the late nineteenth century.

These "invisible" reliefs depict the Sphere of the Desires that the human being is bound to, the kamadhatu. I do not agree with theories that claim this part of the monument was deliberately covered up for religious motives to prevent pilgrims from seeing it. On the one hand, the "hidden foot" contains unfinished reliefs indicating that work suddenly came to a halt due to some unexpected event. On the other, as I shall explain later, such an error seems quite inconceivable in such a carefully planned monument. This part of the mandala symbolizes "extreme exteriority": each side has a stairway in the middle, leading up to the monument's highest point.

The main structure of the sanctuary is composed of this foundation and, standing on top of it, five square terraces. The superstructure consists of three circular terraces. This is the basic shape of the mandala: the square, a symbol of the earth, and the circle, symbolizing the sky, combine to produce the number nine, the supreme figure of Buddhism.

The galleries, which have to be visited clockwise to respect the ritual circumambulation, begin on the second terrace. They are lined with 1,300 wonderful bas-reliefs 2,500 metres long. This is rupadhatu, the Sphere of Forms, in which the human being gives up his thirst for desire but keeps his name and form. This immense stone book relates Buddha's life as told in the sutras. Nooks located on the outside of the balustrades that surround the galleries each contain a stone Buddha seated cross-legged on a lotus cushion. There are 432 in all.

Next we come to the foot of the upper part of the mandala. Here the view to the outside, hitherto impeded by the balustrades, suddenly opens up, so that one has a sense of spiritual breadth as one enters the arupadhatu, the Sphere of Formlessness.

In Borobudur the transition from earth to sky, from form to non-form, is made gently. The square form is not rigorously adhered to: the edges around each square terrace jut out and break up the hard right angles, perhaps in an attempt to use architecture to relieve the monotony of the pilgrim's perambulation. Personally I see an intentional transition to the circle. Aerial photos show that the first two terraces are not exactly circular. A slight deformation makes them more like squares! Only the topmost terrace is a perfect circle.

Borobudur's three spheres mark the spiral stages of an ascension that leads the pilgrim up to the stupa of ultimate truth. This central stupa, whose walls are not perforated like those of the others, contains nothing: the ultimate point is nothing but emptiness (sunyata). Buddha himself is hidden. He is there yet not there; he is being and non-being. Each of the seventy-two small stupas with perforated walls that stand on the three terraces contains a statue of the Buddha. His face can only be imperfectly made out through the gaps in the stonework. These gaps are of different shapes and become less numerous as one approaches the central stupa, signifying the Buddha's increasing invisibility. All these Buddhas have the same hand position (mudra): that of the perpetually-moving wheel of the Law.

When we reach the summit, we suddenly share the cosmic vision of Mahayana Buddhism. Here the supreme reality is unveiled, light is born! Yes, Borobudur, which shimmers in a thousand colours from morning to night, itself glistens like a huge beacon. The sanctuary's 504 Buddhas face the four points of the compass and embrace the world with merciful, shining eyes. Not only these stupas, but the nooks in the wall-parapets, the little towers, the smallest parts of the edifice all reach skywards as if to seize the breath of passing clouds.

The mandala of mandalas

According to this interpretation, Borobudur is the lotus home of the "Great Buddha of Light", who is depicted in a myriad of small, finely carved Buddhas. Dust itself becomes light. As the doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism has it. the one resides in the many, which is itself the manifestation of the one. In the Gandhavyuha, the sacred text of Mahayana Buddhism, light is not the enemy of shade: it is the light of the original emptiness, which transcends the opposition between being and nothingness.

Let us now look at the mandala--this esoteric image that aids active meditation of the Buddhist cosmos--formed by Borobudur. Mandalas, whether painted or sculpted, like the statues in the To-ji temple in Kyoto, are always oriented in relation to a central point. Borobudur, which looks out at the four points of the compass while its "heart" is empty, is a perfect illustration of the mandala concept.

In 1930 the French archaeologist and architect Henri Parmentier suggested that Borobudur might have been originally conceived as an immense stupa resting on square terraces but that problems of stability forced the builders to rethink the plans for the upper part. This theory was supported by several participants in the international symposium on Borobudur held in Tokyo in 1980, but it seems unacceptable to me. Even if Borobudur underwent minor changes during its construction, the extreme rigour of its design rules out the idea of any such architectural compromise.

A mysterious concordance

The mysterious concordance of the numbers one sees at Borobudur is to my mind sufficient proof. As I have said, there are 432 Buddhas on the square terraces and 72 others on the concentric terraces of the upper part. These figures are not a mere coincidence. Since the stairways divide each of these groups of statues by four, in each case their total number (432 and 72) and the number of each group thus obtained (108 and 18) can be divided by three and nine. In other words, it is clear that the entire structure was conceived as a function of the number three, which symbolizes unity and the square of three, nine, a sacred number in Buddhism.

Another researcher, J. G. De Casparis, believed that the central stupa crowning the structure was a tenth terrace, corresponding to the ten stages passed through by the bodhisattva ("Buddha-to-be") before reaching the state of Buddhahood. But when Borobudur was built only six stages were practised in Java. Surely they are represented in the six square terraces. But how can the transition from the square to the circle be explained?

I had never been entirely happy with any of these interpretations. Then one day I read the Juju shin ron (Treatise on the Ten Stages of Thought) in which Kukai, the Japanese Buddhist Grand Master who founded the esoteric Shingon sect at the beginning of the ninth century, expounds his conception of the mandala.

In his eyes the "ascending transformation of the spirit", for which the mandala is the pictorial expression, is effected in nine exoteric (apparent) stages, followed by a final, esoteric (secret) stage. Could there be any better definition of Borobudur's architectural significance? Starting from the sphere of animal desire, the monk eventually reaches the "spirit laden with mystery" (Himitsu-shogon-Shin), the culminating and hermetic point. The awakening he experiences then transforms the world into light. Was this not the secret that the immense mandala was whispering to us in the early light of dawn?

So is Borobudur a monument of esoteric Mahayana Buddhism? I cannot say so categorically, but I am profoundly convinced that it is.

Let there be no mistake. I am not claiming that Kukai influenced the building of Borobudur. I am only saying that Borobudur and Kukai's teachings share a common source. Kukai himself was initiated into the esoteric doctrine of Shingon (True Word) in China and introduced the first mandala to Japan.

In which year did he return to his country? In 806, at the very time when the Sailendra were building Borobudur on the island of Java. Let us not forget either that the Todaiji, the temple of the Great Buddha in Nara (Japan), the conception of which was based on the same Gandavyuha that is illustrated along most of Borobudur's square terraces, was inaugurated in 751, the date when work on the foundations of the Javanese sanctuary is thought to have begun.

The sea route to China

This apparent coincidence is not confined to Japan and Indonesia. In Ceylon at the same time thousands of monks practised the same doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism in the monastery of Abhayagiri, which was in permanent contact with China. And to reach China the Sinhalese monks did not cross mountains but the sea!

This is where the maritime Silk Road comes in. It played a decisive role in the story of the meeting of civilizations. It was a speedy route for the exchange of goods and culture between the East and West, perhaps even before there was an overland Silk Road. It was used by many different peoples: Indians, Chinese, Greeks, Romans and Arabs, as well as Indonesians. Ceylon was a port of call for those who crossed the Indian Ocean, and once across the Malacca Straits they either made a detour around Singapore or sailed along the coasts of Sumatra and Java before heading northwards for Canton in southern China. The maritime Silk Road eventually stretched from Italy (Rome) to Japan (Nara), uniting the Indian Ocean, the western Pacific, the China Sea, the Red Sea and the Gulf.

Borobudur must be seen in the context of this network of extremely rich and varied maritime exchanges. The seas of Southeast Asia teemed with activity in the seventh and eighth centuries. And when talking about Indo-Javanese civilization, especially a Buddhist monument, we should not forget the part played by cultural influences from nations other than India.

Look carefully at th:e meditating Buddhas of Borobudur. Their expression differs from that of Indian or Thai statues, and has a greater affinity with those of China and Japan. Did not the Sailendra have a large fleet that travelled to China as well as to India and Ceylon? Moreover the monks of Abhayagiri often stopped in Java on their way to China. They were even reported to have founded a community in the eighth century on a hill near Borobudur.

Could there be a link between the presence of this monastic community and the building of Borobudur? There is no definite proof, but the shape of the stupas in Borobudur is not unlike that of the stupas in the lotus style of Anuradhapura, Ceylon's ancient capital. I also remember being struck by the resemblance between two statues of Buddha discovered in the ruins of Abhayagiri and the statues at Borobudur.

It is of course impossible to understand the conception of Borobudur without referring to the local culture. In Indonesia there was a form of ancestor worship that venerated the ancestors' spirits by building tiered pyramids in their honour. Could this great pyramid-shaped mandala have been built without such a tradition? The world owes this unique heritage to the Indonesian people.

The sun has risen over Borobudur. My thoughts turn to the outward-looking spirit of the eighth century. There were no cultural boundaries then. Peoples absorbed each other's cultures like travellers slaking their thirst together. Have those far-off times gone forever? I cannot believe that they have. Down in the water lotuses communicate with one another through their roots. Dew drops on petals reflect the same moon that shines down on white flowers thousands of miles apart. And the sun that shines on Mount Merapi now shone on pilgrims' faces at a time when beauty was the splendour of truth.

1. The Javanese converted to Islam in the 15th century.

2. A name given to Indonesia's oldest monuments.

3. A reliquary or commemorative monument.

4. A sanskrit word meaning "a great means of progression" or "Great Vehicle".

Borobudur: from rediscovery to World Heritage listing

The site: a vast Mahayana Buddhist monument in the form of a pyramid-shaped mandala, built in the heart of Java around 800 A.D. by the Sailendra dynasty and abandoned shortly after its completion.

Size: the square base, with sides measuring some 120 metres, covers an area of almost one and a half hectares; the central dome that crowns the monument is almost 35 metres above the base.

1814: rediscovery of the monument by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who has the site cleared of rubble and vegetation. Specialists compile documentation based on drawings.

1885: discovery of "the hidden foot"--the original base--and its bas-reliefs concealed behind the retaining wall needed to keep the structure from sliding.

1907-1911: Theodoor Van Erp carries out the first restoration work. He dismantles and rebuilds the three circular terraces and the stupas.

1955: Indonesia seeks UNESCO's advice on measures to prevent the monument's dilapidation.

1972: UNESCO launches an international appeal to save Borobudur.

1975-1982: restoration work carried out.

23 February 1983: inaugural ceremony to mark the completion of restoration work. Total cost: $20 million, two-thirds from the Indonesian government, and $7 million from UNESCO's international campaign, in which 27 countries took part.

1991: Borobudur included on UNESCO's World Heritage list.

EIJI HATTORI, of Japan, is currently an advisor for culture and science to the Director-General of UNESCO. A UNESCO staff member for many years, he initiated the Organization's Integral Study of the Silk Roads project.

COPYRIGHT 1994 UNESCO
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group