Borobudur ꦕꦤ꧀ꦝꦶꦧꦫꦧꦸꦝꦸꦂ

Atlas’ Notebook: Edition LVIII

Welcome to Cosmographia. The following is part of our Atlas’ Notebook series, featuring art, poetry, literature, cartography, and photography, all centred on a particular place. For the full map of Cosmographia posts, see here.

Borobudur is the largest and most elaborate Buddhist temple in the entire world. Yet its origins remain a mystery.

The temple lies in central Java, Indonesia, surrounded by thick jungle and a ring of mountains. It’s suspected its construction, amid an area with no traces of any other ancient buildings, palaces, or cities, may have been begun by the Shailendra and/or Sanjaya dynasties of 8th century Java. It’s estimated one million stones, each weighing 100kg each, were mined from a nearby riverbed in order to build the stupa, which contains 504 statues of the Buddha and almost 3000 carved stone reliefs.

No one quite knows why such a vast Buddhist edifice was built in a primarily Hindu area, some 5000km away from the centre of Buddhist thought. It’s not even known what precise function it served. The sophisticated civilisation that birthed it went into a sudden and mysterious decline within a century of the temple’s completion in the mid-9th century.

Borobudur soon fell out of use, its original purpose forgotten. Centuries passed. Out of sight and mind, the jungle retook the temple hill. There it lay, waiting, silent and forgotten, for half a millennia. Until…

I. In Art

Reconstruction of Borobudur during its heyday — G.B. Hooijer (c. 1916–1919) CC BY-SA 3.0.

Gijsbert Brand Hooijer was an officer and draughtsman in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, and was stationed on the island of Java during the early 20th century when it was still a Dutch colony. As the title suggests, this tempura painting is a reconstruction of what Borobudur may have looked like in its Middle Ages heyday. At first glance, I suspected the elephants pictured might be an orientalist fantasy, however there are relief carvings of elephants on Borobodur itself, which may be evidence that elephants once existed on the island of Java, though they are now long extinct.

Hooijer was painting Borobodur about a century after the temple was ‘rediscovered’ by the man with the most British name of all time — Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles. As Governor General of the Dutch East Indies between 1811 and 1816, Raffles took great interest in the history of the island. After he heard about the existence of a huge monument deep in the jungle, he dispatched Dutch engineer Hermann Cornelius to investigate. It took his team two months to cut back the undergrowth to reveal the extent of the huge temple complex.

An engraving based on the original drawings of Cornelius — Unknown (c. 19th century). Public Domain.

II. In Verse

It is time
The sick and bonded man
Afresh
Came
To this holy place
To read
The word carved on the silent stone—
That, on piercing a thousand years’ ruckus,
Rings out in the skies forever, the
Word of eternal love, ‘Buddham saranam gacchami’.

— Rabindranath Tagore, Borobudur (1927)

Rabindranath Tagore was a true giant of world literature. Born in Kolkata in 1861, the Bengali writer was a prolific poet, playwright, and novelist, but also found time for philosophy, painting, and music (including writing the Indian national anthem). His influence on Indian literature and culture earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, making him the first ever non-European winner.

In 1927, Tagore spent three months travelling Southeast Asia to rediscover the history of Indian cultural exchange across the region. In his own words: “We have embarked on this pilgrimage to see the signs of the history of India’s entry into the universal.” During his three weeks in Java, he became fascinated by the traces of ‘Indianness’ in Indonesian culture, going back to the 8th-9th centuries Hindu Sanjaya dynasty, and wrote the above poem about Borobudur.

III. In Cartography

Map of the Indian Ocean and the China Sea — İbrahim Müteferrika (1728) Public Domain.

İbrahim Müteferrika was a polymath. Among the various disciplines at which the Hungarian-born Ottoman tried his hand were: diplomacy; economics; sociology; theology; history; publishing; engraving; and apparently he was the first ever Muslim to own and run a printing press with moveable Arabic type.

It was that same printing press that produced this glorious map of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea in 1728. This is just one of a series of his maps that illustrated Kâtib Çelebi’s Cihannuma (Universal Geography), the first printed book of cartography to appear in the Islamic world.

The labels are in Arabic, but if your geography is good you’ll be able to recognise the lands that today make up Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines, Timor-Leste, Brunei, and the northern tip of Australia. The islands bordered in yellow represent the Dutch East Indies; Java is the large yellow island above the drawing of the ship in the southwestern quadrant. Borobudur was still lost to the jungle in the 18th century, but if it were marked here it’d appear right in the centre of the island.

IV. In Literature

Since no documents give us specific information about Borobudur, we must approach the problem of its place in central Javanese civilization from a different direction. What political and economic conditions shaped the lives of ordinary Javanese around A.D. 800? What do we know about Javanese nobility such as Samaratungga and Sri Kahulunan?

Borobudur, it turns out, tells us far more about the ancient Javanese than Javanese history can tell us about Borobudur. The monument is built of over a million blocks of stone laboriously hauled up a hill from a nearby riverbed, then cut and carved with great artistry. This in itself is significant, for it demonstrates that Javanese society in A.D. 800 produced enough surplus to support a great deal of activity which did not produce direct economic benefits. The Javanese must have had abundant manpower to haul the stones, skilled craftsmen to carve them, efficient agriculture to provide food for these workers, and well-organized institutions to coordinate such an ambitious and complex project. Above all, it is highly significant that they chose to devote a major portion of their resources to the construction of a monument which, although it perhaps served several purposes, was principally a visual aid for teaching a gentle philosophy of life. Certainly this qualifies ancient Java as one of the most humanistic societies in history.

— John N. Miksic, from Borobudur: Golden Tales of the Buddha (1994)

John N. Miksic is an American archaeologist and professor specialising in Southeast Asia. His Wikipedia page describes him as the “Indiana Jones of Singapore’s history”, which is exactly the kind of thing I would write on my own Wikipedia page, if I had one.

V. In Photography

Borobudur from above. Look at the humans for scale. Photo by Unknown. CC0.

Monks following Pradakshina (clockwise circumambulation of sacred entities/sites) at Borobudur. Photo by Heri Nugroho. CC BY-SA 4.0.

A terrace on the temple of Borobudur, Java, Indonesia, 1913. Photo by Fran Hurley. Public Domain.

Borobudur at dawn. Photo by Steffen Bertram.

Queen Maya on a horse carriage going to Lumbini to give birth to Prince Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha). Photo by Gunawan Kartapranata. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The jungle beyond Borobudur. Photo by Elisabeth Morin.

Borobudur is surrounded by mountains, including twin volcanoes Mount Merbabu (left) and Mount Merapi (right). Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.

— Siddhārtha Gautama