From Antwerp to Zanzibar: travel writers’ discoveries of 2022
Staff, 2022-12-09 23:00:02,
William Dalrymple
Borobudur, Java
My travel discovery of the year was unquestionably Borobudur in Java, the largest and most spectacular Buddhist temple in the world. Begun around AD800, it is one of the great cultural achievements of humanity, but not nearly as well-known as it should be.
From the ground, it looks like it is a stepped pyramid — but seen from the air, its plan is in the shape of a sacred Buddhist mandala. It is an absolutely massive structure, constructed from more than 1.5mn huge blocks of stone and decorated with 500 statues of the Buddha and the Bodhisattvas, all locked deep in meditation, focused within as they hover on the threshold of enlightenment.
Its history is mysterious. It is usually said to have been put up by the Buddhist kings of the 9th-century Sailendra dynasty, “the Lords of the Mountains”, but there is precious little evidence for that. One single surviving inscription links a Sailendra princess to an unnamed sanctuary, but it is not certain that it is Borobudur which is being referred to. Nor is it clear what the monument is for. Most scholars believe it seeks to represent some Indic cosmological theory, perhaps representing in stone a Mahayana Buddhist view of the universe. This is possibly the Three Realms of Mahayana Buddhism; or the Six (or Ten) Perfections. In the absence of an inscription, no one is sure.
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