At the Borobudur guesthouse, near the world's largest Buddhist monument in
central Java, I had reached a still point. After coming so far it was hard
to know how to take the final steps. With the travelling and interviews of
the previous week, my body clock had blurred night and day. My awareness was
like the 24-hour fluorescent airport lights: flattened into a watery presence.
How to approach such a fabled place and not be the prisoner of anticipation?
But I felt excitement stirring. Like the moment before meeting someone you've
long admired from afar, and suddenly their eyes and yours are absorbed in
reflected gaze.
Thin rain and thick cloud gathered towards darkness as
I followed the smooth curved path for the final walk up to the monument.
The closing Indonesian sky had washed visitors away. I didn't want to look
up to the high terraces until I felt equal to what might come. I had avoided
seeing pictures beforehand, knowing only that the complex was thought to be
an interpretation of the Ratu Boko inscription (792 ce):
'I pay homage to the Cosmic Mountain of the perfect Buddhas …
endowed with the awe-inspiring power of wisdom, whose profound
caves are knowledge, whose rock is excellent tradition, whose
brilliance is owing to its relic; the Good Word whose streams are love, whose
forests are meditation - truly
the Mount of Few Desires
which is not shaken by the eight horrible winds: the worldly qualities.'
What form would this place take? Unlike meeting a person, when rapport opens
its own doors, pilgrimage is a reflexive appointment with our deeper selves
and our highest aspirations. The challenge of Borobudur is immediate. Its
sculpted friezes are conceived as a stupa-mandala. They map out a mythic route
through several levels, with stone narration of the Jataka tales and the Buddha's
life unfolded across four successively higher-walled galleries until reaching
the fifth level - the apex of the monument itself - and its gateway to the
transcendental. Circumambulating you literally climb up.