I decided to continue last year's pilgrimage series and now I set out to visit Borobudur on the island of Java in Indonesia. In the summer of 2024, I spent a month in Tibet and did 7 aras, walking 400 km around the most sacred mountain of 4 religions, Kailash, at an altitude of between 4,700 and 5,700 m above sea level. In November, I went through the 8 most important pilgrimage sites of Buddhism in Nepal and India related to the life of Buddha. Lumbini-Kushinagar-Vaishali-Rajgir-BodhGaya-Sarnath-Sunkissa-Sravasti.
The location of Borobudur is interesting, geographically it is quite south of the central places of the Buddhist world. Buddha never visited the island of Java.
There was once a Sailendra dynasty that built the Borobudur temple in its heyday in the 8th century, perhaps inspired by the activities of King Ashoka a thousand years before the Sailendra dynasty in the 3rd century BC... The structure of Borobudur is actually a pyramid, a large stupa. There are no passages inside, only a huge filling. It is not known whether there are any relics inside. Nevertheless, the structure is a breathtaking construction, based on its size it is the largest temple in the world and the largest building of Buddhism. The brochures say it was built from 2 million volcanic stone blocks in the 8th century, with millions of cubic meters of soil filling underneath. The stones are carved with events from the life of Buddha, making it an impressive sight.
The structure housed 504 Buddha statues, but unfortunately more than half of them had their heads stolen by enthusiastic visitors. Barely 20 km away is the Merapi volcano, which is Indonesia's most active volcano. The volcanic eruptions are responsible for the fact that the place was depopulated several times in the 10th-15th centuries due to eruptions. It was during such a depopulated period that the heads were most likely removed and taken away. It is not known exactly when it was finally abandoned, but it was certainly abandoned in the 15th century and overgrown with primeval forest. It was rediscovered in the 19th century. They cleared away the thick layer of soil and the overgrown jungle trees and restored it as much as possible... unfortunately, the many missing Buddha heads could not be recovered.
What is most striking is the connection between the place and its surroundings. I went as a pilgrim myself, which is not the same as visitors. Pilgrims can go as believers early in the morning. The morning mist over the jungle, the light effect of the rising sun on the stones... this sight is indescribable. On April 9th, I bought a regular ticket and went through the temple with a guided group and then spent the whole day in the park.
I made arrangements with local organizers for April 10th and was able to enter as pilgrims with believers. Fortunately, there were very few of us. The staff respects the believers and treats us with humility, completely different from the large, noisy groups. Security guards are constantly present. It was a strange sight that the security guards came up with me as I did the koras on each level and counted the laps for me. All this without a sound because the immersion during the mantra should not be disturbed, but sometimes one really gets so immersed that I really don't know what age I am. With each round, I looked at the fingers he showed and saw where I was.
Based on Rinpoche's instructions, I did 3 koras both up and down on each level of the structure, while chanting Guru Rinpoche's mantra and the Heart Sutra mantra. There are 9 levels, going from the bottom up, it also symbolizes the rise of the spiritual level with enlightenment at the top. 3 koras up per level, 3 koras down per level, a total of 54 koras. According to my phone's pedometer, this is about 15 kilometers... Since you can't go up the structure in shoes, they give you slippers, but try walking 15 km in such slippers on the irregular and moving stones... I took off my slippers, but the volcanic stones are rough and wear out the skin on your feet. The stones on the top 3 levels are smooth, but on the lower 6 levels they are rough. So I did half of it in slippers, half barefoot and completed the 54 koras according to Rinpoche's instructions. After that I walked back to the hotel for another 3 km but due to the condition of my feet I don't know how I managed to do this distance, maybe Guru Rinpoche's mantra put me in a levitating position...
What was very interesting to me was the play of the stones... or maybe the play of the local spirits? The floor stones of the building's levels are of different sizes and most of them move when you step on them. As I walk in silence, the moving stones make a unique sound of the sound of stones hitting and rubbing against each other. Barefoot, there is no friction of shoe soles, only the sound of the stones moving out and back... but what was interesting was that "someone came behind me" all the time... which was probably an echo of the silent walls... I had to keep looking back because apart from my own footsteps it was as if someone was following me a few meters behind me... but there was no one there... When the place is opened to tourists during the day, you can't perceive such things because people are noisy. But this way, in the silence, I could hear it clearly. It could probably be a kind of delayed echo of the walls and you could hear it back in the silence.
It's worth going with a tour guide because you can talk to the guide who will tell you things you wouldn't know otherwise, for example, that after the eruption of Merapi 14 years ago, more than ten centimeters of ash covered the Borobudur temple and it took weeks to clean it up... By the way, Indonesia's population is 95% Muslim, and loudspeakers are placed in many places in the park around the temple and they regularly (maybe every 4 hours) start up and broadcast the Muslim prayer... which no one has any problem with anyway.
After 54 o'clock I stayed in the park until early afternoon... only then I trudged back to the hotel where I immediately fell asleep and slept for 2 hours. The prices here are cheap. I had already planned the trip so that I got a flight ticket of around USD 300, although not a direct flight but at least cheap. On the evening of April 7th I flew from Hong Kong to Singapore where there was a 9-hour wait and on the morning of the 8th the next flight went to Yogyakarta, which is the closest airport to Borobudur. It's an hour and a half taxi ride from Yogyakarta airport to Borobudur temple. A one and a half hour taxi costs about USD 15. There are many hotels starting from USD 2... I booked the hotel so that the hotel would be next to the entrance to the church park... but in the meantime they moved the main entrance to the other side so instead of a hundred meters the park entrance is about 3 km away but at least I walk more this way. Nice quiet little bungalow-like hotel, with a nice little family-like inner garden, USD 20 including breakfast.
The entrance fee to the park with a guided tour is around IDR 455,000 (USD 30). Pilgrims do not have an entrance fee, but the "manager" has to pay IDR 300,000 (USD 18.75). No matter how I calculate it, the total budget is definitely under USD 500. In Hong Kong, this is less than HKD 4,000. If I look at it this way, the bill for 4 people in an inexpensive restaurant is HKD 1,500-2,000, then I can calculate that for the price of 2-3 dinners in Hong Kong, I can come to Indonesia for 5 days... It's true, my wife cooks hot food at least twice a day, so we only go to restaurants when we have important guests or when there is an event. On the other hand, health is the first thing now, so we have switched to a unique diet and sourcing ingredients is very important, so we prefer to cook at home with safe ingredients.
Here in Indonesia, at least around Borobudur, I see the dried noodles in bags everywhere, they make food from them. Yesterday I ate in a very nice and good restaurant in the park, but by the time I got home, my stomach was really upset and I threw up what I had in me. Afterwards I felt much better, I was able to sleep and in the late afternoon I ate a big durian that the receptionist got me. Basically, I only ate fruit from the beginning. In China or Hong Kong, such a durian costs about USD 40-50, here it is USD 3.75.
Do I need coffee or not??? Do I take caffeine pills...? Anyway, I think coffee grounds like this are quite natural... Here in Indonesia there is another interesting thing called "cat-shit-coffee" I swear I can't translate it better (I'm translating it back from Chinese to Hungarian). There is a type of civet cat here that eats coffee fruit in nature. They round up the unfortunate ones, breed them I think, keep them in cages and feed them coffee. Their droppings are carefully collected and coffee is made from them. This is very expensive coffee and supposedly very delicious. We've had this before and we still have it at home in Hong Kong, but it's the same coffee, brewed into grounds as what's on my table now that I'm sipping while writing... or maybe I'm not an expert enough for it...
Coffee is also very good here. Coffee is grown in Indonesia, they have delicious coffee. When it comes to safe eating, coffee is also important. Here they put the ground coffee in hot water and there is a thick layer of grounds at the bottom of the cup... in fact, this is real natural coffee. They say we shouldn't drink coffee because it's acidic... well, that's also an aspect, but if we consider that eating a lot of salad increases the amount of heavy metals in us, such as the radioactive strontium 90 isotope... which is bound by 1-3-7 trimethylxanthine... more commonly known as caffeine... then what's the matter..???
Indonesia is interesting, special, beautiful, diverse... I could write a lot more about it. Tomorrow I'm going home to Hong Kong.
