Building of Borobudur

No foundation inscription survives, and the date rests on indirect evidence. Jacques Dumarçay distinguished about five building stages: the Shailendras began the work around 780, continued it around 792 and again during their decline around 824, and the fifth stage, completed around 833, is attributed to the Sanjaya line. The Karangtengah inscription of 824 mentions a sacred building called Jinalaya, and the Tri Tepusan inscription of 842 an endowment for a ‘Kamulan Bhumisambhara’; J. G. de Casparis proposed that Bhumisambhara — ‘mountain of the combined virtues of the ten stages of the bodhisattva’ — was the monument’s original name. George Coedès, judging by the script of the short inscriptions on its hidden base, had placed it no earlier than the mid-9th century.

Pilgrims climbed clockwise past reliefs of the life and former lives of the Buddha and of Mahayana texts to three circular terraces with 72 perforated stupas, each enclosing a seated Buddha. The original base, with 160 panels on the law of cause and effect and short instructions for the sculptors, was later encased by an additional base — for structural or religious reasons, scholars debate — and uncovered by chance in 1885. Borobudur was probably abandoned in the 10th–11th centuries, when the court moved to East Java; it came to European attention in 1814 under Thomas Stamford Raffles, was restored by Indonesia and UNESCO in 1975–1982 and became a World Heritage Site in 1991.