BOROBODUR
Rulers of the Sailendra dynasty built the clossal pyramid of Borobodur sometimes between 750 and 850 AD. Little else is know about Borobodur's early history but the Sailendras must have recruited a huge workforce, for some 60,000 cubic meters of stone had to be hewn, transported and carved during its construction. The name Borobodur is possibly derived from the Sanskrit words 'Vihara Buddha Uhr', which means the 'Buddhist monument on the hill.   With the decline of Buddhism and the shift of power to East Java, Borobodur was abandoned soon after completion, and for centuries lay forgotten, buried under layers of volcanic ashes, until 1825 when Raffles governed Java.   Borobodur is built in the form of a massive symmetrical stupa. Six squares terraces are topped by three circular ones, with four stairways leading up through finely carved gateways to the top. Viewed from the air, the whole thing looks like a giant three dimensional tantric mandala. It has been suggested, in fact, that the Buddhist community that once supported Borobodur were early Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhists who used it as a walk-through mandala.   The entire monument was conceived as a Buddhist vision of the cosmos in stone, starting in the everyday world and spiraling up to nirvana-eternal nothingness, the Buddhist heaven. At the base of the monument is a series of relief representing a world dominated by passion and desire, where the good are rewarded by reincarnation as some higher form of life and the evil are punished by a lowlier reincarnation. The pilgrim's walk is about 5km long, past nearly 1460 richly decorated narrative panels. Some 432 serene-faced Buddha images stare out from open chambers above the galeries, while some 72 more Buddha images sit only partly visible in latticed stupas on the top of the three terraces.