Story World Research at Borobudur and Prambanan
It was late evening when my plane landed in Yogyakarta. A black cloud followed me. My visa extension was in jeopardy and the global markets were crashing. A feeling of déjà vu came over me. I was about to embark on a temple marathon with my new host.
We would see Borobudur and Prambanan in a single day. Could we do it? This was one of the main reasons I had returned to Indonesia since Covid, but the madness continued to haunt me. Buying tickets to the temples was crazy. It was like winning the lottery just being able to buy a ticket. It only got worse when you wanted to climb Borobudur itself. Having my ticket scanned at the entrances to the temples annoyed me. The mobs of tourists had turned Borobudur into a seething tourist trap. It was worse than Angkor Wat or Bagan.
Why had I even bothered to come?
For centuries, Borobudur and Prambanan had been buried by volcanic ash and jungle overgrowth. They were the key to Southeast Asia’s Hindu and Buddhist past. Borobuder was a mixture of indigenous ancestor worship and the Buddhist concept of enlightenment. The result was religious fusion at its finest. A Buddhist pyramid temple was the result. It was a breathtaking achievement. Not only was a three-dimensional mandala staring me in the face, but also a Netflix movie in stone depicting ancient Javanese life with an all-star cast of kings, monks, saints, householders, gods, demons, angels, and even mystical creatures. It also included the Buddah’s past lives as a king, outcast, god, and even an occasional animal.
You scaled the physical temple and delved deeper into your mind simultaneously. If you were lucky, you might even get enlightened. My host and I in the morning had sped off searching for a working ATM. It felt like a dream. But it could have been worse. Borobudur had suffered from earthquakes, looting, and terrorist attacks.
Cosmological gamelan sounds entered my head and clashed with samsaric Jim Morrison lyrics:
“Well, the clock says it’s time to close, now and I guess, I’d better go now….
Jim blared in my head as the energies intensified.
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"My brain feels bruised with numb surprise."
He droned on and on.
"Speaking secret alphabets."
The climax was coming.
"I wanna sleep all night in your soul kitchen.”
My host and I spent so much time blabbing at a restaurant that we almost missed seeing Prambanan. We raced to the temples before they closed, but it was worth it. We had arrived at a series of stone Himalayas built in the tropics overlooking an angry volcano. Mount Merapi. I shuddered. Here was the place where the Hindu gods performed their task of organizing the harmony of the universe.
BLING.
It was like watching a cable TV series about lost civilizations. The three great Hindu gods were honored here. Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. The Ramayana was carved in stone here. It was time to enjoy another masala movie. Giant kings, ghosts, temple dancers, priests, and cursed princesses were all featured in this stone spectacle. Even Durga, the queen of creation and destruction got some respect. As in Borobudur, the secret guardians protected the temples from all four directions. There was something ancient here that the West could not grasp, let alone understand. The world was not just a physical kind of geology and ecology. It was also a psychic one and the two were connected. Could one successfully tune into this bigger bandwidth? I thought about this deeper reality as I circumambulated around the sacred temple.
BLING.
Night fell and I had little time to think about this bold vision. I was preparing for a final journey through time that would take me back tens of thousands of years to the island of Sulawesi. An exhilarating climax was imminent and the stakes could not have been higher.
