I
Civets are small nocturnal mammals, roughly the size of domestic cats, with a distinctive gut. Their gut hosts a “secret” bacteria that helps digest fruits uniquely – breaking down the entire outer pulp, and only permeating the inside seed with enzymes and gastric juices, reducing the seed's acidity and bitterness while enhancing its aroma. When the fruit happens to be coffee cherries, and the wild animal has picked the ripest and the sweetest fruits from the forest for itself, about 24-hours of digestion in its gut will produce droppings of coffee seeds on the floor with a supposedly distinct aroma and sweetness. It’s sold as kopi luwak, one of the most expensive coffees in the world. Capitalism subsequently did what it does to exquisite products – leading to force-fed caged civets excreting beans that are commonplace in Indonesian airports and usually come with don’t-buy recommendations from travelers. I could find several boxes of ‘authentic’ kopi luwak each with different claims and price tags, and decided that I am doing just fine in life with my regular morning coffee.
Converting poop into coffee is a strange human endeavor, and the credit of its discovery goes to the human desire for accessing the forbidden. Coffee was introduced in the 19th century as a cash crop for plantations in Java and Sumatra by the Dutch, who controlled the Indonesian archipelago for roughly 350 years. Dutch plantation owners strictly forbade native workers from picking the cherries for their own use. Driven by curiosity and a desire for the “forbidden” drink, local farmers noticed that wild civets (luwaks) would eat the ripest coffee cherries but excrete the beans intact. They collected excreted beans, cleaned and brewed them. When the plantation owners tasted this significantly smoother and less bitter coffee, it soon became a highly prized, expensive delicacy among the elite.
II
Indonesia is a land tough to fathom. It’s the largest country in the world made entirely of islands – an archipelagic state. There are over 17,000 islands in Indonesia, with the largest ones being New Guinea (western half belongs to Indonesia), Borneo (shared with other countries), Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Java. The capital city of Jakarta is located in Java, the most densely populated island in the world. The number of people living in Jakarta metropolitan area is roughly the same as the entire population of Canada, or 1.5 times the entire population of Australia. It’s infamous for its traffic, though the city’s infrastructure has improved significantly with the country’s growth (Indonesia is one of the wealthier economies in Southeast Asia), and for me, commuting in elegant BYD cars amidst the imposing cityscapes feels like a privilege.
The term Jakarta evolves from ‘Jayakarta’, a 16th century name of the city. Jayakarta is a Sanskrit term (for victorious), bestowed on the city by Fatahillah, a Muslim military commander, who defeated a Hindu Sunda Kingdom. The lines between language, religion, conquests, and the modern state of Indonesia are challenging to understand from the perspective of clean lines drawn in the modern politics of India, the country I come from. But perhaps the modern lines are the strange ones. Hinduism and Islam in their older forms, on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, were less centralized, more local, and more porous than they are today. Both have narrowed into the national, textual, hyper-masculine versions we know now: small gods and local saints and Sufi dargahs giving way to a standardized faith convenient in politics. A Sanskrit name bestowed by a Muslim commander on a former Hindu capital belongs to a religious world that existed before this narrowing.
The hotel I am staying at in Jakarta features two exquisitely woodcarved panels in the lobby, one portraying Ramayana stories in intricate detail, the other Mahabharata scenes replete with chariot battles and the moment when the Bhagavad Gita is delivered on the battlefield. Just these two panels carry a Hindu visual culture that is refined and heightened, a religion that took deep root in this country and grew its own flavor. The epic stories from Hinduism remain famous in Indonesia, and are the bedrock of their traditional wayang puppetry. Juxtaposed against this imagery, in the same lobby, is a Ramadan Oasis, a beautiful decor with colorful fanous lanterns hanging over a wooden camel and desert hut, to welcome guests for iftar. The city is in its most reflective and spiritual phase in the final days of Ramadan when I arrive – Indonesia is also the country that hosts the largest Muslim population in the world. I stand for a long moment between the panels and the lanterns, working out where I am: Hindu epics carved in wood on the walls, an iftar oasis at the centre of the floor, and a country with the world’s largest Muslim population going about its evening. Amidst the fantastic hospitality of Southeast Asia, this juxtaposition seems effortless, however strange to me.
Hindu and Buddhist ideas came to Indonesia from Indian merchants, who shifted their focus from the West to the “lands of gold” in the east after the Roman Empire fell in the 5th and 6th centuries. On the map, the most direct sea route between India and China goes through the Strait of Malacca, the ultimate choke point for global trade (more strategic than Hormuz, with roughly a quarter of all globally traded goods passing through it). The strait has been controlled variously from the lands of Sumatra on its west, Malay Peninsula on its right, and Java in the south, and the riches passing through saw the rise and fall of kingdoms often more prosperous than those around the Mediterranean. The Srivijaya kingdom (7th-11th century) was one of the early ones to prosper out of Sumatra, and became a global center for Buddhist learning. Then came the Majapahit (13th-16th century) in East Java, a Hindu-Buddhist empire that unified much of the modern Indonesian archipelago for the first time. Islam spread through the archipelago over these same centuries, carried by traders from Gujarat and the Arab world, and Sultanates rose as the Majapahit declined. The Dutch arrived in the early 1600s and left only in 1945. The Sanskrit-based courtly cultures of those thousand years produced some of the greatest achievements of Indian thought outside India: Borobudur, the largest and most philosophically complex Buddhist structure in the world, and Prambanan, a Hindu complex with Ramayana reliefs that are more complete and better preserved than any found in India today. I got a chance to visit Borobudur, which attracts around 1.4 million visitors a year, with foreign tourists surprisingly making up only about a tenth of that.
III
Borobudur was built around a natural hill in Magelang and dates to 9th century. This was the period of Shailendra dynasty (Sanskrit meaning “King of the Mountain”) that ruled Java and is associated with a cultural renaissance in the region. To get to the temple, I fly into Yogyakarta (another Sanskrit-derived name from Ayodhya, Rama’s capital in the Ramayana, joined with karta, or “accomplished”). Yogyakarta is situated in the southern part of the island of Java, and technically the only royal city in Indonesia still ruled by a monarchy. It has a surprisingly beautiful airport, with hallways and gate areas decorated in intricate Batik Kawung motifs on the ceilings and walls. The corridors are an art gallery in themselves, and most of the interior structure has a wood or bamboo-texture, and terracotta-style tiles. Every gate is a Gapura, a welcoming symbol of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms. The city is the heart of Javanese fine arts and culture, and the origin of globally popular batik textiles. It’s also the centre of Indonesian education. The ‘university town’ feel of Yogyakarta is apparent as I drive north to Magelang: there are photo copy and printing shops, establishments for laptop repair, billboards advertising scholarships and even notary services, and several fast food joints. As the vehicle moves farther out towards Magelang, the landscape changes into lush green paddy fields, and winding roads through canopies of banana, palms, and teakwood. Java has incredibly rich, volcanic soil that allowed for massive rice production. This surplus food supported a much larger population than other islands, providing the “manpower” needed for the vast armies and monumental construction projects like Borobudur.
As we drive further north, the massive silhouette of Mount Merapi looms to the right. This is one of the world’s most active volcanoes, and is the “source” of the fertility – the ash from its frequent eruptions is why the paddy fields stay so impossibly green. The vehicle also crosses several wide, rocky riverbeds (like the Progo or Elo rivers) which are apparently “lahar” paths that form the channels for volcanic mudflows. Locals still manually collect sand and stones for construction from these rivers. About halfway between Yogyakarta and Magelang is the town of Muntilan where the roadside is lined with hundreds of small workshops. In them, craftsmen carve volcanic stone into statues, stupas, and pestles – a living link to the stonemasons who probably built Borobudur.
IV
I am staying at Manohara, the only accommodation located inside the Borobudur Temple complex. The Sanskrit word Manohara literally translates to “stealer of the heart”, and the accommodation perhaps is named after the story of Manohara, one of the most famous Buddhist tales. Stories in Buddhism are called Jataka tales (Sanskrit for “birth stories”) and they are legends detailing the previous lives of Siddhartha Gautama before he became the Buddha. The more of the Jataka tales I encounter (primarily in Southeast Asia), the more I start seeing how much geography and characters are shared across Buddhism and Hinduism, apparently two very different religions of the world. Buddhism did emerge within the same cultural landscape as early Hinduism and shares the same spiritual vocabulary. Place names like Panchala, Hastinapur, and Ayodhya are common across Buddhist and Hindu tales, and Sanskrit serves as the common substrate for culture.
That evening, I walk to the restaurant at the rear side of Manohara, and stop. Across the lawn, half-hidden by the late afternoon trees, sits the most beautiful stone structure I have ever seen: a dark, stepped pyramid sitting on its hill the way a mountain sits on the earth, absolutely there.
Borobudur temple is an imposing pyramidal structure built using almost 2 million blocks of gray volcanic stone. The square base of the temple can fit two full-sized soccer fields side-by-side with room to spare, and at 35m high, it rises to about 10 floors of a modern building. The structure is a massive Lego-like puzzle, with stones that were laid without a single drop of mortar and fitted together using intricate “knobs” and “dovetail” joints. The mortar-free masonry allows the entire structure to flex slightly during earthquakes, critical for a seismically active region like Java. When viewed from above, the entire structure is a mathematically precise Tantric Buddhist Mandala, representing a cosmic map of the universe. There are about 100 gargoyles, a sophisticated drainage system for tropical rains, each carved to look like a dragon. And that’s just the engineering.
My ascent begins at four in the morning. We are given thin sandals that feel like rubber, designed to softly tread the stones that have withstood the weight of prayers and hopes for centuries. A line of small flashlights threads up through the dark garden to the eastern stairway. A faint call to prayer drifts up from a village somewhere below, carried by the mist. We climb in silence.
As the first light reaches the corridors, the details become clearer, and immediately overwhelm the senses. The builders of the temple essentially “wrapped” a hill in stone and then carved it. The temple features over 2,600 relief panels narrating four Buddhist textual cycles, including the Jataka tales of the Buddha’s previous lives, and 504 Buddha statues: a mind-boggling number of fine art installations that are essentially rock carvings done at the level of finesse and detailing of a wall painting. The monument consists of nine stacked platforms and a visitor walks through galleries making her way up to each. The walk up represents progressive realms of enlightenment. One starts at the lower realm - Kamadhatu, or the realm of desire depicting humans entangled in the cycle of samsara and the law of karma. The second one is Rupadhatu, or the realm of forms. To me, the five Rupadhatu terraces are the most beautifully carved, symbolizing the stage where one has abandoned desires but is still bound by physical forms and names. These are narrow corridors lined with hundreds of relief panels and more than 400 Buddha statues in different mudras (hand gestures) housed in decorative niches. Then comes the top level, Arupadhatu, or the realm of formlessness. These are circular platforms strikingly plain compared to the levels below. They have no narrative reliefs here, a detachment from the physical world. This level features 72 perforated bell-shaped stupas, each containing a seated Buddha statue. The visitor’s journey is clockwise to ascend each level, walking through nearly 5 kilometers of corridors, and symbolically spiraling upward from the everyday world toward the final state of Nirvana, represented by the empty, formless central stupa at the very peak. The architecture “thins out” as one reaches enlightenment.
I give up on clicking pictures of the panels, overwhelmed and saturated. It’s probably a hidden lesson about the nature of beauty. I start listening more intently to the guide. His hands, wrinkled and experienced, darkened by years of tropical sun, point at the clever stone joints, then to the history of the UNESCO restoration of the monument, and then to the stories of the largest panels, which he narrates with care. These are stories from my own childhood, which traveled from India to Java, amalgamating with Hinduism and Buddhism and conquests and rituals, while communicating the same essence of life. It isn’t lost on me that my guide is a Muslim, who takes pride in this monument and its beautiful stories etched in stone over a thousand years. I chat with him more, and get to know his life story: his Umrah of 2015 to another great site in the world, and where he hopes to return for Haj in 2027 if he manages to save enough money. “I want to die happily,” he says. “Most people want to live happily. For me, this life is only a process. To get to the next one.” I marvel at the core of every religion that gives hope and meaning to human life, and simultaneously serves as a tool for political organization.
I sit near one of the “open Buddha” statues, one of the few open ones among the 72 enclosed statues at the top level where the outer stupas were damaged over centuries. This is the Buddha turning the wheel of Dharma. I look out at the horizons. Mount Merapi is visible, with its fiery interiors that have periodically deposited layers of volcanic ash and debris on this island over the years. A little to the right is the silhouette of the Menoreh Hills, its jagged ridgeline resembling a reclining person, who, according to a local myth, is Gunadharma, the architect of Borobudur who laid down to rest after finishing the massive task of building the temple.
I feel my breath in the early misty island air, and an unbearable lightness in my soul. My physical body is surrounded by nothing but stones designed to be empty. The place feels like a void, not of the melancholic type, but one that dissolves everything into it, marking everything that constitutes consciousness as irrelevant. There is no pride, privilege, ambition, or want in this space and time. I am far from Nirvana, but in these fleeting moments of almost meditative trance, I carefully note the last remnants of the physical world that appear in my mind. And I later reflect that these remnants were only the simplest things of absolute beauty: the sun rising behind the slopes of Merapi, its golden glow across the stupas, the fog in the valley below, birds waking up and darting through the sky, and a smile on my face that didn't signify anything other than ‘being’.
It’s time to descend. I walk down in silence through the same platforms in reverse, the realms of formlessness, form, and desire arriving in sequence as the sun gathers strength. Halfway down I look back at the central stupa, smaller now from below, an empty bell against a clearing sky. The architects had thought of this view too. The descent is part of the design. You return to the world of desire knowing what is at the top, and what is at the top is nothing.
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