Borobudur: The World's Largest Buddhist Temple

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 4 June 2026 · Updated 12 November 2026

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Borobudur is a Buddhist temple: a Mahayana Buddhist monument in Central Java, Indonesia, built in the 8th and 9th centuries under the Shailendra (Syailendra) dynasty. UNESCO calls it “one of the greatest Buddhist monuments in the world”. It is not a Hindu temple (the great Hindu temple compound of the region is Prambanan), and Indonesian Buddhists still gather there every year for Vesak.

Architecturally it is known for its stepped form: built on several levels around a natural hill, it rises through five square terraces above its base to three circular platforms ringed by 72 openwork stupas, each containing a statue of the Buddha, and is crowned by a main stupa, with reliefs carved on its base and on the balustrades of its square terraces. ICOMOS calls it “a harmonious marriage of stupas, temple-mountain and the ritual diagram” (its French text names that diagram: mandala), and Eiji Hattori, writing in the UNESCO Courier in 1994, reads it as “both a stupa and a mandala”; Guinness World Records lists it as the largest Buddhist temple in the world. Pilgrims walk it clockwise and upward, from the world of desire toward awakening.

What is the Borobudur temple in Java?

Borobudur (Indonesian: Candi Borobudur) is a vast stepped pyramid of dark volcanic stone near Yogyakarta in Central Java. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica it was “constructed between about 778 and 850 CE, under the Shailendra dynasty.” It belongs to the Mahayana tradition, and it is built as a three-dimensional mandala: nine platforms — six square below, three circular above — crowned by a single great central stupa. 84000’s introduction to the Gaṇḍavyūha counts 504 statues and 2,672 carved panels; the upper terraces hold 72 latticed stupas, each sheltering a seated Buddha (UNESCO). Pilgrims circumambulate it clockwise, climbing while “reading” the carvings — a journey, in stone, through the three realms of Buddhist cosmology toward liberation.

Which religion is Borobudur associated with?

Buddhism, and specifically Mahayana Buddhism. UNESCO’s World Heritage listing calls it “This famous Buddhist temple, dating from the 8th and 9th centuries”, and Eiji Hattori, writing in the UNESCO Courier, says the Shailendra rulers who built it “converted to Mahayana Buddhism”. Its galleries illustrate Mahayana sūtras such as the Gaṇḍavyūha.

It is not a Hindu temple. The great Hindu monument of the region is Prambanan, which UNESCO calls “the largest temple compound dedicated to Shiva in Indonesia”; when Borobudur was nominated, the 1991 ICOMOS evaluation records, Prambanan, “itself worthy of inscription”, was nominated separately. Nor is it a relic of a vanished faith. In 2010 Indonesia had more Muslims than any other country (about 209 million, by the Pew Research Center’s count), but Borobudur is still where Indonesian Buddhists gather each year for Vesak.

A monument built as a mandala

Most Buddhist temples are buildings you enter. Borobudur is a diagram you climb. In plan it reads as a mandala, the symbolic map of the cosmos found in Mahayana and Vajrayana art: squares below, circles above, all organised around one central stupa. Hattori, who calls it “a perfect illustration of the mandala concept”, points out that it is not a temple in the usual sense, since “it has no place for worship nor for making offerings”, and that the central stupa “contains nothing”. Instead the entire mountain of stone is the teaching, and you experience it by moving through it with your body.

Its three vertical zones correspond to the three realms (dhatu) of Buddhist cosmology. UNESCO’s statement puts it plainly: “the kamadhatu is represented by the base, the rupadhatu by the five square terraces, and the arupadhatu by the three circular platforms as well as the big stupa.”

• Kamadhatu, the world of desire, at the hidden base: in UNESCO’s words, “the sphere of desires where we are bound to our desires”. This is the world of ordinary craving and consequence.
• Rupadhatu, the world of form, the square terraces above: “the sphere of forms where we abandon our desires but are still bound to name and form” (UNESCO). Here the galleries narrate the life of the Buddha and his former lives; Britannica notes the reliefs depict “events in the life of the Gautama Buddha and scenes from the Jatakas (stories of his previous lives).”
• Arupadhatu, the formless realm, the open circular terraces near the summit: “the sphere of formlessness where there is no longer either name or form” (UNESCO). Here, Britannica observes, “there is little decoration”; the carved stories fall away, and only the bell-shaped stupas and the sky remain.

To ascend is to rehearse the path itself: leaving desire, passing through the disciplined world of form, and arriving at a spareness beyond images. The architecture teaches by being walked.

The sources agree that Borobudur is Mahayana; they read its plan differently. UNESCO’s listing speaks of “ten superimposing terraces” and says they “correspond to the successive stages that the Bodhisattva has to achieve before attaining to Buddhahood”, a reading Hattori credits to the scholar J. G. de Casparis, who counted the central stupa as a tenth terrace. Hattori himself compares the monument with the esoteric Buddhism that Kūkai brought home to Japan in 806, and asks whether it is a monument of esoteric Mahayana: “I cannot say so categorically, but I am profoundly convinced that it is.” Whether Borobudur also reflects the esoteric, Vajrayana-style Buddhism of its time is an open question, not a settled fact.

What you see as you climb

Borobudur is meant to be experienced as a clockwise pilgrimage (pradakshina), keeping the monument always on your right, spiralling upward terrace by terrace. As you go, the reliefs unfold like the pages of an enormous stone book.

The hidden foot: the law of karma

At the very base, a heavy stone encasement covers the original foot and its 160 reliefs, discovered in 1885. 84000’s introduction to the Karmavibhaṅga (The Exposition of Karma), a text on the workings of karma, says this “so-called hidden base” features “reliefs depicting stories from the Karmavibhaṅga that illustrate the law of karma”, showing the fruits of wholesome and unwholesome action. Hattori thinks the encasement was “probably built to shore up the monument during its construction”. Because it still hides most of the reliefs, they are usually seen in the photographs taken soon after their discovery. They set the moral ground floor of the whole journey: actions have consequences.

The galleries: the Buddha’s life and the bodhisattva’s quest

Climbing into the square terraces, the panels turn to the life of the Buddha. One series draws on the Lalitavistara (The Play in Full), which 84000’s translators summarise as the story of the Buddha’s birth and youth, his renunciation, his awakening under the Bodhi tree and “his first turning of the wheel of Dharma”; their introduction notes that at Borobudur “this sūtra provided inspiration for the elaborate artwork adorning sections of the temple structures.” Other long sequences carve the Jataka tales, stories of the Buddha’s past lives.

The upper galleries are given to the Gandavyuha, the climactic section of the Avatamsaka (Flower Garland) Sutra, which follows the young pilgrim Sudhana as he journeys from teacher to teacher in search of awakening. 84000’s introduction to its translation of the sūtra says the third and fourth galleries “are entirely dedicated to the Gaṇḍavyūha, with 460 panels illustrating the sūtra”, and suggests that the builders, inspired by its account of Maitreya’s kūṭāgāra, “were also trying to create an edifice that embodied enlightenment.” Hattori counts some 1,300 reliefs along the galleries, besides the 160 on the hidden foot; 84000 gives 2,672 carved panels for the monument as a whole.

The summit: stupas, silence, and the formless

At the top the square galleries open onto three round terraces ringed by 72 perforated, bell-shaped stupas, each enclosing a seated Buddha glimpsed through the stone latticework. They surround one great central stupa, the still point of the whole design. After the crowded storytelling below, the summit is deliberately bare — an architectural image of arupadhatu, the formless. Here the “reading” ends and only seeing, and stillness, remain. (For why the stupa form carries this weight, see our guide to stupas and pagodas.)

Across the monument there are about 504 Buddha images in total: 432 seated in open niches along the square terraces, and the 72 within the summit stupas. Hattori notes that the 72 Buddhas inside the summit stupas all share one hand gesture (mudra): “that of the perpetually-moving wheel of the Law”.

Why Borobudur matters in the story of Buddhism

Borobudur shows how far Buddhism had travelled by the 8th and 9th centuries. Hattori places it in the sea trade of the “maritime Silk Road” that linked India, Sri Lanka, Java and China, and describes the “prosperous Sailendra” rulers who raised it with “Thousands of labourers, craftsmen and artists”. UNESCO calls the Borobudur compounds “one of the greatest Buddhist monuments in the world,” and the temple stands as a landmark in the long history of how Buddhism spread across Asia.

Its scale is easier to state than to picture. Guinness World Records puts its stone at 60,000 cubic metres and its height at 34.5 m; Hattori describes a square base “with sides measuring some 120 metres”, built of andesite, “a bluish-grey volcanic rock”, on the top of a hill. It was built not as a tomb or a treasury but as a teaching: a structure meant to carry pilgrims, step by carved step, through a vision of the path to awakening.

It is also a reminder that the heart of Buddhist Asia has not always sat where it sits today. Borobudur endures as a UNESCO World Heritage Site that, in UNESCO’s words, “could be used as a Buddhist pilgrimage site”, and, as the Vesak procession described below shows, Indonesian Buddhists still use it as one.

Loss, burial, and rediscovery

For reasons scholars still debate, Borobudur was eventually abandoned, and the sources do not agree on when. The 1991 ICOMOS evaluation says “Abandoned around the year 1000”; Britannica records that “it was buried under volcanic ash from about 1000”; UNESCO’s own statement says it was used as a Buddhist temple “until sometime between the 10th and 15th centuries when it was abandoned.” Hattori notes that the dynasty turned its attention to the east of the island in the 10th century, and asks whether an eruption of Mount Merapi was the cause. The volcano is still a risk: UNESCO counts its acidic ash, “as happened in 2010”, among the threats to the site. Exactly why and how completely Borobudur fell silent is not settled history, and honest accounts present it as an open question rather than a single tidy cause.

It returned to wider attention in 1814, during the brief period of British rule in Java, when it was found, Hattori writes, “by an agent sent out by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, at that time the British governor of Java”; Raffles had the site cleared of rubble and vegetation. In 1885 the hidden foot and its reliefs were discovered behind the encasement at the base.

Restoration and Borobudur today

Centuries of weather, weight, and tropical growth had left the structure unstable. Two major restorations followed:

• A Dutch restoration in 1907–11 under Theodoor van Erp, who, in Hattori’s summary, “dismantles and rebuilds the three circular terraces and the stupas”.
• A far larger campaign carried out with UNESCO’s help. UNESCO launched an international appeal in 1972; Hattori dates the restoration work to 1975–82 (ICOMOS gives 1973–82), and its completion was marked on 23 February 1983. Hattori writes that twenty-seven countries “worked with UNESCO and Indonesian experts to move a million stones over a ten-year period”, at a total cost of $20 million, two-thirds of it from the Indonesian government. UNESCO notes that “Mostly original materials were used with some additions to consolidate the monument and ensure proper drainage”.

In 1991 the Borobudur Temple Compounds — Borobudur together with the nearby temples of Pawon and Mendut, which lie on a straight line with it — were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

On 21 January 1985 bombs placed inside stupas on its upper terraces damaged nine of them. A 2019 study in the Journal of Indonesian History records that all nine held Buddha statues, two of which were too shattered to be reconstructed, and that the attack led to further restoration and tighter security at the site.

Borobudur is not only a museum-piece. It is a living pilgrimage site, most vividly at Vesak (in Indonesia, Waisak), the festival of the Buddha’s birth, awakening and death. Central Java’s provincial tourism office describes the day: “From Mendut Temple, Pawon Temple, to Borobudur, thousands of monks, devotees, and visitors join the sacred procession, culminating in the release of lanterns as a symbol of prayers, hopes, and peace for the universe.” The monument’s operator calls the roughly three-kilometre procession from Mendut “an annual tradition”. In 2026, The Jakarta Post reported, around 25,000 Buddhists took part in the celebration, which marked the year 2570 of the Buddhist Era and ended at night with the release of 2,570 lanterns. After more than a thousand years, people still climb Borobudur the way it was built to be climbed: slowly, clockwise, and upward.

A note on the numbers: counts of Borobudur’s panels, statues and terraces differ from source to source, depending on what is included and on damage over the centuries. UNESCO gives the 72 openwork stupas and about 2,500 square metres of relief, and speaks of ten terraces; Eiji Hattori counts nine levels, 504 Buddhas (432 in niches and 72 in the summit stupas) and 160 hidden reliefs; 84000’s introduction to the Gaṇḍavyūha gives 504 statues and 2,672 carved panels. Where a precise figure is uncertain, we have said “about.”