Meditations on movement

October 11, 2010

In front of Borobudur after our tour

           The traditional way to visit Borobudur, the 8^th century Buddhist stupa (and the largest Buddhist structure in the world) in a valley in Central Java, is to start at the bottom and walk around each of the ten levels three times, moving up one at a time, around and around past carvings representing the material world and telling Buddha’s life story and carvings about Buddhism’s spread throughout Asia and into Indonesia, up through the top four levels of Nirvana, no more carvings, just large stupas spread out over the four levels.

Carved faces from level one

            I make it through level three on Saturday, about 1 ½ times around, before I have to rejoin the rest of my family who were exploring other parts of the grounds, around levels one and two each three times, studying the carvings, walking quietly. Although the place is crowded, a premier tourist attraction domestically and internationally, walking through it in this way is peaceful, because most of the visitors don’t visit it that way. They walk through the beginning of Buddha’s life, then head up to the second level to see the only complete statue of Buddha (of the 128 statues in the stupa, some missing fingers, or heads, victims of 12 centuries of vandalism, jungle rot, and volcanic eruptions), and then to the top level, up the steep tall stairs. I walk around the first level, ducking through the crowd of German tourists, and around again, this time through the Thais, and around again, strolling for a few minutes just behind and then just ahead an American couple, the man loudly arguing with the tour guide about the origins and history of Buddhism. Aside from that, all I hear is the sound of rain lightly on my umbrella, the afternoon call to prayer from the area mosques, and the abdominal rumble of incipient GI distress (taken together, this is my Indonesian soundtrack). The views over the valley are beautiful, surrounded as we are by volcanos and other mountains on all sides. I have too much of a monkey mind to ever make it is a Buddhist, my attention continually focused on the shiny things I see from the corner of my eye, but I did find it meditative in any case.

Headless Buddhas

            We’d made it to Borobudur that morning on the bis paling pelan di Indonesia, the slowest bus in Indonesia, ascending and then descending the pass outside our house at a pace that would have allowed shopping and perhaps some hiking on our part, during the drive. For a while, to pass the time, we played the game “You don’t see that in Bozeman”: chickens crossing the highway, tobacco drying by the side of the road, gasoline being sold in small glass bottles, women balancing bunches of stuff on their heads, the Hotel Hooker, a sign at a police station that had an advertisement for cigarettes printed on it below the word “Police,” until it became too hard, since there was really nothing familiar out the window, except that which had already become familiar in our seven weeks here.

These pictures describe the progression of the stupa, a design taken from the leaf of the bodhi tree, which Buddha sat under when he achieved enlightenment. Bodhi trees are supposed to be present at Buddhist temples (though my guess is Buddha is pretty lax about this requirement). The carvings of the leaf and the tree are taken from reliefs showing the life of Buddha, and the stupas at the top replicate the shape of the leaf.

We ended up, fortuitiously, on the same bus on the way home the next day, only this time it was profoundly more crowded, an elderly ibu nearly sitting in my lap and my family close but not next to one another, obscured by the humanity in the aisle way of the smallish bus. Outside a market in Magelang, the bus driver got out, bought a pack of cigarettes to smoke on the drive up (it doesn’t matter where you are here: people are smoking there, even on the top of Borobudur) and then got back in the bus, pressed his foot to the accelerator, and the engine quit. We sat there as the driver and his helper tinkered with things and inexplicably pounded on the floor of the bus, and suddenly, after about ten minutes sitting on the very crowded bus, my children increasingly impatient (“How do you say, ‘What’s the matter?” Seamus asked me. “I could tell you, but I wouldn’t know what he answered,” I told him.), everyone just got off the bus. We were done on that bus, and when the next bus came about ten minutes later, while we stood a little dazed in the middle of a busy market, it was as crowded as ours, and still managed to accommodate about 2/3 of the people from our original bus. We decided against it and watched it drive away, a man hanging from door with his baby tied around his waist.

            This too was one of those wonderful travel moments, standing where you hadn’t planned to be with no real sense of how we would pull ourselves out of it. There was never any sense that we were in any trouble – at the very worst, our friends in Salatiga could have called for a car to come get us, for minimal cost, so it was a chance for small talk with strangers and some musing about how to solve the problem. I was delighted when a bus driver approached me and asked me if he could drive us home, and I accepted the 1^st price he offered (Rp. 100,000, a little over 10 bucks – my readers [hi mom] will think this is not very much money, and they are right, and wrong). So, on the tattered seats of an angkot backfiring so badly on the descent that I thought we might incur another casuality, we got home, and I tipped him an extra 10,000, because we were so glad to have arrived with so little incident.

            The weekend also saw Seamus come into his own as a bargainer at the market (his best line: Saya tinggal di Salatiga. Saya tidak orang gila – I live in Salatiga. I’m not a stupid person – which won him the deal, even though it should have been the negator bukan instead of tidak.) He offered Rp. 10,000 for a small statue of a stupa, with the initial asking price being Rp. 60,000, and he got it for Rp. 10,000! The guy who sold it was delighted, it seemed, by the bule kid who wouldn’t budge – he waved us down in the parking lot of the temple the next day to say hello and laugh about it again. 

            So, a weekend trip of 120 kilometers that saw transport in five busses, two becaks (bicycle taxis), two elephants, two motorcycles, and a tandem bicycle, during which we saw the most extraordinary ruins I’ve seen since I visited Tikal in Guatemala. I learned the enormously useful word sepentar. My kids were visibly astounded in a positive way by something uniquely Indonesian. And my children are learning, as they recount their frustration and amusement at watching the man pointlessly whack the floor of the bus with a wrench, to delighted listeners, that the narrative ends up becoming the most important part of any experience.