Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple on Earth, a stepped mountain of grey stone standing in the rice fields of central Java, in Indonesia, and it has no inside. There is nothing to walk into: you climb it, past more than a kilometre of carved relief. The reading starts at the eastern stairway and goes clockwise with the temple wall on your right, the direction pilgrims take. On the first gallery the upper row gives the life of the Buddha in 120 panels, ending at his first sermon, with tales of his earlier lives facing it. From the second gallery up, more than 460 panels follow a boy called Sudhana from teacher to teacher in search of wisdom. One level you will not read at all. Around the base lie 160 more panels on how good and bad deeds come back to you, sealed behind an added stone casing not long after the temple was finished. Whether that was to hold up a sagging structure or to put the scenes out of sight has never been settled.
In the niches along the square terraces sit 504 Buddhas, and it is the damage that registers: over three hundred broken, most without heads, forty-three gone altogether. In 1896 the Dutch let King Chulalongkorn of Siam cart off eight loads of sculpture, which is still on display in Bangkok. Water in the hill was rotting the monument from underneath. Between 1973 and 1983 the square terraces came down block by block, over a million stones numbered, cleaned and set back on new foundations with drains built in. Once a year at Waisak it works as a temple again: monks process in from Mendut with water and a flame, circle the stone, and after dark hundreds of paper lanterns go up together. Above the last carving the stories stop and seventy-two bell-shaped stupas ring the open summit, each with a Buddha sitting inside it. The stone is pierced rather than left open, so what you get through the gaps is a shoulder, a hand, part of a face in the shadow.