Sunrise in Borobudur

Borobudur is the world’s largest Buddhist temple, built in the 9th century over a period of 75 years, used for scarcely 100 years before being abandoned and rediscovered only in the 1800s. Since an extensive restoration project from 1975-1982, sunrise at Borobudur has become one of Yogyakarta's biggest draws and spectacular events.

A 3.30am pickup from my hostel in Yogyakarta takes me on a one-hour drive to the Borobudur complex, north-west of Yogya. When I arrive at Manohara Hotel, the only hotel near the Borobudur compound, it is still dark, so when I am offered coffee I am more than happy to accept. Sunrise isn't until 5.30am.

There are two gates at Borobudur: the public entrance, which opens at 6am, and the private, Manohara Hotel-owned entrance which opens at 4.30am (also naturally the more expensive option). The crowds are sparse before sunrise, especially now in low, rainy season - there are less than 30 of us here to catch the sunrise, I think.

My guide, Budi, is 40 but has the energy of a 10-year old. We are given flashlights to help us find our way around in the dark, but Budi is an enthusiastic photographer and shows me how I can make use of light and shadow to take haunting photographs of the reliefs and Buddha carvings. The flashlights have less use helping me find my way around than as a photography aid!

The weather is unpredictable in rainy season, and as the sky brightens the thick fog that comes from the jungle surrounding Borobudur begins to lift. The sun is not golden, obscured by the fog and cloud, but that does not take away from the beauty of this ancient monument. I'm just thankful it isn't raining this morning. 

Budi, my tour guide.

Borobudur's nine levels are arranged in threes - desire, forms, and finally the formless nirvana. Viewed from above, Borobudur is shaped like a mandala, and the structure of Borobudur is steeped in Buddhist cosmological significance. The top three levels - the nirvanic Arupadhatu levels - are home to a total of 72 stupas with diamond and square perforations, inside of which each sits a statue of Buddha sitting in the lotus position. The bottom six levels are square-shaped, and the top three terraces are circular, leading up to a singular massive stupa at the very top of the monument.

Budi recites these facts off the top of his head. He knows them by heart; he lives in a village not one kilometre from the Borobudur temple, with his family, and before becoming an English-speaking tour guide, he was a Japanese-speaking tour guide.

"I know five languages," he tells me. "Indonesian because I am Indonesian, Javanese because I am Javanese, Japanese because of the Japanese tourists, English to become a better tour guide, and between me and my wife, body language!" Budi is one of those people that you meet and who can instantly make you feel at home anywhere - ever-friendly, warm and welcoming, and who clearly loves his job.

Budi's enthusiasm for photography is infectious - he knows his way around a camera and he knows how to take a killer photograph. He lives in a village and tells me he would love to visit Cambodia, but that it would take him 12 months to save enough money to visit Angkor Wat - more since his wife and children want to tag along if he goes. As the head of the family, he has decided that he won't visit Cambodia if he has to leave his family behind, and because of that it is likely he'll never visit. He has never been outside of Indonesia.

His only chance to play with dSLRs is here, at his job as a tour guide at Borobudur, showing tourists where to take the best photos, the best spots to get a great view, and asking if he can use his guests' cameras to take photos of them. This is how he has learned photography - over the years, slowly, observing tourists angling themselves in places to get the right frame.

It amazes me how large the stupas are, how many of them there are, and how intricate the work is for a 1200 year old monument. The stone that makes up Borobudur is volcanic lava rock, hauled from 32km away at the still-active Mt Merapi. During the 7-year restoration of Borobudur, stones that were deemed damaged beyond repair were replaced by lava rock also taken from Merapi. There are some 2 million stone blocks here, weighing a collective 3.5 million tonnes.

Borobudur, translated, means "The temple on the hill." Beneath the steppe pyramid structure, Borobudur sits on a bare hill, which provides its foundation. Because of this, Borobudur is particularly vulnerable to soil erosion and water damage. Small-scale restoration projects have attempted to install drain channels and lead plates to redirect rainfall. The weight of tourist visitors leads to fears of soil subsidence, which partially factors into the high ticket prices at Borobudur to discourage visitor overload.

Before sunrise in low season, visitors are relatively few - after the public gates open at 6am, I am told, crowds throng the space so much that it becomes impossible to get a photo without someone in the picture. In dry season, the visitor crowd is even worse, flooding the monument even before sunrise.

On the first six levels, reliefs are carved in the stone walls, depicting stories of how the Buddha came to be and the various trials and tribulations he faced before attaining nirvana. These reliefs, placed end to end, would stretch 2.5km. The faces of Buddha have their hands in any of six different positions (mudrâ), each meaning something different - calling the earth to witness, benevolence, concentration, courage, virtue, and turning the wheel of dharma.

Budi somehow manages to turn even this into a activity, and takes five minutes to show me a fun wushu-like series of poses each leading into the next mudrâ. Clearly dance lessons are failing me as I struggle to keep up with the changing poses, but it's a lot of fun - "Something for you to remember and cheer you up when you are sad," Budi says, videoing me laughing.

By the time we're done, it's 6.30am. Crowds of Indonesian tourists and schoolchildren have begun to arrive. We go back to Manohara Hotel, and Budi heads home to change into his cycling gear. Manohara provides a light breakfast to its Sunrise Tour guests, and today it is goreng pisang, or fried banana, with cheese on top. There's a musician playing the gender (a xylophone-like traditional Javanese instrument) a little away, and I'm allowed to have a go.

Right outside the main Borobudur complex lies a small village (kampung), and this is where most people working in the Borobudur tour and souvenir crafts industry live. A 13km bicycle ride will take you up and down hills around the area, and right by what is speculated by some to have once been an ancient lake.

The cycling tour is entirely doable by beginners, and although it takes you up and downhill, a good portion of the tour was on flat ground. My biggest problems were with dehydration - the hot sun really takes it out of you and it is no fun sweating out more liquid than you can take in! Fortunately, Budi is there to lead the way - and for this section of the tour I am joined by another guide and expert cyclist, also named Budi.

Both guides were ridiculously fit and energetic, and at points when the hill becomes steep Budi-II even pushes me from behind while cycling. I've never felt more unfit. Budi and Budi are so welcoming and helpful they keep me hydrated with Pocari Sweat and keep my sugar levels high with bananas and rambutan.

The sun is blazing hot on my shoulders and I'm starting to get strange-looking sun blisters, but the feel of the wind while cycling makes up for it. There's something authentic about cycling through such a traditional village, next to farmers planting and harvesting rice fields, and through streets where everyone knows everyone and yelling at chickens to get off the road.

At one point we have stopped for a break, and I hear the strange combination of a goat bleating and a scooter engine. Turning around, I see the most bizarre sight I've ever come across - a rider on a scooter, a pillion, and a goat with its legs bound sandwiched between them. The people on the scooter wave cheerfully to us, and while I wave back it must be obvious that I am confused by what I have just seen. That goat must have wound up in someone's dinner.

That, to me, seems like a pretty authentically village-style experience.

The scenery throughout the route is stunning - we go through backroads and through padi fields. Everything is bright emerald green and brilliant sapphire blue. Despite the backbreaking toil of their work, rice farmers are friendly and say "Selamat pagi" to us - 'Good morning', in Indonesian. 

Cycling through what was once an ancient lake. I'm too short for my bicycle!

We are nearly at the end, and we stop by a pottery workshop. I've never tried my hand at pottery, but I watch the artisan here expertly turn a lump of clay into a perfect Borobudur stupa, and I'm raring to give it a go.

I quickly realise that my left-handedness is not an advantage here, as the pottery wheel spins the wrong way and into my fingers; I also quickly realise that I'm better at breaking off pieces of my stupa than actually building it. It is hard to get the right amount of pressure to shape the clay with - it is better to slowly and steadily apply gentle pressure, but this is a skill that I have yet to master.

After one disastrously failed attempt, however, I'm allowed another go and the second stupa turns out somewhat better than the first.

Before I know it, it is 11am - Budi apologetically says to me that it is Friday and he needs to be at the mosque soon. I barely noticed, but of course I quickly wash my hands and get ready to head back to Manohara, apologising for having forgotten the time. It has been such an eventful morning, after all, and Yogyakarta is an hour's drive away. Budi has been an amazing tour guide, and without doubt he has been the star of this morning.

It takes some determination to navigate the souvenir stall-lined streets on the way back without buying anything - this has always been my weak spot, when a seller pleads with me to "Please buy something" and they slash the price of an item to 1/4 of their original asking price. "100,000 Rupiah. 70,000. 50,000. 30,000." Eventually I give in to guilt and buy something - two lava stone souvenir stupas for 40,000 Rupiah, or $4. Now I'll have something I can put on my bookshelf to remember Borobudur by.

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Batik, Indonesia's national treasure

Batik is Indonesia’s traditional fabric craft, one of Indonesia's national treasures and prides, and a UNESCO-designated Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Walking down Yogyakarta's Malioboro Street, all manner of batik souvenirs line the street - shirts, bags, pouches, wallets - filled with intricate patterns and a riot of colour.

On a typically sunny Indonesian morning, I'm on the back of an ojek (a motorcycle taxi) and winding through busy streets to go learn how batik is made. Batik Winotosastro is one of Yogyakarta's oldest batik factories and I'm there to have a go at creating some myself.

The first thing that strikes me about Winotosastro is how organised everything is - this is clearly a place which manufactures a lot of batik and has their workflow down to a fine art. Batik at Winotosastro is all about intricate, fine, beautiful patterns, and lots of stamping to get the most perfect result every time.

There's a shelf full of metal stamps with patterns from florals to peacocks to tigers and geometric beauties, both for the border outline and the inner main pattern. The stamps are heavy metal, and after choosing my patterns I take them to a workstation, where - much to my surprise - it is a worker who helps me perfectly place my stamps in a perfect square border around the edge of my fabric.

The stamps are loaded with hot wax from a heavy but shallow iron bowl, and then it is simply a matter of perfect alignment and making sure that the wax is heavy enough to penetrate the fabric on both sides. This is why a worker helps you with the outline - because a perfect outline is difficult to accomplish and the wax must be even. A trained eye knows exactly how to navigate the corners so that they are placed at perfect 45° angle to each other, how to ensure that the lines are straight, and that the rough edges between stampings look seamless.

Once the wax is placed, it is very difficult to change the pattern. A friend calls batik a lesson in going with the flow - it might not turn out exactly as we want it to, so all we can do is to work with whatever happens.

After the outline comes my turn at having fun. I get to play with placing the stamps - tigers and peacocks, in my case. My shaking hands are guided by a worker who helps me place them properly, then I count to 3 to ensure the wax penetrates both sides of the fabric, and when I lift the stamp off there has been a perfect wax print on the fabric. It's art class on easy mode, and even I - with less artistic talent than a sea cucumber - can see that this is going to turn out just fine.

Then comes the nervewrecking bit, when I'm asked to personalise and customise the batik with a personal quote or my name. I'm bad at this part - I always want to have a perfect quote on something so final, and nothing comes immediately to mind, so just having finished reading The Hobbit the day before Tolkien is on my mind. Google, of course, is ready to help.

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.

It seems fitting, travelling, to use a Tolkien walking song.

Although my handwriting is scrawny and looks terrible, and I've erased several versions of my personalised quote already, the artisan who uses a canting pen to fill in my pencil with wax somehow manages to make it all look not just nice but even good.

My own practice attempt at using the canting, on the other hand, is a right mess, with wax spilling all over my practice cloth. No wonder they get the professionals to fill in words for you and fix any mistakes. 

At Winotosastro, they use chemical dyes to achieve brilliant colour; the deep blue colour I've chosen goes through a few rounds of dyeing to achieve a beautifully rich navy.

After dyeing, the wax is removed with hot boiling water, which melts the wax clean off the fabric. It reveals the white colour underneath, and the hot wax is skimmed off the top of the water to be reused. The fabric goes through a few rounds of being plunged into boiling water and cold water to ensure that the dye has set and to remove any final traces of wax.

Finally, the batik is finished with a flat iron which quickly dries the fabric, and then hemming the edges with an old pedal-operated sewing machine. It has been an hour of watching the transformation from a plain piece of white fabric to my personalised design, and the speed with which everyone works amazes me.

The workshop was less hands-on than I'd expected - but the creation was mine, and now I have a little piece of Indonesia I can say was entirely hand made and my own.

This trip was sponsored by Yonderbound.

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Vipassana, Bootcamp Nirvana: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Satya Narayan Goenka’s brand of Vipassanā meditation "in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin" stems from Burma (today Myanmar), where Goenka was born, raised and trained. Vipassanā was supposedly lost by most of the Buddhist and Indian world and maintained only in the lineage of Yangon Burmese monks.

Since the 1980s, the Vipassanā movement has grown into a worldwide organisation that organises 10-day meditation retreats - free of charge to new students, sustained by donations accepted only from those who have already completed at least one 10-day course. Basic needs - food and accommodation - are provided for and students are asked to focus on nothing more than their work of meditation. A student wakes up at 4AM, begins meditating at 4.30AM, and continues throughout the day with intermittent breaks according to a strict schedule until bedtime at 9PM.

The first Vipassanā meditation centre outside of India was set up in Massachusetts in 1980, and the organisation now boasts 227 locations in 94 countries.

Beginning 22 December 2015, I signed myself up for one of these meditation retreats, after hearing endless praise for the beneficial effects of the course. A full disclaimer: I did not complete the course. I left on day 7 of the course, for reasons that I will explain below. Though I did not complete it, there were nonetheless some surprising and good takeaways that I discovered about meditation, myself, and the effects of voluntary confinement.

1. Bootcamp Nirvana is Hard Work.

Meditation is not easy - it is challenging both for the mind and the body. Sitting for 11 hours a day in some variation of the lotus position means you will have a lot of cramping in your legs, and you will want to move your posture a lot especially during the first three days. And then there’s the matter of trying to still your mind, trying to focus on your breathing and instead only being able to think about what’s on the menu for lunch.

Make no mistake - anyone who tells you that meditation is easy just because you're sitting there "not doing anything" has certainly never tried meditation before.

2. The first 72 hours will be the longest 72 hours of your life.

You are asked to focus on your breath coming in and out of your nostrils and pay attention to your breathing. Never mind 11 hours a day - after the first two hours you’re likely to start seriously questioning what you’re doing here. I mean, seriously guys, I’m breathing through my nose. Left nostril, right nostril, both nostrils, I get it. How long do you have to practice focusing on your breath?

3. Your mind is far stronger than it seems.

For the first three days, the course teaches Ānāpāna meditation, which is the practice of focus and concentration. At first it seems impossible that you are supposed to be doing this for three days, which is mindnumpingly boring and makes you want to quit almost immediately. But then you realise that it’s just a matter of bending your mind to your will, and slowly the focus starts to kick in - you start thinking less about lunch, less about the ASOS sale, and less about all the other things you could be doing with your time rather than being here for 10 days.

S.N. Goenka says several times that the untamed mind is your biggest enemy, like a ranging stampeding elephant, and that the tamed mind is your biggest friend. I am inclined to agree with him in this regard. Certainly if nothing else three days of Ānāpāna and the subsequent Adhiṭṭhāna (strong determination) sittings will prove to you that the mind is a malleable thing, and with enough focus it is most certainly possible to bend it to your will.

The website for Vipassana meditation, dhamma.org

Now that being said, although Vipassanā is hard work it is very doable. It’s not exceptionally difficult by any means - it does require mental strength and determination, but no more than the average human being should possess. But Vipassanā does have dropouts - myself being one of them - and just like everything else in life, Vipassanā isn’t for everyone. There were several things I felt uncomfortable with at the centre that led me to leave on Day 7 of the course.

4. Vipassana is undoubtedly a Buddhist tradition.

While Vipassana International (VI) claims they are non-sectarian, simply because your beliefs are non-conflicting do not make them any less Buddhist - make no doubt, this is a Buddhist meditation.

One of the first things you are told in the course is that “These are the teachings of Gautama Buddha”. That the practice of these beliefs does not require belief in a deity or god of any kind is irrelevant: to claim that you are non-sectarian and then preach Buddhist texts is false advertising, even if their advertising does not claim to lead to profiting revenue.

Now if VI had said from the start that they were going to be teaching and chanting Buddhist texts, then I would have been less bothered by this. But as it is, the entirety of Vipassanā’s foundation is Buddhist, relies on Buddhist metaphysics and is based on Buddhist ideology.

This is not nonsectarian meditation - this is clear and pure Buddhist meditation.

5. The practice of Vipassana is based on Buddhist metaphysics. 

This includes (but is not limited to) a belief in the reason and motivation for Vipassanā practice as being clearing Saṅkhāras (a kind of mental habit that leads one to behave in certain manner) to be for the reincarnation of a being’s next life. If you accept that and came to the course knowing that Vipassanā is Buddhist in nature, then this would be all fine and well - but for those who go to Vipassanā coming from a more critical mind, having previously been told that this is supposed to be "scientific" in nature, the metaphysics on which the practice is based are more than a little dubious.

To be fair, S.N. Goenka does say multiple times that a belief in reincarnation is not strictly necessary to the practice of Vipassanā, and that one can practice Vipassanā without believing in reincarnation. However, if this is true, then it becomes no different from the churchgoer who prays for show rather than because of a true belief in worship: if one does not believe in reincarnation, Saṅkhāras, past lives or any of the related Buddhist metaphysics, then what is the reason for true Vipassanā practice?

The Dhama Giri meditation centre in Igatpuri, India.

6. Spurious claims to pseudoscientific quantum theory.

In the course, Goenka makes constant and repeated claims to the ever-changing nature of atomic flux as well as the phenomenology of kalapas. Kalapas in the Theravadic Buddhist tradition are defined as

the smallest units of physical matter, tiny units of materiality, tens of thousands of times smaller than a particle of dust, coming into existence and disappearing in as little as a billionth of a second or a trillionth of the blink of an eye.

Goenka claims that “Everything in the universe, all the subatomic particles, are made of just vibrations” and that “Western scientists come to the same conclusion as Gautama Buddha, but yet the Western scientists are not enlightened.”

Now superficially one might indeed see some resemblance between the notion of kalapas and the Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanics, and indeed Goenka often uses this superficial similarity to describe "matter wave" - where all matter can also behave like a wave. However as we have seen multiple times before in all manners of New Age pseudoscience, this is merely cloaking unscientific thought in scientific language in order to garner some form of authority and repute.

Here is Wikipedia's first-line definition of science:

Science is a systematic enterprise that creates, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

None of which Vipassanā fulfils.

I do not doubt that Buddhism is one of the world’s few major organised religions where ontological core beliefs and modern science do not necessarily conflict. By this I mean that there is no fundamental conflict between the existence or non-existence of certain core beliefs of each camp; contrast this against, for example, several monotheistic religions where the world's creatures were either "created by an Intelligent designer" or "became as they are after millions of years of evolution".

However simply because there is no conflict, one cannot simply claim the achievement of the other. Science and scientific theories, unlike the ones made by S.N. Goenka, has been checked, peer-reviewed, and repeatedly proven to hold consistent under a variety of circumstances. They are superficially similar in the same way that water and hydrochloric acid are both clear liquids. They are not the same, and Vipassanā cannot piggyback on the advances of scientific achievement to say that they are as universally true as they claim.

7. Blind faith.

A recurring theme I have heard from those who claim to have seen beneficial results from Vipassana is that “After you do it you will see results” or “They tell you do something a certain way so you just do/follow/obey”, or that I should “just surrender”. Goenka insists from Day 1 that as long as we follow his method, things “Will become so clear.” Unfortunately for me, things did not get any clearer as the course progressed.

I was told several times that rather than questioning the intellectual integrity of the method or why a method works, I should just see the course through to its end, and then and only then make a decision. While I can accept that we are asked to give the method a ‘fair trial’, it seemed contradictory to me that we are both (1) on day one asked not to accept anything blindly, and (2) asked to simply follow the method without questioning why things are.

8. Chanting of Buddhist texts in Pāli.

Expect chanting. A lot of chanting - morning, afternoon, and evening. It came as a shock to me the first time I heard the chanting come over loud speakers and completely filling the entire meditation hall - especially given that in all of my research and in everything that I had been told by friends who had completed the course, not once had the subject of chanting come up.

The disclaimer outside the meditation hall tells us that the chanting consists of “Truths and good wishes”, but it fails to convince that their proclaimed truths are in fact so. At times it can feel very cult-like, with the constant repetitions of Buddhist texts and “Bhavatu Sabba Mangalam” and the crowd’s “sadhu, sadhu, sadhu” response. Goenka’s droning voice and his constant “May all of you find real peace, real happiness, real peace, real happiness” felt like some form of brainwashing; I did not have a good reaction to it.

9. Saṅkhāras.

Quoting from Wikipedia because it's easiest, Saṅkhāras are:

In the first (passive) sense... conditioned phenomena generally but specifically to all mental "dispositions". These are called 'volitional formations' both because they are formed as a result of volition and because they are causes for the arising of future volitional actions.

In the second (active) sense of the word, saṅkhāra refers to that faculty of the mind/brain apparatus (sankhara-khandha) that puts together those formations.

Beginning on day 4 of the course, one is introduced to Vipassanā meditation proper, and the concept of Saṅkhāras. Each physical sensation in your body is claimed to be a Saṅkhāra rising from your ‘backlog’ of accumulated Saṅkhāra, and through constantly merely observing these sensations and not responding to them one is able to clear their mental backlog of accumulated habit and trauma. One is encouraged not to confront or face these Saṅkhāras, but merely to let them arise, observe, pass, and slip away in accordance with the law of nature, the Dhamma, in which “everything is constantly changing”.

Of course, in order for this to actually happen, one must accept that merely observing sensations (which has been the ultimate goal of the course) is enough for one to learn to not react and clear a backlog of habit. It is this non-reaction that helps to achieve liberation and freedom from the condition of suffering; observing a physical sensation somehow brings peace to the mind.

The problem, once again, is that this physical-to-mental chain just isn't obvious, and when I asked further about this problem I was told to "just do it" and that I would understand the more I practiced. See point 7 above.

10. The meditation teacher is just that: a meditation teacher.

Do not expect your guru to hold the answers to why aspects of the method are a certain way - his/her role is that of a meditation teacher and nothing else. He/she is not a philosopher and will not give you philosophical answers. He/she can give you tips on how to improve your posture, how to make meditation more comfortable, how to meditate and clear your mind better, but he/she is not trained to tell you how any of the methodology of Vipassanā works.



Now, maybe some of these doubts I have are clarified in an old-student’s course, or maybe they are more robustly defended by other traditions and scholars of Buddhism and purposely watered down for ease of consumption to a more general audience. if this was the case, it certainly did not show during the 7 days that I spent before leaving. In the end, I felt uncomfortable accepting charity from others while not buying their pitch; I felt morally inclined to leave rather than continue accepting their charity in food and accommodation while knowing I did and could not believe their methods.

In the end, I decided that Vipassanā wasn’t for me. Not because of anything wrong necessarily that the centre was doing, but because I felt uncomfortable being a part of a course where receiving charity is necessary to the fulfilment of the course objectives, while at the same time not subscribing to the same ideals and objectives that S.N. Goenka claims.

My experience has been that with the growing popularity of Vipassanā there has been a stark divide and almost a sense of moral superiority between those who are "ready" (those who have completed the 10-day course) against those who are "not ready" (those who did not complete or have not been on the course).

The Vipassanā experience is something profoundly individual. I do not doubt that those who practice and serve Vipassanā courses are well-intentioned, if a little misguided. It is the prerogative of every person to find out what methods lead them best to happiness. If Vipassanā is not the universal road to happiness that it claims to be, is that then just the overenthusiastic failing of yet another mere human?

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