The largest surviving Buddhist monument on earth — a colossal stepped pyramid of volcanic stone on the island of Java, in central Indonesia, raised around 780 to 840 CE under the Sailendra dynasty as a three-dimensional map of the path to enlightenment. Not a temple you enter but a mountain you ascend, it is faced with one of the world's most extensive surviving ensembles of Buddhist reliefs and crowned by a great stupa. Abandoned and half-buried for centuries, it was cleared to Western attention in 1814 and rebuilt by a major restoration campaign, and it stands today, a wonder of the world, in a Muslim-majority nation.
It is the largest Buddhist monument in the world, and you do not enter it. You climb it. Borobudur is a solid mountain of some two million blocks of volcanic stone, raised on a plain in central Java, and a pilgrim is meant to walk up through it level by level, circling clockwise past more than a thousand carved panels and hundreds of stone Buddhas. The journey is the meaning: you rise from the carved world of human desire, through galleries of the Buddha's life and teaching, to a bare summit of bell-shaped stupas and a single great dome at the top, where the carving stops and the design says there is nothing left to depict. Then the monument was abandoned. For centuries it lay under volcanic ash and jungle, neglected after Java’s political center shifted and the island later turned toward Islam, until it was cleared and made a wonder of the world again. The path to enlightenment was built in stone, lost, and dug back out.