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Smart Bombs at Borobudur / p.1
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By Cecilie Scott
I thought of my friend Arnie when I
visited Borobudur. Arnie, an engineer, could admire this
structure. But he'd have trouble with the premise, for
the words rendered in stone were not his words.
Arnie laughed when he told me of the
strange beliefs of his Indian colleague at Boeing. The
world resting on a turtle! This from an educated man in
the aircraft industry, a fellow engineer. "On a
turtle!" Arnie exclaimed. "So I ask him what
holds up the turtle. And he tells me, 'Another turtle.'
And that turtle? 'Another turtle.' And then he gets
impatient and tells me, 'Turtles. Turtles all the way
down!' Can you imagine?" Arnie laughed, with a good
humor born of complacency, at this contradiction between
logic and belief, science and superstition.
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When Boeing inhales it sucks in engineers from
Winnipeg to Bangalore, and scientific knowledge coexists
in each along side earlier cosmologies. I think of Hindu
and born-again Christian struggling and failing to
comprehend each other across the chasm of belief. I
avoided a like exchange with Arnie, who accepts the Bible as the word of God, literally true in all details.
So I thought of Arnie at
Borobudur. There the word was made stone, panel after
panel of carved stone showing the life and the teachings
of the Buddha. The word is embedded in 55,000 cubic
meters of stone temple built eleven centuries ago, in the
Buddhist phase of Java's past.
Borobudur drew Anna and me from Bali, to
the dismay of our Balinese friends. They warned us the
Javanese were not to be trusted. "They smile but
they don't mean it," said Surya. "They pick
pockets on the bemos in Denpasar," said Wayan. Guide
books urged caution and money belts. Yes, we knew that
Java was not Bali. And though the Gulf War had ended and
State Department advisories been lifted, we were aware of
entering a Muslim world freshly sensitized by this latest
exercise of U.S. power, a world where the war had
appeared nightly in each village, on each TV screen.
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 The Ultimate Indonesian Homepage
Borobudur Site (Univ. Laval)
Buddhist Art: Borobudur Temple (BuddhaNet)
1998 Human Rights Report (USIS)
Human Rights Watch - Indonesia
Indonesian Weekly Netnews
Inside Indonesia
Proponents for a peaceful solution will gather here again:
Like before Desert Storm, group will march for justice
Summary - GAO Report Operation Desert Storm:
Evaluation of the Air War,
July 1996
Links updated September 2001
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Our first night in Yogyakarta was a frustration. We found ourselves
confined to two blocks of tourist-focused enterprises
because to venture out on foot was to attract persistent
followers. Men followed us offering their services as
guides, a necessity, they assured us, to protect us from
other men just like themselves. So we retreated to our
hotel and reserved a car and driver for the next morning.
We would visit Borobudur and the Hindu temples nearby on
the Prambanan plain first before seeing how much we could
see of Yogya.
We arrived at Borobudur just before it opened. We waited in
the still-cool and silent morning with half a dozen other
pilgrims gathered at the foot of this artificial
mountain. A guard opened the gate and allowed us to
ascend. We circled around each level clockwise in true
pilgrim fashion, pausing at each panel, each chapter and
verse of this good book.
I took pictures, concentrating
on animal guides and icons, partly from preference and
partly because I needed elephants and birds and fish to
keep myself anchored to this world. For I was fresh from
Bali where any rock might be inhabited by spirit and
flowers spoke directly to the gods; there was no dead
matter there. So the world held me and I held onto the
world through its creatures.
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Anna, familiar with
Buddhism, was more comfortable with these images as
symbols drawing the pilgrim upwards and away from the
world of forms.
We wound our way around each gallery, then climbed the steep stairs to
the next as more and more tourists joined us and passed
us - Indonesian tourists. We paused at the request of a Javanese
family, taking our place in a group picture, passing cameras back and
forth, becoming momentos of each other's trip to an
exotic site. Yes, Borobudur is an exotic site for the Javanese; Islam has long since replaced Hinduism there, just as Hinduism replaced Buddhism a thousand years ago.
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We were out in the open on the first of the upper terraces when I
noticed Anna speaking speaking with four Javanese boys, teenagers in jeans and tee shirts. And I admit I was worried. All warnings surfaced as I joined the conversation and turned
to find other teens gathered around us.
A slim young man in a denim jacket . . .
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© 1996-2001 Cecilie Scott
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