Encounters In Space And Time

Yesterday was a temple day for me. I spent the morning at Borobodur, a ninth-century Budddhist complex. It's built on a hill in layers. As you walk through the corridors in each layer, you walk among carved panels that symbolize spiritual growth. As you go up, you pass through stages of increasing virtue, then degrees of enlightenment.

I know this because I was lucky enough to have a delightful guide to lead me through my symbolic spiritual evolution. Atin walked me around the base and showed me four panels that depicted different sins. She told me that explorers had found that at that level there were more panels, covered with stones. Those coverings still remain. That's partly to protect them from the elements. And it's partly to protect us from what they show. "I tell you frankly, some of them are really pornographic!" she told me in a voice that rang with amazement and a hint of a guilty titter.

As she led me on up I was reminded of how much I love Buddhist monuments. I'm not quite sure why that is. It is certainly not because I am religious. But every time I visit a Buddhist temple or stupa I feel ... nice. I can't think of any other way to put it. I just feel nice.

The feeling stayed with me right through the day. Later in the afternoon I went to Prambanan, a Hindu temple complex that was also built in the ninth century. It's a lovely sprawling expanse of grassy meadow with the remains of temples scattered across it.

Near one of them two boys were in a tree, trying to finesse fruit from one of the upper branches with a stick. A couple of hundred yards away a shepherd had decided to bring his flock of sheep for their afternoon graze. I wandered between temples in various degrees of decay and restoration.

At some point an airplane flew past, the passengers undoubtedly oblivious that thousands of feet below them there were stone edifices that had stood patiently for a millenium and more.

Strewn all around were endless mounds of stone blocks, waiting to be placed back where they belonged. As I circled around this enormous 3-D jigsaw puzzle I ran across a deer. He was busy rubbing his antlers against a tree. He tolerated me as I edged nearer and nearer. He let me get to within ten feet as he concentrated on shredding the bark of the tree. Even the staccato clatter of my camera shutter did not throw him off.

Eventually he tired of the attention and sauntered away, with thin strips of bark dangling from his antlers.

So I carried on prowling the grounds. Finally, after maniacally taking maybe thirty photographs in ten minutes (I was looking for the perfect sunset picture) I decided to call it a day. By then the only people left in the grounds were me and about a dozen French tourists. Waiting for us outside the gate was a lone Indonesian man. He had straggly long hair tied in a pony tail, a gaunt face, and the most improbably white teeth. He was seated comfortably on the ground, cradling a guitar.

I took a final picture of him as he sang Hotel California in a strong Javanese accent.

Later that night, as I sat looking at all the pictures I had taken during the day, I had an image of worlds reaching out, snaking tendrils across time and space, gently brushing past each other and then moving on.