Entering the Dharmadhatu: A Study of the Gandavyuha Reliefs of Borobudur

The Gandavyuha, a sacred text of Mahayana Buddhism, is an allegorical tale of the pilgrimage of a youth named Sudhana, who visits fifty-three spiritual mentors to receive their instruction in the Conduct of the Bodhisattva. His miraculous journey on the path towards Enlightenment inspired the sculptors of Borobudur (9th century C.E.) to illustrate the tale in 460 bas-reliefs on the higher galleries of this great Javanese monument. During the 1920s N.J. Krom and F.D.K. Bosch identified many of the panels, but most of their findings, written in Dutch, remained unnoticed. Entering the Dharmadhatu compares the complete set of panels with three early Chinese translations of Central Asian and Indian Sanskrit manuscripts of the Gandavyuha. This first identification of the entire series in English concludes with a discussion of the new perspectives on the meaning, symbolism, and architecture of Borobudur that a reading of the Gandavyuha suggests.