Polly #7 Visits the World’s Largest Buddhist Temple

I flew on another plane to the big island of Java, it is in a country called Indonesia.  The people here speak a similar language to the people in Malaysia.

I visited a place called Borobudur, a temple that was built 1200 years ago – it is a very big for a building that is very old.  They did not have machines to build buildings that we have today.  The temple was built with two million stone blocks – that is a lot of stone!

Polly looks small sitting in front of a very big temple!

I hopped onto the first step of the temple and it looked so big!  All the steps were different sizes and some were so tall that I had to give a big hop to reach them!

The temple was built by the Buddhists to honour the Buddha.  There are over 500 statues of the Buddha on the temple.  Shane told me that Buddha was a man who lived in India more than 2500 years ago.  His name was Siddhārtha Gautama, but when he reached “enlightenment” he was called Buddha, which means “awakened one” or “enlightened one“.

There was so much to see at the temple!

There are 2,672 relief panels about Buddha and his life and teachings.  Shane told me that Buddhism teaches people that suffering is caused by attachment, and that attachment can be avoided by following the right understanding, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.

Polly sits in front of two of the 2,672 relief panels.

Borobudur has nine level; the six lower levels have relief panels, but I hopped all the way to the top three levels and they were different.  They did not have panels, but 72 objects called stupas – they looked like bells to me.  There was a statue of Buddha inside each of these stupas.

Polly and the stupas.

While I was resting near the stupas, a big group of teenagers came and talked to me.  They were studying English at a school and they had an exam later in the day, so they came to the temple to practice their English.  The students were very happy to meet me and we talked about the differences in food between Java and Australia and they wanted to know more about kangaroos!  We talked for more than an hour and then they had to go to school.   The students were very kind and funny, I hope they all passed their exams.

Where's Polly? Polly talks to a class of English students.

After spending a day hopping up and down the steps of Borobudur I was very tired, so I slept very well that night and had nice froggy dreams.

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