The Buddha Vairochana

Buddhism was well established in parts of Indonesia by the 600s. The reports of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims who passed through Indonesia in the late 600s and 700s on their journey to India describe thriving centers of Buddhist scholarship. The greatest Javanese Buddhist monuments, like Borobudur, built in the decades around 800, surpass in complexity and profundity any others in the Buddhist world.

This Buddha image must have come from one of those monuments, although we do not know from which one. It resembles the hundreds of Buddha images at Borobudur itself. The statue’s hands would have been held together at the chest in the gesture of preaching. This gesture not only recalls the “turning the wheel of the doctrine” by the buddha who lived on earth, but is also associated with the supreme cosmic buddha Vairochana.