Raised in Central Java under the Sailendra dynasty, Borobudur does not fit architecture's usual definition of "a structure you enter." It has no interior, no hall, no room; it is a solid stone mass from top to bottom, and one moves not within it but over it.

The structure is built by stacking, without mortar, some two million andesite stone blocks around a natural hill. Nine platforms rise one above the other: the lower six are square in plan and walled, the upper three are circular and open. This transition — from square to circle, from enclosed to open — is no accident but a cosmological diagram: worldly desire below, formless enlightenment above. The visitor begins at the bottom and ascends by walking each platform clockwise (pradaksina); this rising spiral path is the building's true "space."

Along the walls of the square platforms run hundreds of relief panels, with 504 Buddha statues in niches. On the uppermost circular terraces stand 72 perforated (latticed) stupas, each holding a seated Buddha half-visible behind the stone lattice; the great central stupa is empty. Borobudur thus constitutes architecture as a path, a diagram, an experience of walking — here structure is not shelter but a three-dimensional mandala traversed with the body.