The following essay was written as a response to “Borobudur’s Lost Crown: Why Theodoor van Erp’s Words Matter Today,” published by BDG on 4 May 2026. BDG welcomes substantive scholarly and informed engagement with content shared by our contributors, and we are pleased to offer this response from the Young Buddhist Association Indonesia as a contribution to a discussion of significance to Buddhists and heritage communities worldwide. Readers wishing to follow the exchange in full are encouraged to read both pieces together.

The Young Buddhist Association Indonesia (YBAI)—Yayasan Muda Mudi Buddhis Bersatu—is the largest Buddhist youth organization in Southeast Asia by digital reach, with more than a million followers across Instagram and YouTube. Founded in Surabaya in 2016, the YBAI advances the principle of “Faith AND Science” in its engagement with matters of Buddhist heritage, doctrine, and contemporary public discourse. YBAI operates as a non-partisan civil society organization under the legal foundation Yayasan Muda Mudi Buddhis Bersatu. This essay is published as part of YBAI’s ongoing engagement with the Borobudur chattra question.

Introduction

In a recent feature for BDG, Hendrick Tanuwidjaja revisits Theodoor van Erp’s early-20th-century field analysis of Borobudur’s main stupa (mahastupa) to argue that the proposed installation of a chattra (often rendered “catra” in Indonesian sources) atop the mahastupa rests on solid archaeological foundations. The piece does an important service in returning attention to a primary source that has indeed been under-circulated in contemporary Indonesian discourse. Van Erp’s Beschrijving van Barabudur (1931) is a landmark of early scientific archaeology, and its careful documentation of fragments recovered from the summit deserves to be read by anyone seriously engaging with this question.

Yet the conclusion that follows from re-reading van Erp is, we believe, the opposite of what the article suggests. Van Erp’s work—read in full, alongside the broader archaeological corpus and the conservation history of the past century—does not support the chattra installation now planned for August 2026. It supports something quite different: humility about what we can reconstruct; restraint about what we should add; and reverence for a form whose authenticity has been affirmed many times over since van Erp himself first dismantled his own reconstruction.

Equally important, the discussion has shifted in recent weeks. The Indonesian government no longer describes the proposed intervention as a “reconstruction.” It now presents the chattra installation under the framework of “living heritage” and “adaptation.”

This framing change is significant and deserves careful examination on its own terms. So too does the assessment process underlying the current proposal, the findings of which have been characterized in public as supportive of the installation while, in substance, raising serious concerns that have not yet been openly disclosed.

This response is offered in the same scholarly spirit as the original article. Our aim is not to dispute van Erp’s findings, nor to impugn anyone’s motives. It is simply to widen the frame.

This response considers the question from four angles: van Erp’s own conclusions, the UNESCO restoration record, the wider Sailendra corpus, and the standards of contemporary heritage practice.

What van Erp did, and what he undid

The earlier article correctly notes that van Erp, working between 1907 and 1911, recovered sector-shaped stones, octagonal fragments, and dowel-fitted components from the upper terrace of Borobudur, and that he reconstructed from these a tiered pinnacle topped by parasols and a jewel finial. What deserves greater emphasis, however, is what happened next.

Van Erp himself dismantled that reconstruction.

This was not a minor footnote in his career. After completing the restoration, van Erp removed the chattra and pinnacle elements he had assembled. The reasons he gave were technical: too few fragments; too many proportional uncertainties; too much interpretive distance between the recovered pieces and any defensible final form. But the deeper principle was unmistakable: where evidence is partial, conservation chooses restraint over speculation.

Van Erp’s conclusion, as recorded in the Indonesian secondary scholarship that has read his 1931 monograph most carefully, was unambiguous. Mundardjito (2015) documents that Van Erp dismantled the upper and middle portions of the yasti reconstruction on his own initiative, because too many new stones had been used to replace the missing originals—leaving only the lowest section in place atop the main stupa. Soekmono (1976) similarly attributes the dismantling to Van Erp’s discomfort with the proportion of new material relative to original fragments. On Van Erp’s final published plate, the chattra itself is drawn in dashed lines—a graphic acknowledgment of unresolved uncertainty, as noted by archaeologist Hari Setyawan of the Museum Cagar Budaya Borobudur.

The further question of where the recovered fragments originally belonged is traceable to J. J. de Vink’s 1912 discovery of burial urns at the temple grounds, reported in Notulen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap and referenced in Krom (1927:12). Building on that finding, Indonesian archaeologists today—most directly Hari Setyawan at the Museum Cagar Budaya Borobudur and Aditya Revianur at Universitas Gadjah Mada—have argued that the chattra fragments likely belonged to the small votive or funerary stupas surrounding Borobudur, rather than to the main stupa itself.

Taken together, Van Erp’s own decision to dismantle, his graphic acknowledgment of uncertainty, and the subsequent Indonesian scholarly tradition that has read his work most closely all point in the same direction: where the evidence is partial, conservation chooses restraint over speculation.

This is not the language of a man who left the question open. It is the language of a man who considered the question settled.

That principle did not die with van Erp. It became foundational to 20th-century heritage practice, and was codified in the Venice Charter of 1964 and the Nara Document on Authenticity of 1994. Both documents make explicit that hypothetical reconstruction—however learned, however well-intentioned—must yield to the integrity of what survives. To frame van Erp’s self-correction as a mere “concession to methodological rigor of his time” is to miss its enduring significance. It was not a constraint of his era. It is the foundation of ours.

The 1973–83 UNESCO restoration: a deliberate decision 

Between 1973 and 1983, Borobudur underwent what remains one of the most ambitious heritage restoration projects in modern history. Coordinated by UNESCO and the Indonesian government, the project mobilized hundreds of specialists from many countries—among them Indonesia’s own foundational archaeologist, R. Soekmono, who served as project director.

This team had access to everything van Erp had documented, plus seven decades of additional scholarship in Buddhist archaeology, comparative architecture, and conservation science. They disassembled and reassembled the entire square terrace structure, stone by stone. They surveyed every component of the monument. They had every opportunity, every resource, and every authority to install a chattra atop the mahastupa if the evidence warranted it.

They chose not to.

This was not an oversight. It was a deliberate scholarly decision by an international body of experts working under UNESCO’s framework. The absence of a chattra on Borobudur today is not the residue of an “overly conservative restoration choice.” It is the considered conclusion of the most rigorous heritage process the monument has ever undergone.

Soekmono himself, in his monograph Pelita Borobudur (1983), documented the comparative reasoning of the restoration team and concluded that the stupa form completed in the original Sailendra construction was consistent with the wider Central Javanese Buddhist tradition—a tradition in which the bell-and-finial form, complete with harmika and yasti but without chattra, was the established vernacular.

To revisit van Erp now without engaging with what UNESCO and Soekmono concluded after him is to reset the clock by a century—and to set aside the very international heritage system within which the current proposal is being debated.

The wider Sailendra corpus

The most significant gap in the original article is its narrow focus on Borobudur in isolation. Borobudur was not built in a vacuum. It is the largest surviving expression of a sustained eighth- and ninth-century building program in central Java that produced an extraordinary cluster of Buddhist temples within a small geographic radius: Mendut, Sewu, Pawon, Plaosan, Kalasan, Banyunibo, Sojiwan, Lumbung, and Bubrah.

These are contemporary monuments. They were built by the same dynasty (Sailendra), under the same religious framework (Mahayana Buddhism with a strong Vajrayana influence), using the same architectural vocabulary, and within the same century as Borobudur itself.

None of their stupas carry a chattra.

Not Mendut, whose great stupa stands intact. Not the dozens of perimeter stupas at Sewu. Not Plaosan’s elegant twin temples. Not Kalasan’s commanding form. The Sailendra builders made hundreds of stupas across Java, and the surviving evidence is consistent: the stupa form they perfected stood complete in itself, without a parasol superstructure.

This corpus is not analogical evidence. It is direct architectural evidence from the same builders, the same period, and the same religious tradition. To reconstruct a chattra atop Borobudur from a small set of recovered fragments while ignoring an entire surviving corpus of contemporary stupas without chattras is a methodological inversion: hypothesis is given priority over witness.

The cross-regional comparison also deserves attention. 

In Buddhist architectural traditions that did adopt chattra as a permanent structural element—those of Myanmar (Shwedagon, Htukkanthein), Thailand (Wat Arun), and Laos (Pha That Luang)—the convention is consistent: when the principal stupa bears a chattra, the subsidiary stupas in the same complex do too. The architectural grammar is internally coherent. 

The 1,537 subsidiary stupas at Borobudur—including the 72 perforated stupas of the upper terraces and the stupas of the balustrade—are equally consistent in the opposite direction: none of them carries a chattra. To install a chattra on the main stupa alone would make Borobudur unique among the world’s surviving Buddhist monuments in this respect: a principal stupa bearing a chattra in a complex of 1,537 stupas that do not. This is not the restoration of a lost element. It is the introduction of an architectural anomaly that no comparable tradition supports.

A recent peer-reviewed study by Lee and Lee, published in Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya of Universitas Indonesia (Volume 15, Number 1, 2025; DOI 10.17510/paradigma.v15i1.1710), documents this corpus systematically and concludes that the Sailendra stupa form was, by design, complete without a chattra. This is now a peer-reviewed finding within Indonesian scholarship.

Borobudur’s own reliefs

There is one further body of evidence the original article touches on but treats selectively. Borobudur’s narrative reliefs depict numerous stupas—and the article correctly notes that some appear with multiple parasols in the Gaṇḍavyuha cycle.

What the article does not mention is that the majority of stupas depicted across Borobudur’s reliefs stand without chattras. In the surveyed corpus of stupa depictions across the Karmavibhanga, Lalitavistara, Jataka-Avadana, and Gaṇḍavyuha-Bhadracari registers, the bell-and-finial form predominates. Where parasols do appear, they are consistently shown over other stupas—often votive or visionary stupas housing relics or marking commemorations—not over a configuration that maps directly to Borobudur’s own mahastupa.

More telling still: in Panel IV.13 of the Gandavyuha-Bhadracari register, a stupa appears that closely resembles the form of Borobudur’s main stupa—large, central, monumental—and it is depicted without a chattra. The builders of Borobudur, in carving their own visual encyclopedia of Buddhist cosmology onto the monument’s walls, included an image of a stupa of their own type. They did not give it a chattra.

The reliefs are not a manual for Borobudur’s own crowning structure. They are a visual encyclopedia of Buddhist cosmology in which stupas appear in many forms for many purposes. To select the chattra-bearing depictions as proof of Borobudur’s intended summit, while disregarding the majority that stand without chattras—and the panel that depicts a form recognizably similar to Borobudur—is to read the reliefs through a predetermined conclusion.

“Living heritage” and “adaptation”: the new framing

A development that has emerged only in the past several weeks deserves careful attention. As scholarly and civil society scrutiny of the chattra proposal has intensified, the framing of the project itself has shifted. Where earlier presentations described the installation as a form of “restoration” or “reconstruction,” the language now used by Indonesia’s Ministry of Culture—including in the minister’s statement at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on 22–23 April 2026—increasingly emphasizes “living heritage” and the principle of “adaptation.”

This shift is significant. It tacitly acknowledges what scholarly critics have long pointed out: that the proposed chattra cannot meet the threshold for reconstruction set by paragraph 86 of UNESCO’s Operational Guidelines, which permits reconstruction only “in exceptional circumstances” and “only on the basis of complete and detailed documentation, and to no extent on conjecture.” A 6.2-meter, three-tonne bronze fabrication, anchored permanently into the original stone surface by eight stainless-steel chemical anchors set 300 millimeters deep with epoxy resin, does not meet that threshold. The shift to a “living heritage/adaptation” framework is, in effect, a search for a different category of permission.

Yet “living heritage” is not a category of unrestricted intervention. In the international heritage discourse from which the term originates, “living heritage” refers to the active relationship between a monument and the communities who use it. This relationship is to be respected and accommodated within conservation practice, not used as a justification to alter the monument’s physical fabric. Borobudur is, and always has been, a living heritage site in this sense: it hosts Vesak ceremonies; it is a place of pilgrimage for Buddhists from across the world; and its meaning continues to evolve with each generation that encounters it. None of this requires the addition of a three-tonne bronze structure to its summit.

The “adaptation” framing requires equal scrutiny. International heritage adaptation is generally understood as the reversible accommodation of contemporary use—for example, lighting, signage, accessibility infrastructure, or visitor management—that does not compromise the Outstanding Universal Value of the property. Permanent physical addition to the monument itself, anchored irreversibly into 1,200-year-old stone, falls outside any reasonable definition of adaptation that the international heritage community would recognize.

The renaming of an intervention does not change its physical character. A bronze chattra installed by chemical anchor remains a bronze chattra installed by chemical anchor, whether it is described as reconstruction, restoration, adaptation, or living heritage practice. The standards by which it must be assessed are the standards of the intervention itself, not the standards of the framework chosen to describe it.

The Heritage Impact Assessment: what was found, and what was reported

Public discussions of the current proposal have referred to the existence of a Heritage Impact Assessment (HIA) and have generally characterized its findings as supportive of the installation, subject to mitigation. The full assessment, however, has not been publicly released, and what is known of its contents from materials presented at a coordination meeting at the Ministry of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia on 9 April 2026 tells a more complicated story.

According to those materials, the HIA’s overall rating of the chattra installation was Moderate–Major Negative. Of 22 interactions evaluated between the proposed intervention and the monument’s heritage values, eight were classified as Major Negative.

On the dimension of impact upon the monument’s symbolic value—particularly the principle of sunyata expressed in the perforated upper stupas and the open form of the mahastupa itself—the assessment recorded a Major Negative finding.

The same assessment identified six critical data gaps, including: the absence of a finite element analysis of the stress imposed by a three-tonne load on a stone surface whose compressive strength has been measured at points as low as 291.4 kg/cm² at the proposed installation surface; incomplete documentation of the chemical interactions between the proposed epoxy resin anchoring system and the andesite stone of the monument over multi-decade timeframes; insufficient analysis of thermal expansion differentials between the bronze structure and the underlying stone, particularly under tropical conditions; limited evaluation of seismic vulnerability changes resulting from a top-heavy mass nearly doubling the height of the mahastupa (from approximately 6.77 meters to 12.97 meters); the absence of a full visual impact analysis documenting how the installation will alter the inscribed silhouette by which the property’s Outstanding Universal Value was recognized in 1991; and incomplete consultation with international heritage advisory bodies, including the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), prior to finalization.

The same materials also acknowledged, in internal language, that the proposed chattra is best understood as a “hypothetical reconstruction” rather than a restoration—a categorization that, if accurate, places the intervention squarely within the limitations set by paragraph 86 of the Operational Guidelines.

That an assessment with such findings is being publicly described as supportive of the installation—subject only to “mitigation”—represents a transparency concern in itself.

Heritage Impact Assessment is not a procedural formality whose conclusions can be selectively communicated. Under the Guidance and Toolkit for Impact Assessments in a World Heritage Context (UNESCO/ICCROM/ICOMOS/IUCN, 2022), HIA findings are intended to inform decision-making, not to provide retrospective justification for decisions already made.

If the full HIA contains the findings summarized above, they require disclosure. If those findings have been mischaracterized in subsequent communications, that mischaracterization requires correction. And if the assessment is being used as a procedural cover for an intervention that the assessment itself rates as Moderate–Major Negative, the international heritage community has a legitimate interest in understanding why.

The schedule: May 2026–August 2026

A further clarification of the public record is needed. Earlier reporting and public communications referred to a target installation date of 31 May 2026, coinciding with Vesak 2570 BE. As of early May 2026, that date has been revised. The current target is August 2026, with the precise date communicated by the Minister of Culture as occurring after the conclusion of the Vesak observances.

The postponement is, on its face, a positive development. It creates space—not yet sufficient, but greater than before—within which outstanding questions might be addressed: completion of the State of Conservation report; receipt of UNESCO’s technical response; substantive engagement with ICOMOS Indonesia’s formal Statement of Concern dated 10 April 2026 (reference 051/0426/Pres-II-Ext); and resolution of the Heritage Impact Assessment’s six critical data gaps.

Whether that space will be used for those purposes, however, remains an open question. A delayed installation that proceeds without addressing the underlying procedural and substantive concerns is not a different decision; it is the same decision, slower. The schedule revision should be received not as a resolution of the controversy but as an opportunity for the resolution that has not yet occurred.

The international heritage system contains, within its own procedures, a path that this opportunity could allow Indonesia to take. The State of Conservation report can be completed and submitted to the World Heritage Centre. UNESCO and ICOMOS can offer their technical response in advance of the 48th session of the World Heritage Committee, scheduled for 19–29 July 2026 in Busan, South Korea. The full HIA can be made publicly available. The findings of ICOMOS Indonesia can receive substantive engagement.

Indonesian and international scholars can convene. None of this is hostile to Indonesian sovereignty over its own heritage; all of it is what the Convention to which Indonesia is a State Party has long contemplated for situations of exactly this kind.

The August 2026 timeline, if used in this way, could become the foundation of a process Indonesia could be proud of. Used otherwise, it will be remembered as a delay that solved nothing. 

“Restoration” or “construction”?

Further clarification is essential, building on the framing question discussed above. The chattra currently being prepared for installation is not an assembly of original stones recovered by van Erp. Those fragments remain catalogued and stored. What is being installed is a newly fabricated bronze structure—some 6.2 meters high and weighing three tonnes, with bronze cakra and guci components mounted on a stainless steel axis—anchored to the mahastupa by eight M20 SS304 stainless-steel chemical anchors set 300 millimeters deep into the original stone surface, with epoxy resin bonding and a 32-bolt clamp system.

This is not a restoration in any sense recognized by UNESCO’s Operational Guidelines.

Whether it is described as reconstruction, adaptation, or living-heritage practice, it remains a contemporary intervention inspired by a historical hypothesis. The distinction matters profoundly. The intervention is not reversible. It is not built from original materials. It is not based on complete documentation. It changes the silhouette and physical integrity of a World Heritage property, whose Outstanding Universal Value was inscribed in 1991 on the basis of the form Borobudur has held since the UNESCO restoration.

To call this “restoring visibility to an already established conclusion” is to soften a category distinction that international heritage law cannot soften.

The current process: where things actually stand

Read together, the current state of the discussion can be summarized as follows.

The Heritage Impact Assessment commissioned by the Indonesian government rates the proposed installation as Moderate–Major Negative, with six critical data gaps unresolved.

ICOMOS Indonesia, the national committee of the international advisory body to UNESCO on cultural heritage, sent a formal Statement of Concern on 10 April 2026 to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre in Paris, raising four substantive grounds for concern: absence of transparency in the process; contested historical basis for the chattra; threats to the authenticity of the site; and doubts regarding the government’s commitment to conservation procedure.

The State of Conservation report, through which any major intervention at a World Heritage property must be communicated to UNESCO under paragraph 172 of the Operational Guidelines, has not yet been formally submitted. Neither, accordingly, has UNESCO’s technical response been received. The chattra itself, meanwhile, is reported by official sources of the Indonesian Ministry of Creative Economy to be already in advanced stages of fabrication at the Yusman sculpture studio in Bantul, Yogyakarta—documented in the Ministry’s press release of 14 April 2026. 

It is in this context that the Minister of Culture, Fadli Zon, made his commitment at UNESCO Paris on 23 April 2026 that the conservation approach to Borobudur, “including the proposed chattra, will be carried out carefully, reversibly, non-invasively, on the basis of scientific assessment, through Heritage Impact Assessment and technical consultation with UNESCO.” The director of the World Heritage Centre, Lazare Eloundou Assomo, responded by confirming that “the Heritage Impact Assessment needs to be prepared and submitted so that it can be reviewed by UNESCO and the relevant advisory bodies, before it is further discussed by the World Heritage Committee.”

These are exactly the right standards. Honoring them is what the postponement to August 2026 makes possible. Failing to honor them—proceeding with installation before the SoC is complete, before UNESCO responds, before ICOMOS Indonesia’s concerns are addressed, before the HIA’s critical data gaps are closed, and against the HIA’s own Moderate–Major Negative rating—would mean using the appearance of process while bypassing its substance.

What van Erp would recognize

There is a final point to be made, and it returns us to the figure with whom this discussion began.

Theodoor van Erp was a man of his time, but he was also a man ahead of it. The decision to dismantle his own reconstruction is one of the most consequential acts of methodological humility in the history of Southeast Asian archaeology. It set a precedent that the UNESCO restoration of 1973–1983 honored. It is the precedent that the Heritage Impact Assessment of 2026 honors, in its own internal findings if not yet in its public communication. It is the precedent that ICOMOS Indonesia is asking the current process to honor.

To invoke van Erp’s name in support of an installation he himself would not have authorized—without acknowledging his self-correction, without acknowledging Soekmono’s deliberate choice, without acknowledging the contemporary corpus of Sailendra stupas, without acknowledging the assessment’s own negative rating, and without waiting for UNESCO’s technical response—risks using his authority in tension with the very principles he helped to establish.

The form of Borobudur as it stands today is not the form van Erp imagined for a moment in 1911. It is the form he chose, the form Soekmono chose, the form UNESCO chose, the form scholarship has affirmed, and the form by which the monument was inscribed as a property of Outstanding Universal Value in 1991. It is, as Indonesia’s Ministry of Culture itself recognizes in the diplomatic initiative now underway, the form upon which a serial nomination—Mandala Sacred Buddhist Architecture of India and Indonesia—is being prepared together with the Archaeological Survey of India.

A mandala, in the tradition Borobudur expresses, is by definition complete in itself. To complete what is already complete is not restoration. It is overwriting.

What the discussion needs

We do not write to oppose dialogue. We write because we believe dialogue is exactly what the current process risks foreclosing.

The August 2026 timeline offers something the 31 May 2026 timeline did not: time. Time to submit the State of Conservation report. Time for UNESCO and ICOMOS to respond in advance of the 48th session of the World Heritage Committee in Busan. Time to release the full Heritage Impact Assessment to public and scholarly scrutiny. Time to substantively engage with ICOMOS Indonesia’s formal Statement of Concern. Time to convene Indonesian and international scholars in a meeting whose conclusions can be openly recorded.

Used in this way, the postponement could become the foundation of a process worth defending. Used otherwise—to absorb critical pressure while installation preparations continue unchanged—it will be remembered as a delay that solved nothing.

Van Erp’s writings deserve to be read more widely. They will reward that reading. But they will not deliver the conclusion the current proposal asks them to deliver. They will deliver, instead, the lesson that scholarly humility is not a constraint on heritage practice but its foundation; that what we choose not to add is sometimes a more important act of stewardship than what we do; and that the integrity of a monument is held in trust not only for our generation, but for every generation that will inherit it after us.

That trust, more than any pinnacle, is the crown that Borobudur cannot afford to lose.

Author’s note: The Young Buddhist Association Indonesia (YBAI) is a Buddhist civil society organization; it does not claim the disciplinary expertise of professional archaeologists or conservation scientists. The arguments presented here are based entirely on published scholarship and disclosed primary documents, and consciously build on the work of three institutions whose disciplinary authority on these questions is greater than our own: ICOMOS Indonesia in matters of international heritage practice; the team of Indonesian archaeologists at Balai Konservasi Borobudur and BRIN; and the peer-reviewed scholarship of Lee and Lee (2025) at Universitas Indonesia. 

We are also indebted to the work of Institut Nagarjuna (Nugroho and Setiawan, 2026), whose Policy Brief No. 1 Tahun 2026 shares a substantive position with this essay although arrived at independently. Our role here is to widen the circulation of these scholarly findings within the international Buddhist community and to invite that community into a discussion that the Indonesian heritage community is already conducting at considerable length.

Where this essay refers to the materials presented at the coordination meeting of 9 April 2026, it does so on the basis of materials that have circulated within Indonesian heritage and Buddhist civil society communities since that date. The YBAI welcomes correction by any party in a position to clarify or refute the contents of those materials, and would regard the public release of the full Heritage Impact Assessment as the most constructive path to resolving any factual ambiguity.

References

Eloundou Assomo, L. 23 April 2026. Statement of the Director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre on the Borobudur conservation program, Paris. As reported in VOI.id, 24 April 2026.

ICOMOS. 1964. The Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites. Paris: International Council on Monuments and Sites.

ICOMOS Indonesia. 10 April 2026. Formal Statement of Concern Regarding the Proposed Installation of a Chattra on the Main Stupa of Borobudur. Reference 051/0426/Pres-II-Ext. Submitted to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre.

Indonesian Ministry of Creative Economy. 14 April 2026. “Apresiasi Penyempurnaan Chattra Borobudur Sinergi Maestro Lokal dan Identitas Bangsa”(press release). Retrieved from ekraf.go.id.

Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs, Directorate General of Buddhist Community Guidance. 9 April 2026. Coordination meeting materials presented at the Auditorium H.M. Rasjidi, Jakarta.

Krom, N. J. 1927. Barabudur: Archaeological Description, Volumes I–II. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Lee, S. T. S., and Lee, S. 2025. “Polemik Catra pada Stupa Induk Candi Borobudur: Kajian Arkeologi dan Filosofis.” Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya, 15(1). DOI: 10.17510/paradigma.v15i1.1710.

Lee, S. T. S. 24 April 2026. Preserving the Integrity of Borobudur: Defining the 8th–9th Century CE Nusantara Stupa Vernacular. Presentation, Jakarta. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.23553.83043.

Mundardjito. 2015. “Borobudur: Masalah Puncak Stupa Induk.” In Trilogi Borobudur I: Puncak Stupa Induk. Magelang: Balai Konservasi Borobudur.

Nugroho R., E., and Setiawan, E. 2026. “Penambahan Chattra pada Borobudur: Risiko Rekonstruksi Spekulatif dan Implikasi Kebijakan Konservasi.” Policy Brief No. 1 Tahun 2026. Jakarta: Institut Nagarjuna.

Soekmono, R. 1983. Pelita Borobudur Seri A No. 6. Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, Republic of Indonesia.

Tanuwidjaja, H. 4 May 2026. “Borobudur’s Lost Crown: Why Theodoor van Erp’s Words Matter Today.” Buddhistdoor Global.

UNESCO. 1972. Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

UNESCO. 1994. The Nara Document on Authenticity. Nara: International Conference on Authenticity in Relation to the World Heritage Convention.

UNESCO. 2023. Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention. WHC.23/01, 24 September 2023. Paris: UNESCO World Heritage Centre.

UNESCO/ICCROM/ICOMOS/IUCN. 2022. Guidance and Toolkit for Impact Assessments in a World Heritage Context. Paris: UNESCO.

UNESCO World Heritage Committee. 2025. Decision 47 COM 7: State of Conservation of World Heritage Properties. 47th Session, Paris.

Van Erp, T. 1931. Beschrijving van Barabudur, Tweede Deel: Bouwkundige Beschrijving. Bab De Chattra-Kwestie. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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