Traditions of knowledge in old Javanese literature, c. 1000-1500

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 1-27

  Hall, Kenneth R ^a,b  

^a BALL STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b GADJAH MADA UNIVERSITY   (Indonesia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HISTORY; TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE;

ASIA; EURASIA; GREATER SUNDA ISLANDS; JAVA; MALAY ARCHIPELAGO; SOUTHEAST ASIA; SUNDA ISLES;

EID: 33644634425     PISSN: 00224634     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022463405000019     Document Type: Article

References (112)

1. As summarised in Helen Creese, 'Old Javanese studies, a review of the field', Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (hereafter BKI), 157 (2001): 3-33. Creese's article is the introductory essay to a special issue of BKI which includes contributions by the leading scholars of Old Javanese literature.
2. Edi Sedyawati, Ganesa statuary of the Kadiri and Singhasari periods (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994).
3. However, Kama, the Indic god of love and beauty, is featured more often than Wisnu; see P. J. Zoetmulder, Kalangwan, a survey of old Javanese literature (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1974), pp. 173-85.
4. S. Supomo, 'Indic transformation: Sanskritization on Java and the Javanization of the Bharata', in The Austronesians: Historical and comparative perspectives, ed. Peter Bellwood et al. (Canberra: Dept. of Anthropology, Australian National University, 1995), pp. 306-7.
5. S. Supomo, 'The sovereignty of beauty: Classical Javanese writings', in Illuminations. The writing traditions of Indonesia, ed. Ann Kumar and John H. McGlynn (Jakarta: Lontar Press, 1996), p. 14. The author demonstrated his skill at alangkara, 'poetical embellishments' within the metrical restrictions.
6. By contrast, the south Indian version deals with the scholarly Brahman Ravana and his Raksasas. The northern version tended toward heroic legend; the southern version included more supernatural and mythological material. The Ramayana kakawin was inspired by the sixth- or seventh-century Ravanavadha (The death of Ravana). The Javanese author used this text as his guide for half his poem, and then deviated from the original text (Zoetmulder, Kalangwan, pp. 228-9).
7. The Old Javanese Ramayana differs markedly in form and tone from the East Javanese kakawin. In contrast to the ninth-century Ramayana reliefs at Prambanan, which remain true to the Indian texts, the 977 reliefs at Candi Jalatunda in East Java illustrate the Old Javanese Mahabharata in both its parwa version and a wayang version - seemingly incorporating both the court and folk traditions in an attempt to make this complex, the base of a pilgrimage route to the top of the sacred Mt. Penanggunan, available to all members of Javanese society.
8. Vinod Kanna and Malini Saran, 'The Ramayana kakawin: A product of Sanskrit scholarship and independent literary genius', BKI, 149 (1993): 247.
9. Supomo, 'Sovereignty of beauty', p. 18.
10. Zoetmulder, Kalangwan, p. 95. This information is supplied as a conclusion by the poet responsible for the Old Javanese Wirataparwa, who elaborately dates the presentation of his work; this postscript also cross-references the king's grandson, who had asked about the origin of this text. The grandson, who had taken an interest in 'the fruits ... of the story [I have] told', must have been the subsequent king Airlangga, though he is also referenced in other sources as the prior king's son-in-law.
11. Supomo, 'Sovereignty of beauty'. In all, ten books (according to Supomo, nine) of the 18 Mahabharata parwa are known to have been transitioned into Old Javanese versions, although Supomo believes that the others were rewritten but have been lost. He also holds that although only three of the books are clearly attributable to Dharmawangsa Teguh's patronage (he was also the patron for the Old Javanese Uttarakanda, the supplement to the Ramayana that makes the story of Rama in the Ramayana kakawin more complete); he was the likely patron for the others as well.
12. While the Wirataparwa is not the first book of the Mahabharata, priests in India began their recitations with it rather than the Adiparwa (the actual first book) because it is one of the shortest parwa and is full of action and excitement (Supomo, 'Indic transformation', p. 306).
13. King Balitung's undated early tenth-century inscription records the recitation of the Indic epics as an important component of the ruling prince's ritual celebrations, and also includes the earliest reference to wayang (ritualized theatrical) performance. Himansu Sarkar, Corpus of the inscriptions of Java, up to 928 A.D. (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadyay, 1971), vol. II, p. 96
14. Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 282.
15. Zoetmulder, Kalangwan, pp. 208-9.
16. Scholars debate whether the 'recitation incorporated the Valmiki Sanskrit version of the Ramayana or the Old Javanese Ramayana kakawin, which should have been available at that time; see below and Supomo, 'Sovereignty of beauty', p. 16, who argues in favour of the Ramayana of Valmiki.
17. Modification of the English translation in Holt, Art in Indonesia (pp. 76-7) of Canto 1.12-14
18. from Poerbatjaraka, 'Ardjuna Wiwaha', BKI, 82 (1926): 181-305. Their attempted seduction of Arjuna, to entice him to forgo his mediations, became the inspiration for numerous artistic representations at Kadiri-era monastic retreats.
19. Translated in Patricia B. Henry, 'The religion of balance: Evidence from an eleventh-century Javanese poem', in Indonesian religions in transition, ed. Rita Smith Kipp and Susan Rodgers (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), pp. 108-10.
20. Translations of the Arjunawiwaha have been cross-referenced with I. Kuntara Wiryamartana, Arjunawiwaha; Transformasi teks Jawa Kuna lewat tanggapan dan penciptaan di lingkungan sastra Jawa (Yogyakarta: Duta Wacana University Press, 1990).
21. On the controversy relative to this assignment see Zoetmulder, Kalangwan, p. 235.
22. Thomas M. Hunter, Blossoms of longing, ancient verses of love and lament (translations from the Old Javanese) (Jakarta: Lontar Press, 1998), p. 33. Arjuna's celestial lover is representative of the devoted subject, who has felt Arjuna's embrace (symbolized in the sexual union of Arjuna and his lover), and longs for his return. The celestial aficionado, like mankind, is bound by the sorrow of material desire; Arjuna, due to his spiritual superiority, is free of the bondage that is consequent to such human (sexual) desire.
23. Peter Worsley, 'Narrative bas-reliefs at Candi Surawana', in Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th centuries, ed. David G. Marr and Anthony C. Milner (Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), pp. 342-3. '[The Arjunawiwaha illuminates] the conceptual relationship between world renouncer and world destroyer [and] the transformation of the world renouncer into world retainer: The ascetic Arjuna meditates not to secure his own moksa [i.e., release] but to attain the means to return once more to the society of his fellow men with greater strength to fulfill his social role'.
24. Stuart Robson, 'On translating the Arjunawiwaha', BKI, 157, 1 (2001): 49.
25. Henry, 'Religion of balance', p. 101.
26. Stuart O. Robson, 'Kakawin reconsidered: Toward a theory of Old Javanese poetics', BKI, 139 (1983): 291-321
27. S. Supomo, 'Some problems in writing about contemporary life as depicted in the Sumanasantaka', BKI, 157, 1 (2001): 113-29.
28. Stuart O. Robson, 'Notes on the early Kidung literature', BKI, 135 (1979): 307
29. Alton L. Becker, 'Aridharma: Framing an Old Javanese tale', in Writing on the tongue, ed. Alton L. Becker (Ann Arbor: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, 1989), pp. 281-320 Creese, 'Old Javanese studies'.
30. Zoetmulder, Kalangwan, pp. 187-8.
31. Robson, 'Kakawin reconsidered', p. 302. Supomo, 'Indic transformation', reminds us that the poet's composition would have easily induced his contemporaries to make the allegorical connection between the poet's fiction and the king/hero Airlangga, but 'it is very likely that the readers of the Arjunawiwaha from, say Kadiri of A.D. 1150, would have identified Arjuna with King Jayabhaya, the contemporary ruler of Kadiri. Likewise, readers two centuries later would have identified him with King Rajasanagara, the great ruler of fourteenth-century Majapahit' (p. 308). In other words, a Kkawin needs to be considered as a living text, and was meaningful relative to a changing rather than a static textual community. As one of this article's anonymous reviewers pointed out, Arjuna's marriage to the seven nymphs is problematic as a model of kingship and royal marriage; it is in no sense a dynastic marriage, in contrast to later examples in Old Javanese literature as discussed below.
32. Robson, 'Kakawin reconsidered' and Robson, 'The Ramayana in early Java', Southeast Asia Review, 52 (1980): 5-17.
33. Sedyawati, Ganesa statuary, pp. 193-257.
34. Bharatayuddha, 6.2-3, S. Supomo, Bharatayudhha: An Old Javanese poem and its Indian sources (New Delhi: 1993); translation from Sedyawati, Ganesa statuary, p. 129. The interpretation of this text that follows expands on Sedyawati's translation highlighting social and gender differences. The present study avoids Sedyawati's discussion of early class formation, but as one of the Journal's reviewers noted, '[its] acceptance of [her] distinction between court and non-court can be challenged on the grounds that the passage is standard poetic description, that similar motifs are ubiquitous throughout kakawin literature, and that this specific passage is only portraying the differing behavior of courtiers, and not the differences between court and non-court - since the kakawin rarely are concerned with non-court society'.
35. Sedyawati, Ganesa statuary, p. 250
36. Anthony Day, 'Locating the dominant' (Paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Honolulu, April 1996).
37. Thus, in the mind of the Bharatayuddha kakawin poet the ritual suicide of the female following the death of her husband offered the opportunity for the emotional fulfilment for the female courtier that was unattainable in life. See Helen Creese, 'Ultimate loyalties, the self-immolation of women in Java and Bali', BKI, 157, 1 (2001): 131-66, especially pp. 131-3 relative to this kakawin.
38. Zoetmulder, Kalangwan, pp. 367-74
39. the quotation is from Parthayajna, 43.2 (p. 371).
40. In the Javanese mandala portrayed in the Candi Jago reliefs, as in the kakawin, there were six realms of existence: The domain of the gods was topmost, followed by that of those titans (whose sin was their lust for power), humankind, animals, tantalised spirits and lost souls who were victims of their unfulfilled desires and unreasonable cravings, and Hell. See K. O'Brien, 'Candi Jago as a mandala: Symbolism of its narratives' (Part I), Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs (hereafter RIMA), 22 (1988): 1-61
41. and O'Brien, 'Candi Jago: A Javanese interpretation of the wheel of existence?', RIMA, 24 (1990): 23-85.
42. Mpu Tantular may have been the recipient of a sima freehold, based on a citation in the Bungur inscription of 1367, which was issued on the authority of King Rajasanagara (Hayam Wuruk). See S. Supomo, Arjunawijaya: A kakawin of mpu Tantular (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1977), pp. 8-10
43. and Jacobus Noorduyn, 'Majapahit in the fifteenth century', BKI, 134, 2-3 (1978): 211-18.
44. Supomo, Arjunawijaya, II, 1.2, 181
45. retranslated in Supomo, 'Sovereignty of beauty, p. 24.
46. Supomo, Arjunawijaya, pp. 18-35.
47. Peter J. Worsley, 'Mpu Tantular's Kakawin Arjunawijaya and conceptions of kingship in fourteenth-century Java', in A man of Indonesian letters; Essays in honour of Prof A. Teeuw, ed. C. M. S. Hellwig and Stuart O. Robson (Dordrecht: Foris, 1986), pp. 163-90.
48. Ibid., p. 169.
49. Louis Dumont, Religion, politics, and history in India (The Hague: E. J. Brill, 1970).
50. Stuart Robson, Desawarnana (Nagarakertagama) by mpu Prapanca (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995), pp. 74-5.
51. A. J. Bernet Kempers, Ancient Indonesian art (Amsterdam: C. P. J. van der Peet, 1959), plates 278-81
52. Holt, Art in Indonesia, pp. 83-6, 135-6.
53. Helen Creese, 'Images of women and embodiment in Kakawin literature', Intersections, 5 (May 2001), www.sshe.murdoch.edu.au/instersections/ issue5/creese;
54. Creese, 'Ultimate loyalties'.
55. Worsley, 'Mpu Tantular's Kakawin Arjunawijaya', p. 171.
56. Sedyawati, Ganesa statuary.
57. Supomo, Arjunawijaya, p. 321.
58. Worsley, 'Mpu Tantular's Kakawin Arjunawijaya', p. 173. Therefore, not only is Rawana incomplete in not having a queen as his companion to counsel and console him; symbolically, this also means that he does not have the capacity to procreate (thereby ensuring the continuity of the royal line) and the absence of an heir would leave the issue of succession up for competition among the different branches of the royal lineage.
59. Supomo, Arjunawijaya, II, 230.
60. Ibid., 25.6-31.5
61. Worsley, 'Mpu Tantular's Kakawin Arjunawijaya', p. 174.
62. Ibid., p. 183, highlights this appeal, and sees it to be a real concern, possibly in response to Gajah Mada's mid-fourteenth-century attempts to deprive religious institutions of their tax exemptions. He notes Kertanagara's late thirteenth-century decision relative to sima, to separate religious lands from secular lands (thani bala) that had been instituted by his father Wisnuwardhana, which exempted religious domains from payment of taxes and performance of duties for the court and other secular authorities.
63. The religious institutions were placed under the authority of their respective dharmadyaksa; Theodore Pigeaud, Java in the fourteenth century (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960-63), vol. I, pp. 99-103 and vol. IV, pp. 381-90. Worsley notes that the Nagarakertagama devotes considerable space to detailing the administration of grants of tax exemption and registers of these lands, listing court officials responsible for these tasks. It names some 218 institutions, which it divides into various categories - Resi, Saiwa and Buddhist - consistent with the Arjunawijaya. After Gajah Mada's death around 1364, Rajasanagara completed several new dharma and issued new charters to recognise claims to tax exemption. For example, the Bungur inscription of 1367 cites an earlier decision dated 860 as the basis of confirming the assignment of tax exemption to Bodhimimba, the teacher (guru) of the king. The inscription states that he was of a ksatriya family and by persuasion a Buddhist. The revenue from this tax exemption was to pay for the construction of a Buddhist temple and to sustain an annual celebration in the month of Kartika.
64. Supomo, Arjunawijaya, 31.8-16.
65. Robson, Desawarnana, p. 39.
66. Supomo, Arjunawijaya, II, p. 217.
67. Ibid., II, p. 222.
68. Ibid., II, pp. 226-7.
69. Ibid., p. 227. These references reinforced the Brahmanical moral obligation on the ruler to maintain, protect and restore religious foundations. In an alternative view, the following passage may be interpreted as a poet/cleric only emphasising these obligations rather than making a broader statement here and elsewhere in the text characterising realm-wide destruction.
70. This is a rare allegorical proclamation of the Majapahit king's access to trade goods that would arrive in his realm by way of the Brantas River. On such a likelihood during this era see Kenneth R. Hall, 'Personal status and ritualized exchange in Majapahit Java', Archipel, 59 (2000): 51-96.
71. Supomo, Arjunawijaya, 69-70.2
72. see also Worsley, 'Mpu Tantular's Kakawin Arjunawijaya', p. 177. As noted above, he has no spouse to be his companion, nor a family to support or counsel him in his defeat.
73. See also Creese, 'Ultimate loyalties', p. 131, on the ritual suicide (sati) of women - often on the battlefield following a battle, in order to join their husbands in death.
74. Worsley asserts that the kakawin is ultimately an appeal for a new royal authority, based in Buddhism rather than Saivism, and may even be a response to the threat of Islam, which was present at the Majapahit court in this era ('Mpu Tantular's Kakawin Arjunawijaya', p. 187).
75. This contrasts with the Kadiri court's Bharatayudda kakawin, as discussed above, which praises the male over the submissive female. This kakawin may give female sexuality an agency that is not supported by the texts/genre more widely.
76. Ibid., p. 178.
77. Ibid., p. 179. 'In the [Arjunawijaya] poem's final two cantos [the poet] explains the poem as a song of praise to the god Wisnu, Maintainer of the Universe (73.2-74.1). In this same passage where he makes such clear reference to those incarnations of Wisnu who will be responsible for the destruction of Rawana and Arjunasahasrabahu, mpu Tantular also invokes Wisnu as a material manifestation (sakala) of Buddha. In this equation of Buddha and world-maintaining incarnations of Wisnu do we perhaps glimpse Tantular's intention to compose the Sutasoma, in the narrative of which the threat of a World Destroyer gives way to a singular royal Buddhist world order? If this is the case, then a tale from the Uttarakanda that once prefaced the future narrative world of the Ramayana has been transformed by mpu Tantular into the prelude of a Buddhist epic about kings and queens and political order'.
78. Nagarakertagama, 43.2-3
79. (Robson, Desawarnana, p. 55).
80. K. P. O'Brien, 'The mandalas of the Sutasoma Kakawin', Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, 20/21 (1988-89): 161. This is consistent with the Tantric iconography at Candi Jago. The layout of the mandala and the worshiper's counter-clockwise progression together create a sacred space where the divine is invited to take up residence.
81. On the prominence of Bherawi (Bhairawa) in Majapahit-era art see Holt, Art in Indonesia, p. 80. One of the most famous icons of Bherawi is the Singasari portrayal that is assumed to be the image of Kertanagara.
82. O'Brien, 'Mandalas of the Sutasoma Kakawin', p. 161.
83. The Sutasoma's attribution of the deplorable state of the temples and countryside to the misfortunes of the past caused by following the wrong divine contrasts to the depictions of decay in the Arjunawijaya in which the same author implies that these are the consequence of human inadequacies.
84. This episode is clearly modelled on the attempted seduction of Arjuna in the eleventh-century Arjunawiwaha.
85. Soewito Santoso, 'Boddhakawya-Sutasoma, a study in Javanese Wajrayana, text-translation-commentary' (Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, 1968), vol. III, pp. 101-2.
86. That is, he succumbed to the 'dark side', or his demonic capacity - as in the above instance of Arjunasahasrabahu's demonic capacity in the Arjunawijaya kakawin that is negated by his queen.
87. O'Brien, 'Mandalas of the Sutasoma Kakawin', pp. 102-3
88. Santoso, 'Boddhakawya-Sutasoma', vol. III, p. 73. Each of these chthonic forces, as well as the demonic Ganesa, was worshipped among the rural ritual sites serviced by resi clerics.
89. O'Brien, 'Mandalas of the Sutasoma Kakawin', p. 116.
90. Ibid., p. 114.
91. Ibid., p. 115.
92. See also Santoso, 'Boddhakawya-Sutasoma', vol. III, 124.11.
93. O'Brien, 'Mandalas of the Sutasoma Kakawin', p. 123.
94. Worsley, 'Mpu Tantular's Kakawin Arjunawijaya'.
95. In classical Indian terms this was dharmavijaya - 'righteous victory' - in contrast to asuravijaya, 'demonic victory'.
96. In support of O'Brien's thesis, see the posthumous icon of Kertanagara in the image of the Hari-Hara ardhanari, a fusion of Wisnu and Siwa, who is portrayed as half male and half female (ardhanari); art historians speculate that the icon represents Kertanagara's union with his wife Sri Bajradewi (Holt, Art in Indonesia, p. 80).
97. O'Brien, 'Mandalas of the Sutasoma Kakawin', pp. 129-30
98. the Mongol reference is found briefly in Nagarakertagama, 44.4 (Robson, Desawarnana, p. 57).
99. Robson, 'Kakawin reconsidered', p. 309.
100. Robson, 'Notes on the early Kidung literature', BKI, 135 (1979): 304-5
101. and Andres Teeuw et al., Siwaratrikalpa of mpu Tanakung. An Old Javanese poem, its source and Balinese illustrations (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969).
102. Ibid., p. 81.
103. Ibid., p. 81.
104. Ibid., p. 97.
105. Note the last desperate appeal by Lubdhaka is to his wife. Such an appeal is consistent with other evidence from this late fifteenth-century era, which stresses the role of the wife as the ritual intermediary and living partner in a deceased husband's successful transition to life-beyond-death. See Kenneth R. Hall, 'Ritual transitions and kingship in fifteenth-century Java', in Structure and society in early south India, essays in honour of Noboru Karashima, ed. Kenneth R. Hall (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 276-312.
106. In this kakawin, Lubdhaka's commoner wife sits at his bedside as he dies, and following his death she reproaches him for leaving her alone with the children. She demands that he let her come with him, wherever he may be going, and says that her death is her only recourse. She arranges his cremation (canto 10), but the text does not state whether she joined him on the funeral pyre. See also Creese, 'Ultimate loyalties', pp. 148-54.
107. Max Nihom, 'Diksa, kala, and the stuti of Siwaratrikalpa 33.1-2', BKI, 153, 1 (1997): 103-11.
108. Teeuw et al., Siwaratrikalpa, p. 137.
109. Stuart Robson stresses this optimism, citing the Siwaratrikalpa kakawin along with the era's popular kidung poetry as examples of a 'new cultural flowering in the late fifteenth century' ('Notes on the early Kidung', p. 305). In 'Kakawin reconsidered', he posits that the new thrust of Saivite ritual reflected in the Night of Siwa ritual, as well as the new literary 'flowering', developed as a reactive to fifteenth-century Buddhism (represented in the Sutasoma as Java's hope), and to the spread of Islam in the region.
110. Stuart Robson, 'Java at the crossroads: Aspects of Javanese cultural history in the 14th and 15th centuries', BKI, 137, 2-3 (1981): 259-92
111. Merle C. Ricklefs, 'Babad Sangkala and the Javanese sense of histoy, Archipel, 55 (1998): 125-40
112. and S. Supomo, 'From sakti to shahada, the quest for new meanings in a changing world order', in Islam: Essays on scripture, thought, and society: A festschrift in honour of Anthony H. Johns, ed. Peter G, Riddell and Tony Street (New York: Brill, 1997), pp. 217-36.