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The Litany of “The World's Beginning”: A Hindu-Javanese Purification Text

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Nancy J. Smith-Hefner
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Tengger Javanese are an ethnic Javanese people who live in the rugged uplands surrounding Mount Bromo in eastern Java. Tengger are unique among modern Javanese in that they alone trace their religious traditions back to a non-Islamic, Hindu-Javanese priesthood thought to date from the time of the last of Java's great Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms (the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). Specialists of Java's ancient Hindu traditions, however, have generally concluded that liturgical manuscripts from the Tengger region can tell us little about Old Javanese religion. The eminent Dutch historian Th. G. Th. Pigeaud writes that the people who preserved the religious texts among the Tengger never belonged to the class of cultured ecclesiastics so prominent in Hindu-Javanese times. Many of the Tengger manuscripts in museum collections are written in a rustic and non-standard, budha script, and do not contain any learned Sanskrit slokas or other easily identifiable references to classical Hindu-Javanese traditions. These facts led Pigeaud to speculate that the Tengger population had always formed a separate community, only superficially influenced by Hindu tradition, and primarily involved in the worship of Mount Bromo, the volcano located at the centre of the region.

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Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , September 1990 , pp. 287 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1990

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References

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 41st Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies held in March 1989.

1 Linguistic research was conducted in the Tengger highlands of East Java from 1978 to 1980. It was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant and was sponsored in Indonesia by the National Language Centre (Pusat Bahasa) and the Indonesian Academy of Sciences (LIPI). Follow-up research, conducted over a nine month period in 1985, was also supported by Fulbright (ASEAN) as well as the Social Science Research Council. I would like to acknowledge with appreciation the critical input of my husband and co-worker in the region, Robert W. Hefner, whose reconstruction of historical events in the Tengger region has served as the foundation of my own understanding of Tengger social and religious change; see Hefner, Robert W., Hindu Javanese: Tengger Tradition and Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; “Islamizing Java? Religion and Politics in Rural East Java”, The Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 3 (1987): 533–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Political Economy of Mountain Java: An Interpretive History (Berkeley, University of California Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

2 Pigeaud, Th. G. Th., Literature of Java, Vol. 1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), p. 49Google Scholar.

3 Budha (literally, “Buddhist”) script or gunung (“mountain”) script are terms used to refer to archaic and non-standard forms of Javanese script found in remote areas of Java in non-Islamic manuscripts; see Pigeaud, , Literature of Java, p. 54Google Scholar; Smith-Hefner, Nancy J., “Reading, Reciting and Knowing: Interpreting a Rural Javanese Text Tradition”, in Writing on the Tongue, ed. Becker, Alton L. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), p. 196Google Scholar.

4 Another Dutch historian, Rouffaer, G.P. [“Tenggereezen”, Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indie (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1921), p. 303]Google Scholar even reports that prayers collected from the Tengger area in the early nineteenth century are written “in ordinary Javanese prose”. They are, in fact, written in a form of what is often referred to as Middle Javanese. Cf. Zoetmulder, P.J., Kalangwan (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), pp. 24–36 and 441–43Google Scholar.

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16 Although the term dhukun has taken on a pejorative sense in more orthodox Muslim areas of Java, in Tengger the term is used to refer to local priests and has no such pejorative overtones.

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22 According to national policy, all Indonesians must now profess one of the five world religions recognized by the Indonesian government: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, or reform-variants of Buddhism or Hinduism.

23 Also of significance, among the texts we collected was a prayer which accompanies a ceremony which Tengger call the pembaruan, a rite of priestly renewal. Priests who have undergone renewal, in Tengger called tiyang baru “new men”, are mentioned in Pigeaud's Java in the 14th Century as well as in the Tantu Panggelaran, an old Javanese historical text which dates from the late Majapahit period [Pigeaud, Th. G. Th., De Tantu Panggelaran (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1924)Google Scholar]. The exegesis of the pembaruan text will be taken up in a later paper, but its existence in Tengger is further support for the early and extensive contacts between the upland area and the lowland Hindu Javanese courts.

24 For a more detailed description of the entas-entas ceremony and its interpretation see Hefner, , “Chapter 8”, Hindu Javanese, pp. 163–88Google Scholar. For an earlier, less complete description, see Scholte, John, “De Slamatan Entas-Entas der Tenggereezen on de Memukur Ceremonie op Bali”, Handelingen van het Eerst Kongres voor de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde van Yawa Gehouden (1919), pp. 47–80Google Scholar.

25 Smith-Hefner, Nancy J., “Language and Social Identity: Speaking Javanese in Tengger” (Ph. D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1983), p. 284Google Scholar. See also Gonda, Jan, Sanskrit in Indonesia (Nagpur, India: The International Academy of Indian Culture, 1952), p. 147Google Scholar.

26 These bells are very similar to the ones still used by Balinese priests today in Bali. They are a part of the Tengger priest's ritual regalia which includes a prapen or “incense burner” and a prasen or “zodiakbeker”, so called because it is typically imprinted with signs of the zodiac. The Tengger priests' holy water beakers have been found to date from as early as the first half of the fourteenth century [Juynboll, H.H., “Zodiakbekers”, in Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indie, ed. Paulus, J. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1921), pp. 838–40Google Scholar], another indication of the archaic pedigree of Tengger priestly ritual.

27 Hooykaas, C., Cosmogony and Creation in Balinese Tradition (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 The keeper of The British Museum manuscript collection, Mr. G.E. Marrison, kindly supplied me with a microfilmed copy of the manuscript. He described the library manuscript as written on Javanese paper and bound in a dark brown tooled leather cover. I transliterated the text from the Javanese script, keeping spelling and punctuation as close as possible to the original. It should be noted that many of the sound distinctions indicated by various diacritics in Hooykaas' text are missing completely from both present day Tengger versions and from the museum manuscript and are not noted here.

29 Hooykaas' elaborate system of diacritics (which reflects an earlier “Sanskritized” ideal) has of necessity, been simplified here [Hooykaas, , Cosmogony and Creation (1974)Google Scholar].

30 Hooykaas, , Cosmogony and Creation, p. 53Google Scholar.

31 Ibid., pp. 53–57.

32 See Smith-Hefner, , “Reading, Reciting and Knowing”Google Scholar.

33 Hooykaas, , Cosmogony and Creation, p. 58Google Scholar.

34 Ramseyer, Urs, The Art and Culture of Bali (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 95Google Scholar.

35 See Hefner, , “appendix”, Hindu Javanese, pp. 271–76Google Scholar, for further speculation as to the relationship between Tengger dhukun and Balinese sengguhu priests.

36 Keyes, Charles, The Golden Peninsula: Culture and Adaptation in Mainland Southeast Asia (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1977)Google Scholar; Leach, E.R., Political Systems of Highland Burma (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954)Google Scholar.