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Pembaron: An East Javanese Rite of Priestly Rebirth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 August 2009
Extract
Although courtly literature provides insight into the high tradition of Old Javanese Hinduism, the nature of popular Javanese religion in former times remains a topic of considerable obscurity. In his voluminous masterpiece on pre-Islamic Java, the Dutch historian Th. G. Th. Pigeaud identifies some 218 clerical estates that existed in rural east Java in the fourteenth century, speculating as to the nature of their social and religious organization. But none of these Hindu and Buddhist clerical communities survived into the modern era, and as a result we know little of their relation to popular Javanese religion. For years scholars have lamented the dearth of primary materials on popular Javanese Hinduism both during and after the fall of the last of Java's major Hindu-Buddhist courts, Majapahit. At the height of its power during the second half of the fourteenth century, Majapahit was conquered by an alliance of Islamic principalities in the early sixteenth century.
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References
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9 Funding for research in the Tengger highlands from 1978–80 was supplied by a Fulbright Dissertation Grant and The University of Michigan Rackham Pre-Doctoral Research Fund. Post-doctoral research in 1985 was supported by Fulbright and the Social Science Research Council. Research was sponsored in Indonesia by the National Language Center (Pusat Bahasa) and the Indonesian Academy of Sciences (LIPI). I would like to acknowledge with appreciation the critical input and assistance of my husband and co-worker in the region, Robert Hefner. His work detailing political, religious, and economic change in Tengger (Hefner, “Ritual and Cultural Reproduction in Non-Islamic Java”, Hindu-Javanese, The Political Economy of Mountain Java) has served as the context and inspiration for much of my own work on Tengger religious texts and ritual traditions. I would also like to thank Pak Y. Padmapuspita of Taman Siswa who very patiently worked through the initial translation of the pembaron text with me. His experience with Sanskrit, Old Javanese, and Balinese literature proved invaluable in deciphering the often fragmented Tengger text.
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21 I recognized the handwriting from a number of the other texts I had collected in northeastern Tengger villages. I was able to discover very little about Pak Ngadiyem, however, aside from the fact that he was a farmer who worked part-time as a “scribe” and had been dead for many years.
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26 I transliterated the text from the original Javanese script, keeping its form as close as possible to the original. I have chosen not to “correct” the text, but leave for the reader the possibility of alternate interpretations. I realize that the resulting orthography is somewhat non-standard; it is, however, a closer reflection of the general form of the Tengger priestly liturgy, much of which has already been transliterated into Roman script. It also more closely reflects the pronunciation of the local dialect. Hulun, for example, is pronounced by the priests as hulun (not ulun); hong is pronounced similarly. Finally, I have added a minimum of capitalization and punctuation, only to assist the reader in following the text.
27 Both the Indian Mahabharata and various Old Javanese texts make mention of a sand sea which must be crossed by those on their way towards hell. In the Middle Javanese Tantri Kamandaka it is a place in the infernal regions underneath the seven hells, consisting of dung and urine, in which snakes, worms, leeches and other vermin live [Gonda, Jan, Sanskrit in Indonesia (Nagpur, India: The International Academy of Indian Culture, 1952), p. 148Google Scholar.]
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