The present chapter, which continues the account of religious developments in Southeast Asia from about 1500, is divided into five sections. The first draws on the European source material that becomes available in the sixteenth century to survey important features of indigenous beliefs as they were practised in areas then little touched by the world religions. An examination of the advance of Islam and Christianity, destined to have such fundamental effects on the evolution of island Southeast Asia, makes up the second and third sections. It will become apparent that the manner in which these newer religions adapted to the local context in many respects resembles the previous infusion of Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian ideas already discussed in Chapter 5. The fourth section therefore takes up several themes common across the region as the world religions extended and consolidated their position. The chapter closes with an overview of the eighteenth century, identified as a time when unprecedented pressures, both internal and external, created new demands in Southeast Asia’s religious environment.

INDIGENOUS BELIEFS

An important contribution to our understanding of indigenous beliefs comes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as European missionaries began to move into areas of eastern Indonesia and the Philippines which had to this point been relatively isolated from external religious ideas. Despite their obvious cultural bias, the accounts missionaries compiled provide the historian with the first sustained contemporary descriptions of native religious customs outside a court environment.