Threads of the Unfolding Web: The Old Javanese Tantu Panggêlaran trans. by Stuart Robson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Threads of the Unfolding Web: The Old Javanese Tantu Panggêlaran trans. by Stuart Robson Peter Carey Stuart Robson (Trans.) with a commentary by Hadi Sidomulyo. Threads of the Unfolding Web: The Old Javanese Tantu Panggêlaran. Singapore: ISEAS, Yusof Ishak Institute, 2021. This remarkable book contains the first English translation of the Old Javanese Tantu Panggelaran (henceforth TP), a text that seems to have been compiled from oral sources circulating in East Java in the 15th century. No dates or author are mentioned in the lontar (palm-leaf) texts used here except for one colophon referring to AD 1635 (page 4). Unlike the much better known Deśawarnana (Description of the districts) alias Nagarkrtāgama (1365) of Mpu Prapañca, depicting the royal progress of the celebrated Majapahit ruler Hayam Wuruk (r. 1350–89), or the other kakawin (kawi) narrative poems set in the context of the 12th–15th-century East Javanese courts, the TP's focus is Java's still untamed countryside. The mountains and mandala (abodes of religious communities belonging to the tradition of the resi or sages) of Central and East Java are its particular concern. Instead of Majapahit, the text looks back over two centuries to the kingdom of Kediri (1042–ca. 1222) as the backdrop for its allegorical tale of the history of Śaiwism and the spread of Bhairava Śaiwite hermitages in Java. The TP starts at the very beginning, describing the original peopling of Java and the fixing of the island's labile foundations, which caused it continually to move up and down. This unfortunate circumstance was remedied by the actions of the gods. On the instructions of the supreme deity, Bhatāra Guru, they brought the top half of ancient India's sacred mountain, Mt. Mahameru, from "Jambudipa" (India) over to "Yawadipa" (Java) to weigh down the two ends of "Java." Here, significantly, these are just the two ends of the Javanese-speaking (kejawen) areas starting in Central Java in the vicinity of the Dieng Plateau, where the stump of Mt. Mahameru came to rest in the form of Mt. Kelāsa,1 and extending to the very tip of Java's eastern salient, in particular the Hyang Massif between Probolinggo and Lumajang. TP's Java is thus not the whole island. This is understandable because at the time and well into the early nineteenth century, "Java" was the kejawen. West Java, namely the Priangan (parahyangan "abode of the spirits") highlands and the Sundanese-speaking kingdom of Pajajaran, roughly contemporary with Majapahit, were both foreign entities in the Javanese view.2 Indeed, when the Java War (1825–30) leader, Prince Diponegoro (1785–1855), left Semarang on the first stage of his journey into exile in Sulawesi (Celebes) on April 5, 1830, he wrote in his autobiographical chronicle that he was "leaving Java."3 But such astral journeys involving cloud-topped masses of rock and earth were not without their hazards even for the Hindu-Javanese deities: as the great bulk of Mahameru's top half was being transported further east from Dieng, the holy mountain [End Page 175] began to crumble, falling to earth and giving birth to a series of peaks in the great chain of volcanoes from Mt. Lawu to Mt. Bromo, where Mahameru's remnants finally come to rest propped upright against Bromo's spacious caldera. Interestingly, this tale of the formation of Java's mountainous spine remained embedded in popular memory in East Java in the trope that the island's volcanoes were the "shadow" of the Himalayas.4 With the fixing of Java's foundations and the appearance of the first inhabitants of Java, the TP describes how more gods and holy sages were summoned to aid in the development of civilization. The practical expression of this process involved Śiwa as the Lord Iśwara acting as gurudeśa (teacher of village headmen). He was instructed by the supreme deity to establish the various branches of learning, including language and ethics, while the divine architect, Wiśwakarma, was responsible for the art of carpentry, Lord Mahādewa for that of goldsmith, and the skills of the painter were introduced by Mpu Ciptangkara, an incarnation of...