The significant number of Buddhist temples dating from the eighth and ninth centuries in Central Java, Indonesia, has been associated with the rise of the Sailendra (Lord of the Mountain) family, credited with establishing Buddhism in modern Indonesia and constructing, among other temples, the world-famous Borobuḍur.
Writing an ancient history of Indonesia
In the early stages of their studies of the Sailendra family, scholars noticed that two Central Javanese inscriptions written in Sanskrit in the late eighth century contained a brief narrative of the Sailendras’s Buddhist activities; this activity was roughly contemporaneous with the period when most Buddhist monuments in Central Java were beginning to be built. Thus, most scholars believe this to be the moment when the Sailendras first appeared in Javanese history. However, it is still unclear how they suddenly appeared without any hint of their presence prior to 778, when the Sailendra family is first mentioned in a Sanskrit inscription.
In fact, the existence of the Sailendra family can be traced back to the seventh century by looking at various Chinese sources, such as Ouyang Xiu’s Xin Tang shu
However, this theory of considering the Sailendras as Indian immigrants was soon rejected by scholars who sought the origin of the Sailendras in Malaysia, Cambodia, or Java. George Coedès, an eminent scholar in the field, tried to relate the Sailendras with Funan, an ancient kingdom in southern Cambodia, by arguing that the name of the kingdom, Funan (its ancient pronunciation is bu-nam), bears a meaning of “mountain” in Khmer and is related to “Sailendra,” meaning “king of the mountain.”
Most Indonesian scholars have tried to find the Sailendras’s origin in the local context by using the inscription discovered in 1963 at Sodjomerto, Central Java, as evidence. This inscription, written in Old Malay, mentions a person, an ardent Sivaite, named Selenda with a title of dapunta. The historian Sidi Ibrahim Boechari, who first reported this inscription, suggested that Selenda could have been an Indonesianized form of Sailendra. The inscription is sometimes dated back to as early as the fifth or sixth century, yet it is reasonable to date it to the seventh to early eighth centuries, if one considers its paleographical characteristics. If this interpretation is correct, the inscription at Sodjomerto could be considered as valuable evidence to prove the fact that the Sailendra family was locally evolved and converted from Hinduism to Buddhism at some point. For now, however, the question of the Sailendras’s origin must be left open until further studies can provide more information on their political, economic, and artistic activities.
Although scholars still do not have exact dates of when the Sailendras founded their kingdom, two Sanskrit inscriptions discovered in Central Java clearly show that the Buddhist Sailendras already were powerful enough in Central Java to build many astonishing Buddhist temples from the late eighth century. The earliest inscription was discovered in the village of Kalasan, to the east of Yogyakarta. It tells about a group of people who met in 778 to build a Tārā temple on a site that had been granted by the Sailendra kings in a village named Kālasa. These Sailendra kings called themselves rājasimha (the lion of kings) and appointed three local officials as witnesses to this gathering. At the end of the inscription, it is written that Mahārāja (a great king) Panamkarana
The second inscription, dated to 782, also contains the word “Sailendra.” This inscription, called the Kelurak inscription, was discovered north of Candi Loro Jonggrong in Prambanan (Central Java). Interestingly, it designates a specific Sailendra king, Sanggrāmadhanaňjaya
In addition to these two early inscriptions, much Buddhist architecture
How to define the relationship of the Sailendra rulers with their neighboring kingdoms is another focus of study. The unfinished Sanskrit inscription discovered at Ligor (775) on the Malay Peninsula suggests that the kings from Śrivijaya
However, many unanswered questions remain to call this interpretation into question: whether the two sides of the inscription were contemporaneously written, who the two kings mentioned in the inscription were, and how these two kings were related. Unfortunately, none of these questions has been answered clearly. Many scholars have attempted to connect the identities of the two kings with rulers mentioned in other inscriptions, such as the Kalasan and Kelurak inscriptions and the Nalanda Copper Plate (c. 860); yet, the interpretation of the Ligor inscription and the definition of the Sailendras’s relation to the Sumatran kingdom are still open to discussion.
The emergence of the Sailendra family in Indonesian history had a major impact on the establishment of Buddhism
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Coedès, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. Edited by Walter F. Vella, translated by Sue Brown Cowing. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968. A history of Southeast Asia from the beginning of the Christian era up to the early sixteenth century, written by an eminent historian in the field who used extensive Chinese and Sanskrit sources. -
Fontein, Jan. The Sculpture of Indonesia. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990. The catalog for a 1990 exhibition, including three very good introductory essays on Indonesian art and architecture by three eminent scholars. -
Sakar, H. B. Corpus of the Inscriptions of Java up to 928 A.D. Vols. 1-2. Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1971. Useful if somewhat dated; includes full translations of major Javanese inscriptions to 928. Footnotes. -
Tarling, Nicholas, ed. From Early Times to c. 1800. Vol. 1 in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. An excellent survey of Southeast Asian history with several different thematic approaches.