Part 1.2 - Hinduism in Indonesia

The natives of the Indonesian archipelago practice indigenous animism and dynamism, beliefs common to the Austronesian people. Indigenous Indonesians venerated ancestral spirits; they also believed that some spirits may inhabit certain places, such as tall trees, stones, forests, mountains, or any sacred place. This invisible spiritual entity that has supernatural power is identified by the ancient Javanese, Sundanese and Balinese as "hyang" which can mean divine or ancestral. In modern Indonesian, "hyang" tends to associate with God.^[1]

Hindu influences reached the Indonesian archipelago in the first century. Historical evidence is unclear about the process of disseminating India's cultural and spiritual ideas. The legends of Java refer to the Saka era, which dates back to 78 AD. The stories of the epic Mahabharata were traced on the islands of Indonesia until the first century; whose versions reflect those found in the peninsular region of south-east India (now Tamil Nadu and southern Andhra Pradesh). Javanese prose works Tantu Pagelaran of the 14th century, which is a collection of ancient tales, arts and crafts of Indonesia, widely used Sanskrit words, the names of Indian deities and religious concepts. Similarly, the ancient chandi (temples) excavated in Java and the western islands of Indonesia, as well as ancient inscriptions that the Canggal inscription of the eighth century, discovered in Indonesia, confirm the widespread adoption of Shiva iconography Lingam, his companion of the goddess Parvati, Ganesha, Vishnu, Brahma, Arjuna and other Hindu deities in the middle or at the end of the first millennium AD. The ancient Chinese records of Fa Hien on his return trip from Ceylon to China in AD 414 mention two schools of Hinduism in Java.^[2]

The two main theories for the arrival of Hinduism in Indonesia include traders from the South Indian Sea to Hinduism, and, secondly, that the Indonesian royal family has embraced Indian religions and culture, and it is they who first adopted these spiritual ideas followed by the masses. The islands of Indonesia adopted both Hindu and Buddhist ideas, merging them with pre-existing indigenous folk religion and animistic beliefs. In the fourth century, the kingdom of Kutai in East Kalimantan, Tarumanagara in West Java and Holing (Kalingga) in Central Java, were among the first Indian states established in the region. Excavations between 1950 and 2005, especially in Cibuaya and Batujayasites suggest that Tarumanagara worshiped the god Wisnu (Vishnu)

Old Hindu Hindu kingdoms of Java built many square river temples, called on Gomati Island and Ganges, and carried out important irrigation projects and infrastructure.

Several prominent Indonesian Hindu kingdoms have been Mataram, famous for building one of the largest Hindu temple complexes in the world: the Prambanan Temple, followed by Kediri and Singhasari.

Rishi Agastya, for example, is described as the main figure of the Javanese text of the eleventh century Agastya parva; the text includes puranas, and a mixture of ideas from the Samkhya and Vedanta schools of Hinduism.^[3]

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

McDaniel, June (August 1, 2010). "Aagama Hindu Dharma Indonesia as a New Religious Movement: Hinduism Recreated in the Image of Islam". Nova Religio. 14 (1): 93–111. doi:10.1525/nr.2010.14.1.93.

[2]:

McDaniel, June (August 1, 2010). "Aagama Hindu Dharma Indonesia as a New Religious Movement: Hinduism Recreated in the Image of Islam". Nova Religio. 14 (1): 93–111. doi:10.1525/nr.2010.14.1.93.

[3]:

John Guy (2014), Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia, Metropolitan Museum of Art, ISBN 978-0300204377, pp. 130-135