Siva and Buddha in the East Indian Archipelago

Abstract

Whoever examines from which standpoint we in present-day scholarship are in the habit of considering the problem of the origin, the development and the significance of the Hindu-Javanese religious syncretism, soon becomes certain that it has undergone no essential changes since Professor Kern, now nearly forty years ago, gave his well-known Academy lecture “On the blending of Sivaism and Buddhism in Java, based on the Old Javanese poem Sutasoma”.¹ The real aim that Kern set before himself in writing this treatise, was to show the untenability of Hodgson’s contention that there is no reason to interpret the striking agreement, (also noticed by this scholar himself in Nepal, the country where he lived), between all kinds of symbols of Buddhism and Sivaism as indicative of a strong Sivaistic influence in the northern section of the Buddhist church. Kern produced irrefutable proof that the Sivaistic influence had been present in no small degree, and in doing this, used data from widely-separated periods and countries. In the first place, he drew attention to clear evidence from India itself, and pointed out that, as early as the 7th century, the orthodox monks of Orissa regarded the Mandyânistic Buddhism as little better than a Sivaist heresy; but — as the title of his lecture shows — later in his argument it was principally data from the literature and culture of mediaeval Java which he brought forward to substantiate his point of view. Since Professor Kern in this way attached equal conclusive force to all these phenomena separated by such distances in time and space, in the problem with which he was engaged, the impression could arise that he regarded them everywhere as completely equal in force, and that he presumed, for instance, a direct genetic connection between the relationship between Buddhism and Hinduism, as it was in Java in the time of Madjajahit, and influences at work many centuries earlier in India.

“It is the duty of one who attempts to analyse a culture to formulate a mechanism whereby an introduced element of culture has become part of the complex in which it is now found”.

W. H. R. Rivers, The History of Melanesian Society, (1914), vol. II, 4.