Medang Kingdom (Mataram)

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Medang wrote itself into stone. Its rulers signed themselves rakai of one domain or another and maharaja of the whole; the records they cut into andesite and basalt call the realm Medang, sometimes Medang i Bhumi Mataram — Medang in the land of Mataram — and it is by both names that the polity is known. From roughly 732 to 1016 of the Common Era it was the dominant Hindu-Buddhist power of the island, the court under whose patronage rose the two greatest monuments of maritime Southeast Asia: the Mahayana terraces of Borobudur and, a few miles east across the same plain, the soaring Shaiva towers of Prambanan. The kingdom of Medang is the matrix in which those monuments stand. Its second name, Mataram, would be borrowed centuries later by an unrelated Islamic sultanate of the same plain — a coincidence of place-name, not a continuity of state.

The Canggal stone and the founding of Sanjaya

The realm enters the written record with a single inscribed pillar. On the slopes of Gunung Wukir, near Magelang, a stone bearing the date 654 of the Saka era — 732 of the Common Era — records in Sanskrit, cut in the rounded Pallava-derived letters that India’s scripts carried across the bay, the deeds of a king named Sanjaya. The Canggal inscription has him erect a lingga, the aniconic column of Shiva, upon a hill in the country it calls Kunjarakunja, and it sets the act on the noble island of Yava — Java — which it praises as rich in rice and gold. It opens with invocations to Shiva, then to Vishnu and Brahma in turn, the three powers of the godhead saluted at the realm’s first dated breath. It remembers a king Sanna before Sanjaya, a settled predecessor whose ordered land had fallen into disturbance, and presents Sanjaya as the restorer who took up the rule.

What Canggal fixes is not a date of conquest but a posture. From its first surviving sentence the kingdom is Indic in its forms and Shaiva at its center: a Javanese lord assuming the Sanskrit vocabulary of universal kingship, the chakravartin whose authority is sealed by the planting of the god’s emblem on a height. The posture was not new to the island — the earlier West Javanese kingdom of Tarumanagara, with its fifth-century Sanskrit stones, had already carried the lingga and the cult of the gods into the archipelago — but it is on the Kedu plain, under Sanjaya’s heirs, that Indic Java reaches its full monumental scale. Around that act would gather, over the next century, a court culture fluent in two ritual languages at once — the Sanskrit of the temple and the Old Javanese of the grant — and a dynastic memory that the later kings would be at pains to keep straight.

Two houses, one island: the Sailendra question

The most worried problem in the kingdom’s early history is whether it had one ruling line or two. Within a generation of Canggal a second name appears in the record. A stone at Kalasan, dated 778, written in Sanskrit but in a northern-Indian script, announces the building of a shrine to the goddess Tara — a sanctuary for a bodhisattvadevi, with a monastery for her monks — and it names, for the first time anywhere in Java, the Sailendra house: the ruler is styled Sailendravamsatilaka, the jewel of the Sailendra family. The Kalasan donor is the same Rakai Panangkaran whom the later king-lists set immediately after Sanjaya. So the man who succeeds the Shaiva founder is found, four decades on, endowing a great Buddhist foundation under a Sailendra title.

Out of this overlap two readings of the dynastic record have long contended. One account, associated with the Dutch scholar F.D.K. Bosch, takes the Shaiva line of Sanjaya and the Mahayana Sailendra — the builders of Borobudur, with their commercial and kin ties to the Sumatran thalassocracy of Srivijaya — as two distinct, contemporaneous houses sharing the Kedu plain, one Hindu and one Buddhist, in rivalry and alliance by turns. A second account, argued by the philologist Poerbatjaraka and drawing on the Old Malay Sojomerto inscription and the Sundanese chronicle Carita Parahyangan, collapses them: one Mataram kingdom and one Sailendra house, Shaiva in origin, within which a king such as Panangkaran could turn to the Buddha without founding a separate dynasty. The epigraphic ground is uneven enough to bear both reconstructions, and scholarship continues to weigh them.

What the stones make unambiguous is the religious texture itself. On a single fertile plain, within a few miles and a few decades, royal patronage raised the supreme Javanese monuments of both faiths — and the same families moved between them. The kingdom is the clearest instance in the archipelago of Hinduism and Buddhism held within one religious horizon, neither displacing the other, the Shaiva lingga and the Mahayana stupa raised by courts that intermarried across the divide.

Pikatan, Pramodhawardhani, and the turn to Shiva

That intermarriage is no abstraction. In the middle of the ninth century the record shows a Shaiva prince of the Sanjaya line, Rakai Pikatan, married to a Sailendra princess, Pramodhawardhani, the daughter of the Buddhist king Samaratunga under whom Borobudur reached completion. Their joint patronage is legible in the plain itself: the twin sanctuaries of Plaosan, a short walk north of the Shiva-house, carry Buddhist and Hindu forms side by side, a union of cults rendered in two adjacent compounds. The same reign saw the Shaiva interest assert itself in the patronage of the court. Pikatan’s name is bound to the rise of the great Shiva temple a few miles east, and a rupture within the ruling kindred: the Sailendra prince Balaputra, a son of Samaratunga and so kin to Pramodhawardhani, was defeated around the middle of the century and withdrew across the sea to Srivijaya, where he took the throne — the end of an independent Sailendra presence on Java.

This was not a war of creeds. Javanese kingship moved easily between Shiva and the Buddha, and the turn that the monuments record is a turn in the weight of royal favor, not a persecution. But after Pikatan the patronage of the paramount court runs decisively Shaiva, and the architectural signature of that turn is the temple that has become the kingdom’s emblem.

Prambanan: the house of Shiva

The Shivagrha inscription — its name the very word for the house of Shiva — is dated by chronogram to 856, and it describes the dedication of a temple compound to Shiva so magnificent that the realm held nothing to match it, attended by lesser shrines beyond counting, with a river turned from its course to run past the holy ground. Issued in the years just after Pikatan’s reign, under his successor Dyah Lokapala (Rakai Kayuwangi), it is read as the consecration record of Prambanan itself, and what it boasts of answers closely to the plan that survives in tumbled and re-erected stone.

The compound is built outward from a center in three nested squares, the Indian temple-cosmos translated into a Javanese idiom of tiered, ascending masonry. Its vanished outer enclosures once held some two hundred and twenty-four small shrines, the perwara, ranked in concentric rows that stepped inward and upward toward the holy ground. The raised inner terrace carries sixteen temples, and at their heart three great towers stand in a north-south line, each crowned with the ribbed Javanese finial — the central and tallest dedicated to Shiva, rising some forty-seven meters and remaining the loftiest Hindu structure in Indonesia; the others to Vishnu and to Brahma, the three powers of the godhead given three sanctuaries. Facing each across the court stands the shrine of its mount: the bull Nandi before Shiva, and the vehicles of the other two gods opposite their towers. Along the inner balustrade of the Shiva temple runs the relief cycle of the Ramayana, the epic carved as a continuous procession of stone, and in the northern chamber of that temple stands the image of Durga slaying the buffalo-demon — the figure that local memory renames Loro Jonggrang, the slender maiden, and folds into its own legend of a princess turned to stone.

Prambanan is the Shaiva counterpart and near-contemporary of Mahayana Borobudur, the two raised within a century of one another by neighboring powers, so that one stretch of Javanese country holds the largest surviving works of both religions in the maritime Southeast Asian world. Both are today living sanctuaries and protected World Heritage sites, tended by the Hindu and Buddhist traditions that hold them sacred still.

The kingship of the inscribed plain

Beneath the monuments lies an agrarian order legible in the hundreds of royal charters the kingdom left. Most Medang inscriptions are not dynastic boasts but grants of sima — arable wet-rice land, sawah, set apart by royal edict and freed from the ordinary tax in return for service or for the upkeep of a sanctuary. The bulk of the surviving epigraphy is, in effect, a record of villages being opened, irrigated, and bound to the temple economy: forest cleared, dry field converted to flooded paddy, the surplus of the volcanic soil channeled to support priests, foundations, and the court. The Kedu and Kewu plains, ringed by the cones of Merapi, Merbabu, Sumbing, Sindoro, Dieng, and Ungaran, were among the most productive rice country in the archipelago, and that fertility is what funded the masonry. A temple the size of Prambanan is the converted surplus of a thousand irrigated fields.

The kings ordered that surplus through a hierarchy of regional lords, each a rakai or samget of a named domain, beneath the maharaja. Two great charters preserve the dynasty’s own reckoning of its succession. The Mantyasih inscription of 907, issued by Sri Maharaja Rakai Watukura Dyah Balitung to make the village of Mantyasih a sima, lists the kings before him in order: Sanjaya, then Panangkaran, Panunggalan, Warak, Garung, Pikatan, Kayuwangi, Watuhumalang, and Balitung himself. A second charter, Wanua Tengah III of 908, gives a parallel king-list with reign-dates — fixing, among other things, Panangkaran’s accession to a day in October of 746 — and lets the two records be checked against each other. It is from these self-authored genealogies, rather than from any outside chronicle, that the line of Medang is known.

The move to the Brantas

In the early tenth century the center of the kingdom shifted bodily off the plain that had defined it. Around the years 924 to 929 a catastrophe struck Central Java that later Javanese memory called the pralaya, the dissolution — bound, in the reconstruction, to a great eruption of Merapi that buried the heart of the realm in ash, and to the mounting pressure of Srivijaya across the strait. Whatever the precise cause, the court abandoned the old highlands. Under Mpu Sindok the seat of the kingdom moved east in 929 to the valley of the Brantas, with a capital at Watugaluh near present-day Jombang, and Sindok founded a new ruling house, the Isyana line. The kingdom kept the name Medang; its monuments and its plain it left behind.

East Java was a different world — riverine and turned toward the sea-lanes rather than the inland rice-bowl — and Medang there became more frankly a maritime contender. Its last great king, Dharmawangsa Teguh, who ruled from about 990 to 1016, pressed the rivalry with Srivijaya to open war, launching a naval campaign against Palembang in 990 that failed to take the Sumatran capital. The retaliation was total: in 1016 a Srivijaya-backed vassal, Haji Wurawari of Lwaram, fell upon the Medang palace, killed Dharmawangsa and nearly the whole royal house, and ended the kingdom. The slaughter, too, the Javanese remembered as a pralaya.

From that wreckage one prince escaped — Airlangga, a nephew of the dead king and a son of the Balinese house of Udayana — who in exile gathered the scattered remnant and refounded the realm in East Java as Kahuripan, before withdrawing in 1045 to the ascetic’s life and dividing his kingdom between his heirs. The line that ran through Kahuripan into Kediri carried the Indic kingship of the Brantas valley forward, and it was on that eastern ground, two centuries later, that the Singhasari kingdom of Ken Arok and Kertanagara arose — out of whose fall, in turn, the empire of Majapahit was born. The Shaiva and Mahayana kingship that Medang had perfected on the Kedu plain thus passed eastward into the polities that would dominate the archipelago in the centuries to come, an inheritance held in common with the wider Indic order of Champa and the Khmer Empire across the South China Sea.

Sources and the study of Medang

The kingdom is recovered first from its own stones. The founding edict of Canggal (732) and the king-lists of Mantyasih (907) and Wanua Tengah III (908) supply the dynastic spine; the temple economy is read from the hundreds of sima charters in Sanskrit and Old Javanese. The keystone for Prambanan is the Shivagrha inscription of 856, edited and translated by Johannes G. de Casparis in the second volume of his Prasasti Indonesia (The Hague, 1956), the indispensable corpus of Central Javanese epigraphy, where the temple’s consecration and the diversion of the river are set out. The fullest scholarly gathering on the Shiva-house is the volume of translated Dutch studies edited by Roy E. Jordaan, In Praise of Prambanan (KITLV, 1996), which carries the foundational essays of N.J. Krom, W.F. Stutterheim, F.D.K. Bosch, and A.J. Bernet Kempers on the complex and the conditions of its making. The Sailendra problem turns on the Kalasan inscription of 778 and the Old Malay Sojomerto stone, debated in the long literature on Java’s two ninth-century houses. The temple compounds themselves are documented as a World Heritage site by UNESCO, which records their ninth-century dating and Trimurti dedication. Between the inscribed plain and the standing stone, Medang is among the best-documented of the early archipelagic kingdoms — a court that wrote its own genealogy and built its theology to a height that still measures the Javanese sky.

→ Related: Prambanan Temple · Borobudur Temple · Sailendra Dynasty · Tarumanagara · Singhasari Kingdom · Srivijaya · Majapahit · Champa · Khmer Empire · Hinduism · Buddhism · Shiva · Vishnu