Prambanan

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Prambanan is a ninth-century Hindu temple compound on the fertile plain of central Java, near present-day Yogyakarta, raised in honor of the Trimurti — Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma — and dominated by a steep central shrine to Shiva that rises some forty-seven meters above the inner court and remains the tallest Hindu structure in Indonesia. It stands a short distance from the great Mahayana monument of Borobudur, the two raised within a century of one another by neighboring powers, so that the same stretch of Javanese country holds the largest surviving works of both religions in the maritime Southeast Asian world. To the local imagination the central tower long carried the name Loro Jonggrang, the slender maiden — a legend attached to the stone goddess in its northern chamber, of which more below.

The Mataram kingdom and the 856 inscription

The compound belongs to the kingdom that ruled the rice plains of the Kedu and Kewu basins through the eighth and ninth centuries, the Hindu-Buddhist polity of Mataram, also called Medang, whose courts patronized in turn the Buddhist foundations of the Sailendra line and the Shaiva sanctuaries of the rulers who followed. A stone slab found near the site, inscribed in 778 of the Saka era — 856 of the Common Era — and known from its opening words as the Shivagrha, the “house of Shiva,” records the dedication of a great sanctuary to that god, together with the diversion of a river to run past its walls. It is generally read as the consecration text of Prambanan itself, set up in the reign of the ruler whom the inscriptions name Rakai Pikatan and his successors. The slab praises a temple unmatched in the realm, attended by lesser shrines beyond counting, and the boast is not idle: what it describes answers closely to the plan that survives in tumbled and reassembled stone. Construction and enlargement continued under later kings of the dynasty, so that the compound as its abandonment found it was the work of several reigns rather than a single campaign.

The dedication has a political edge that the inscriptions only half conceal. The same century that raised Borobudur to the law of the Buddha saw the Shaiva line assert itself on the plain a few miles east, and the rise of the great Shiva-house has long been read as the architectural signature of that shift — not a war of creeds, for Javanese kingship moved easily between the two cults and intermarried across them, but a turn in royal patronage rendered in volcanic andesite. The two faiths were neighbors here in the most literal sense, and their monuments are the clearest measure of how a Javanese court held both within a single religious horizon.

The concentric plan

The design is built outward from a center in three nested enclosures, in the manner of the Indian temple-cosmos translated into a Javanese idiom of tiered, ascending masonry. The outermost court, a vast square, has all but vanished. Within it a second enclosure once held the rows of subsidiary chapels the Shivagrha boasts of — by the standard reckoning two hundred and twenty-four small shrines, the perwara, set in four concentric rows that stepped inward and upward toward the holy ground, so that the worshipper passed through a field of more than two hundred miniature towers before reaching the heart of the compound. Most of these lie today as low platforms and scattered blocks, too ruined to raise again.

The innermost court, a raised square terrace, carries the sixteen temples that give Prambanan its form. Three great towers stand in a north-south line, each sharply pitched and crowned with the ribbed, bulbous finial the Javanese builders favored, climbing in receding tiers like a stone flame. The largest, at the center, is the Shiva temple; to its north stands the temple of Vishnu, to its south that of Brahma, each lower than the central shrine in deliberate subordination to the supreme god the compound was raised to honor. Facing each of the three, across the narrow court, sits a smaller temple for the god’s mount — the bull Nandi before Shiva, the eagle Garuda before Vishnu, the sacred goose Hamsa before Brahma — so that each great god looks out across the court to the animal that bears him. Two further shrines, the apit or flanking temples, close the ends of the central avenue, and a scatter of minor structures complete the sixteen. The whole reads as a hierarchy made visible: the eye is drawn up and in, from the outer fields of small chapels to the three towers, and from the three to the one.

The Ramayana, read panel by panel

The Shiva and Brahma temples carry, along the inner faces of their balustrades, a continuous relief cycle drawn from the Ramayana, the Sanskrit epic of prince Rama’s war to recover his abducted wife Sita from the demon king of Lanka. The carving begins on the Shiva temple and is meant to be read in the direction of ritual circuit, the worshipper moving so as to keep the sanctuary on the right, mounting the steps and following the story panel by panel around the building — the council of the gods, the bending of the great bow, the exile to the forest, the golden deer and the abduction, the alliance with the monkey host, the building of the bridge to Lanka. Where the Shiva temple’s cycle breaks off the Brahma temple takes it up, carrying the war and its aftermath to their close. The Vishnu temple, opposite, carries a separate cycle drawn from the deeds of Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu — so that the reliefs of the three great shrines together stage the descents of the gods into the human world. The narrative is not decoration applied to a finished wall; it is the wall’s argument, a scripture cut in stone to be walked through, the building’s surface turned into a path of reading.

The figures are unmistakably Javanese in cast — the dress, the crowns, the courtly bearing, the dense foreground of trees and animals belong to the island and its art — even as the matter is wholly Indian. The same hand that knew the Sanskrit epic carved it in the idiom of a Javanese court, and the result is one of the great monuments of how an imported scripture was made native to a new soil.

The iconography of the Shiva temple

The central shrine is the densest concentration of meaning in the compound. It rises on a high base, its single inner stair climbing east to a cella in which stands a four-armed image of Shiva as Mahadeva, the supreme form, set upon a lotus pedestal — the focus toward which the whole plan converges. Three further chambers open from the body of the temple, and each holds a figure that fixes a face of the god’s world. In the northern chamber stands the goddess Durga as Mahishasuramardini, the slayer of the buffalo demon, planted with one foot on the dying beast and her many arms bristling with the weapons the gods lent her; it is this striking image that local tradition recast as Loro Jonggrang, the maiden of the legend who lent her name to the whole site. In the southern chamber sits the sage Agastya, the bearded ascetic who in Javanese reckoning carried the teaching of Shiva south across the sea — a figure of particular weight on the island, where he was honored as the patron of the southern transmission. The western chamber holds Ganesha, the elephant-headed son of Shiva, remover of obstacles and guardian of thresholds. The four together — Shiva at the center, Durga, Agastya, and Ganesha at the cardinal chambers — give the temple a complete Shaiva household in stone, the god flanked by his consort’s fiercest aspect, his son, and the sage who bore his word abroad.

Abandonment and ruin

Within a century or so of its completion the great court fell silent, and the reasons remain debated. The center of Javanese power shifted eastward in the tenth century, away from the volcanic heart of the island toward the valley of the Brantas, and the courts that had maintained the compound moved with it; some have proposed that an eruption of the nearby volcano, or the political disruption that followed one, hastened the move. Whatever the cause, the priests and the patronage withdrew, the chapels emptied, and the monsoon began its long work on the abandoned stone. Earthquakes — the plain sits among active faults beneath an active mountain — toppled the towers over the following centuries, until the compound lay as a field of tumbled blocks, its plan legible only to those who knew where to look. It was never wholly forgotten; the villagers of the plain kept the name and the legend, and the ruins drew the notice of the antiquarian surveyors who passed through the region. A survey was made in 1811 during the brief British administration of Java, and the Dutch colonial authorities cataloged the site across the nineteenth century, but for a long time the heaps were quarried for stone and left otherwise to the jungle.

Systematic reconstruction began only in the twentieth century. The work proceeded by anastylosis — the dismantling of a collapsed structure, the sorting of its original blocks, and their reassembly on a reinforced core, with new stone supplied only where the old was lost — a slow and exacting method that requires enough of the original fabric to survive to make the puzzle soluble. The central Shiva temple was raised again and dedicated in 1953; the Brahma and Vishnu temples and the three mount-temples followed over the decades that came after, while the hundreds of small perwara shrines, too fragmentary to rebuild, remain as platforms and stacked blocks awaiting stone that may never be found. Much of what now stands at Prambanan is therefore modern masonry raised on the ancient plan — a reassembly rather than a survival, the original design recovered from its own wreckage. In May 2006 a severe earthquake struck the Yogyakarta region, cracking and dislodging stone across the restored temples and closing the compound to visitors while the damage was shored and surveyed; the central towers held, but the event was a reminder that the ground beneath the monument has never stopped moving.

Java and the reach of Indian religion

Prambanan attests the reach of Indian religion across the Bay of Bengal into the maritime kingdoms of Southeast Asia, where the cults of Shiva and Vishnu and the law of the Buddha took root in courts that were not themselves Indian and produced temple art of an entirely local idiom. The phenomenon is broad and long: a Hindu sanctuary on Java in the ninth century, a Buddhist mountain a few miles off raised under the same dynasty, and three centuries later the colossal Vaishnava city of Angkor Wat on the Cambodian plain — each an independent flowering of Hinduism and Buddhism on soil far from the Ganges, carried not by conquest but by the slow traffic of merchants, priests, and the prestige of Sanskrit kingship. At Prambanan the sculptural program follows Indian iconography with precision — Shiva as the supreme form, Durga over the buffalo demon, Agastya the southern sage, the epic of Rama cut along the walls — while the architecture answers to a Javanese sense of the tiered, slender, upward sanctuary, the andesite towers climbing in ribbed tiers toward their bulbous crowns. The compound is at once wholly Hindu in its theology and wholly Javanese in its hand.

Scholarship and sources

The architectural record of Prambanan was first set in order by the Dutch archaeological service of the colonial period; the anastylosis method by which the temples were rebuilt was developed on Java across the same decades that saw the great campaigns at Borobudur. The standard modern survey of the central Javanese temples and their place in the landscape is Véronique Degroot’s Candi, Space and Landscape: A Study on the Distribution, Orientation and Spatial Organization of Central Javanese Temple Remains (Leiden, 2009), which maps the compound within the wider field of ninth-century foundations on the plain. The iconography and the contested reading of the Shivagrha inscription are treated at length in Roy Jordaan’s edited volume In Praise of Prambanan: Dutch Essays on the Loro Jonggrang Temple Complex (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1996), which gathers the foundational Dutch scholarship in translation. The site’s modern history as a heritage monument, and its standing alongside Borobudur, is documented in the UNESCO World Heritage nomination of 1991, under which the Prambanan Temple Compounds were inscribed. The Ramayana itself, the scripture the reliefs render, is available in the complete Victorian prose translation of Manmatha Nath Dutt (Calcutta, 1891–1894) and in the condensed verse of Romesh Chunder Dutt, Ramayana: The Epic of Rama, Prince of India (London, 1899), long the most accessible English rendering of the matter carved along the temple walls.

A living ground

Prambanan today leads a double life. It is a state heritage monument and a World Heritage site, fenced and ticketed, the central towers floodlit and the Ramayana epic staged each dry season as a ballet on an open-air platform within sight of the shrines. It is also, for the Hindus of Bali and the smaller Hindu communities of Java, a place of observance once more, where the festival of Nyepi and the rites of the Shaiva calendar are kept beneath towers their forebears raised. The two lives are not always easy with one another. The nation conserves the compound as a monument of its deep past; the faith that built it returns to it as a house of the gods; the worshippers who climb the steps come to a working sanctuary and not a ruin. The great annual ceremonies held there are recent revivals on an old ground.

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