Sailendra Dynasty

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On the Kedu Plain of central Java, ringed by volcanoes and watered by the rivers that run down from them, a line of kings who called themselves lords of the mountain spent roughly a century turning the volcanic stone of the plain into the architecture of awakening. Śailendra is Sanskrit — śaila, the mountain; indra, the lord — and the title fits a country where the mountains are the dominant fact of the horizon and the soil they shed is the richest in the archipelago. From the middle of the eighth century to the middle of the ninth, the Sailendra house was the great Buddhist power of Java, and the monuments it raised in that short span include Borobudur, the largest Buddhist structure in the world. The dynasty did not invent the kingdom it ruled, did not rule it alone, and did not hold it to the end. What it left was stone: a mountain of dressed andesite built to be climbed, and a scatter of inscriptions, mostly in Sanskrit cut in a North Indian hand, that fix its kings in time and name the gods they served.

A dynasty within a kingdom

The Sailendra were not a kingdom but a dynasty — one royal house among those that governed the polity the charters call Medang i Bhumi Mataram, the ancient Mataram or Medang kingdom of central Java. (This eighth-to-tenth-century Hindu-Buddhist Mataram is wholly distinct from the Islamic Mataram Sultanate that rose in the same region eight centuries later; the two share a place-name and nothing else.) Within that kingdom two lines are visible in the epigraphic record, and they served different gods. The Sanjaya line, whose founder set up a Shaivite linga on the hill of Gunung Wukir in the Canggal inscription of 732, was a house of Shiva; its later works are tied to the great compound of Prambanan, where the central tower rises to Shiva as lord of the Trimurti. The Sailendra line was a house of the Buddha — specifically of the Mahayana, the Great Vehicle, with a pronounced esoteric cast. For a few decades in the early ninth century the two confessions stood side by side on the same plain, raising the largest surviving monuments of Buddhism and of Hinduism in all of maritime Southeast Asia within sight and a generation of one another.

How the two houses were related is the central problem of Sailendra history, and it is genuinely unsettled. One reconstruction, associated with George Cœdès and F. D. K. Bosch, treats them as rival families — the Buddhist Sailendra as relative newcomers, perhaps from Sumatra or even further afield, who for a time displaced or overshadowed the older Shaivite Sanjaya before the balance swung back. A more recent reading folds both into a single ruling kindred whose patronage simply shifted, ruler by ruler and marriage by marriage, between the two faiths — so that what looks like dynastic rivalry is the religious latitude of one extended royal family. The evidence permits both, because the inscriptions name kings and gods and pious foundations but rarely the lines of descent that would settle the matter, and because a Javanese king could carry several names at once, each surfacing in a different stone.

The name in the inscriptions

The dynasty announces itself in a tight cluster of Sanskrit charters, and the script they use is itself an argument. Where the Sanjaya wrote in the Kawi letters of Java, the early Sailendra documents are cut in a North Indian Nagari-derived hand, the script of the Buddhist heartland of Bengal and Bihar — a graphic signature of where these kings looked for their religion.

The earliest dated inscription found in central Java to name the house is the Kalasan inscription of 778, in Sanskrit. It records the foundation of a temple to the goddess Tara — the bodhisattva of compassionate rescue, the female saving presence of esoteric Mahayana — built at the urging of the Sailendra preceptors, together with a monastery for the monks who would serve her, and it styles the reigning king śailendravaṃśatilaka, the ornament of the Sailendra line. That king is Panangkaran, who carries in other stones the consecration-name Tejahpurnapana and the regnal title Vishnuvardhana, and who reigned from about 746 to 784. The temple still stands as Candi Kalasan, its shrine raised over the worship of a saving goddess, the first dated monument of a Buddhist century.

Four years later the Kelurak inscription of 782 consecrates an image of Manjusri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, under a king styled Sri Sangramadhananjaya — almost certainly the ruler later sources call Dharanindra or Indra — again named an ornament of the Sailendra house. The Kelurak text names the officiating teacher: a guru called Kumaraghosa, come from Gaudidvipa, which F. D. K. Bosch identified as Gauda, the heart of Bengal under the Pala emperors. This is the living artery of Sailendra Buddhism made visible — a Bengali master, schooled in the Pala monastic universities where the esoteric Vehicle was then at its height, presiding over the dedication of a wisdom-bodhisattva in central Java. The same temple complex the Kelurak charter inaugurates was originally named Manjusrigrha, the House of Manjusri, as a later inscription of 792 confirms; it survives as Candi Sewu, the largest Buddhist temple on Java after Borobudur itself.

Beyond Java the name reaches across the sea. The Ligor inscription, cut on a stone at Nakhon Si Thammarat on the Malay Peninsula, has two faces; the older, dated 775, records a king of Srivijaya founding a monastery with three sanctuaries, and the companion face invokes a king of the Sailendra line. The single dynastic name binding a Sumatran sea-empire, a peninsular port, and the temples of the Kedu Plain is the spine of the whole Sailendra question.

The temples of the Kedu Plain

What the inscriptions frame, the monuments fill. In the space of two or three generations the Sailendra court covered the plains of central Java with Buddhist architecture of the first rank. Candi Kalasan to Tara, Candi Sewu — Manjusrigrha — to Manjusri, the smaller Candi Mendut and Candi Pawon set on a straight line running west to the great monument, and, crowning the program, Borobudur.

Borobudur is the argument of the dynasty made permanent. Raised across the decades around 800, completed under the ruler Samaratungga in the early ninth century, it is a stepped pyramid of nine terraces with no inner chamber at all — a solid mountain of stone meant to be walked upon and around rather than entered. More than a kilometer of carved galleries carries the climber up through a curriculum in stone: the law of act and consequence on the buried base, the life of the Buddha and his former lives on the lower square terraces, and across the upper galleries the Gandavyuha, the great Mahayana pilgrimage-scripture of the youth Sudhana seeking awakening from teacher after teacher. Above the storied square terraces the round platforms stand almost bare, ringed with latticed bell-stupas each veiling a seated Buddha, rising to a single sealed stupa at the summit — desire, form, and the formless laid out as a path a body can climb. A charter of 824, the Karangtengah inscription, names Samaratungga and records a sacred building inaugurated by his daughter Pramodawardhani; another, the Tri Tepusan inscription of 842, endows a foundation called Bhumisambhara, which J. G. de Casparis read as the original name of the monument — the mountain of the accumulation of virtue, the heaped merit of the bodhisattva’s stages. The reading is not certain, and no foundation stone survives to name the monument’s patron beyond doubt, but the name fits the building exactly: a mountain of merit, climbed by stages.

This was not the cult of a remote and abstract Buddha. The deities of the Sailendra foundations — Tara the saving goddess, Manjusri the sword of wisdom, the cosmic Buddha Vairocana whose mandala the upper terraces of Borobudur appear to model — are the figures of the esoteric, mandala-and-mantra current of the Mahayana, the same Vehicle of the diamond-thunderbolt that the masters of Srivijaya were relaying north toward Tang China in exactly these decades. The Sailendra plain was a node on a Buddhist world-network that ran from the Pala monasteries of Bengal, through the Sumatran ports, to the esoteric schools of East Asia, and the gods carved into the andesite of Java were the gods of that whole circuit.

The turn of the plain

The confessional balance of central Java tipped within a single famous marriage. Pramodawardhani, the Sailendra princess of the Karangtengah charter, was joined to Rakai Pikatan, a prince of the Shaivite Sanjaya line. The union has been read both ways the dynasty itself can be read — as the reconciliation of two faiths within one kindred, or as the absorption of the Buddhist house into the Shaivite one. What is clear is the aftermath. The Shivagrha inscription, dated to 12 November 856, commemorates a war waged by Pikatan against a rival entrenched in a fortress of heaped stone — long identified with the hilltop site of Ratu Boko — and goes on to describe the dedication of a great Shaivite temple complex that answers to Prambanan. After 856 the plain is unmistakably Shiva’s; the age of Sailendra Buddhist building on Java is over.

The losing claimant in that struggle is traditionally named as Balaputra, a Sailendra prince — by one reading the youngest son of Samaragrawira, by another of Samaratungga — born of a queen named Tara, daughter of a maharaja of Srivijaya. (Some scholars now place a different rival, the lord of Walaing, at the head of the revolt and read Balaputra’s departure as less a defeat than a relocation.) Either way, Balaputra passed out of Java and into Sumatra, where the same dynastic blood already ran in the royal house, and there became maharaja of Suvarnadvipa, the golden isle. From that throne he reached back across the Bay of Bengal: the Nalanda copper-plate of about 860 records the Pala emperor Devapala granting the revenue of five villages to endow a monastery built at the great Indian university of Nalanda at the request of Balaputradeva, king of Suvarnadvipa, of the Sailendra line. A king descended from the builders of Borobudur, ruling a Sumatran sea-empire and founding a college at the most famous monastery in India, with a North Indian emperor as his instrument — a single document closes the circuit the Kelurak guru opened: the Bengali learning came to Java, and a Javanese-Sumatran dynasty endowed it back at the source.

The Sumatran tie and the wider sea

The Balaputra plate is the hardest evidence for the link the dynasty’s whole shape implies — that the Sailendra of Java and the maharajas of Srivijaya in Sumatra were one royal blood, joined by marriage and, after 856, by the migration of a defeated or relocated prince into the Sumatran throne. The marriage of Balaputra’s mother Tara, daughter of a Srivijayan king, points the same way before the war; the shared Sailendra name on the Ligor stone points to it across the sea. Whether the dynasty’s roots lay in Sumatra all along — the Old Malay Sojomerto inscription of north-coastal Java names a Shaivite forebear, Dapunta Selendra, whose very title echoes the Srivijayan kings and whose language is Sumatran — or whether the link was forged later by marriage, the eventual result is the same: a single dynastic identity straddling the strait, with its monuments on Java and its maritime empire on Sumatra.

The currents that fed this Buddhism were oceanic and intercontinental. Bengal supplied the gurus and the script; the Pala realm was the doctrinal headwater. Across the same waters the South Indian Chola kings traded and, in the eleventh century, raided. On the mainland the contemporaries were the temple-mountain civilization of the Khmer, whose god-kings would later raise Angkor Wat on a wholly different logic — a walled cosmos entered inward toward a sanctuary, against Borobudur’s solid mountain ascended from without; the brick towers of Champa on the Vietnamese coast; and the Mon Buddhist culture of Dvaravati in the Chao Phraya basin. Behind all of them lay the deep predecessor of the India-facing entrepôt, Funan on the lower Mekong, whose commercial role Srivijaya inherited. The Sailendra plain was Java’s chapter in this shared Indic world — Sanskrit, the bodhisattvas, the mandala-temple — bent to a Javanese purpose and cut into volcanic rock.

The textual and scholarly record

The Sailendra are known almost entirely through their stones, and the modern reconstruction of the dynasty is the work of epigraphy. The foundational corpus is J. G. de Casparis’s Prasasti Indonesia — the first volume of 1950 devoted to inscriptions of the Sailendra era, the second of 1956, Selected Inscriptions from the 7th to the 9th Century A.D. — in which de Casparis edited the Karangtengah and Tri Tepusan charters and argued that Bhumisambhara was the original name of Borobudur. The Sanskrit material was gathered again by Himansu Bhusan Sarkar in his Corpus of the Inscriptions of Java (1971-72). The framework into which these texts were first set is George Cœdès’s Les états hindouisés d’Indochine et d’Indonésie, in English The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968), the synthesis that also established Srivijaya as a fixed point of the regional past. The vexed question of the dynasty’s origins and its relation to both Srivijaya and the Sanjaya line is argued at length in Roy Jordaan and Brian Colless’s The Maharajas of the Isles (2009), which presses the case for an integral Sailendra-Srivijaya identity.

The dynasty’s foreign reach is documented in single, decisive charters. The Sailendra origin-debate and the Sumatran connection turn on the Kalasan inscription of 778 and on the two-faced Ligor inscription of 775, which alone ties the dynastic name to the Malay Peninsula and Srivijaya; the climactic proof of the line’s continuity into Sumatra is the Nalanda copper-plate of Devapala, in which Balaputradeva of Suvarnadvipa endows a monastery at the great Pala-protected university. The doctrinal world these kings served — the Perfection of Wisdom, the bodhisattva path, the emptiness that the upper terraces of Borobudur translate into stone — can be read in the older Mahayana scriptures gathered in F. Max Müller’s Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts in the Sacred Books of the East. Recent epigraphic work, reading the North Indian scripts of the Javanese charters as evidence of direct contact with the Pala Buddhist tantric world, has sharpened the older intuition that the Sailendra plain was not a periphery of that world but one of its working stations.

What the stone keeps

The Sailendra house lost central Java in the middle of the ninth century, and within a few generations more the center of Javanese power drained eastward toward the Brantas valley, where later kingdoms — the East-Javanese houses that ran down through Singhasari to Majapahit — would carry the Indic kingship of the archipelago into its imperial age. The Kedu Plain fell quiet; Borobudur slipped under ash and forest; the cult of Tara and Manjusri gave way on the plain to Shiva and, in time, to other faiths entirely.

But the dynasty’s purpose was never the dynasty. A house that titles itself lords of the mountain and then builds a mountain to be climbed by stages toward release has stated its measure of itself in advance. The kings are recovered names — Panangkaran, Indra, Samaratungga, Balaputra — but the thing they were assembled to make stands finished on its plain: a curriculum of awakening cut into a hundred thousand blocks of stone, every gallery a doctrine and every terrace a stage, the whole of it a single instruction to walk upward until the carved world falls away and only the bare ring of stupas and the open sky remain. The kings climbed into the inscriptions; their mountain is still climbed every year.

→ In the library: Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts (SBE 49 — Müller et al., 1894)

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