Singhasari Kingdom

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A village smith named Mpu Gandring forged a dagger that he never finished hallowing, and that unfinished blade ran like a curse through four reigns. Its first owner, a man of obscure and probably brigand origins called Ken Arok, used it to kill the smith who made it, then the regent of Tumapel whose widow and lands he took, and then to make himself a king. In 1222 Ken Arok rode against Kertajaya, last ruler of the old Javanese kingdom of Kediri, and broke his army at the field of Ganter; with that victory the polity afterward known as Singhasari was founded, and the center of gravity of Java passed from the Brantas plain of Kediri to the volcanic uplands around modern Singosari, in the Malang district of east Java. Ken Arok took the throne-name Sri Ranggah Rajasa Sang Amurwabhumi and gave his name to a dynasty, the Rajasa line, that would rule first this kingdom and then, through his descendants, the greatest empire the archipelago had yet seen.

The cursed blade and the Rajasa line

The kingdom’s beginning is preserved less as chronicle than as a dark dynastic legend, set down generations later in the Old Javanese chronicle known as the Pararaton, the Book of Kings. Its early chapters read like a tragedy of inherited vengeance. Ken Arok had risen by murder, killing Tunggul Ametung, the lord of Tumapel, to seize his widow Ken Dedes and his office, and the cursed kris of Mpu Gandring was the instrument of that rise. The blade then turned on its wielder’s house. Anusapati, Ken Dedes’s son by the murdered Tunggul Ametung, learned how his father had died and had Ken Arok struck down with the same dagger around 1227. Ken Arok’s own son Tohjaya in turn killed Anusapati; Tohjaya’s brief and bloody reign collapsed within months of 1248 when the sons of the men he had wronged rose against him. Out of that wreckage came Wisnuwardhana, who ruled from 1248 until 1268 and at last gave the kingdom a generation of stability, reconciling the rival branches of the family and ruling for a time alongside a co-regent. He was remembered after death in the funerary temple of Candi Jago, his portrait-statue cast as the bodhisattva Amoghapasa among a crowded relief of attendant deities.

The Pararaton’s account cannot be read as flat fact — it is a court legend shaped by the dynasty that descended from Ken Arok and needed an ancestor at once formidable and fated — but the line of succession it gives is broadly confirmed by the kingdom’s own inscriptions and by the gallery of royal funerary temples scattered through the Malang valley, each enshrining a dead king as the god into which he had dissolved. Candi Kidal held the deified Anusapati; Candi Jago held Wisnuwardhana. The temples are the surest record the kingdom left of itself, and they record, above all, a theory of kingship in which the ruler does not merely serve the gods but becomes one.

Kertanagara, the divine king

The kingdom found its defining figure in Wisnuwardhana’s son and successor, Kertanagara, who reigned from 1268 until his death in 1292 and who concentrated in himself the whole ambition of the Rajasa line. Under him Singhasari ceased to be a regional successor-state and became, in the verdict of later historians, the first attempt at a Javanese empire reaching beyond the island itself. He was at once a conqueror, a diplomat, and an initiate, and these three faces were not separate careers but a single program: the gathering of the island world under a sacred center, with himself as its axis.

Kertanagara’s religion was the heart of his statecraft. He was consecrated into a tantric path that fused the cult of Shiva with the esoteric Buddhism of the Mahayana, the Shaiva-Buddhist synthesis the Javanese called Siwa-Buddha — a welding of the imported worlds of Hinduism and the Buddha-dharma in which Shiva and the Awakened One were held to be distinct in name and form yet undivided in essence. The doctrinal current behind his initiation was the tantra: the ritual and contemplative path explored across the subcontinent as Hindu tantra and carried in its Buddhist form by the great adepts, the mahasiddhas whose unorthodox attainment outside the monastery shaped the esoteric Buddhism that reached Java by sea. Kertanagara received a tantric consecration — a jinabhiseka, an anointing as a Jina or victorious one — and took a sacred name that itself fused the two lineages. The court poem of the next century, the Desawarnana, calls that name Jnanabajreswara; the Sanskrit inscription on the back of his own deified image gives it as Jnanasiwabajra, lord of the adamantine knowledge of Shiva; a later Singhasari inscription of 1351 renders it Jnaneswarabajra. Across all three the components are the same — knowledge, Shiva, and the vajra, the diamond-thunderbolt of the tantric Buddha — soldered into one royal title.

The cult expressed itself, as east Javanese religion always did, in stone, and the statuary of Kertanagara’s reign is among the most arresting that the archipelago produced. At its serene pole stands the Prajnaparamita of Java, a seated image of the goddess who is the Perfection of Wisdom, recovered near the Singosari temple complex and now in the National Museum of Indonesia — a figure of such poised and inward calm, hands folded in the gesture of teaching, that it is often taken as a portrait of a deified queen of the line in the form of the wisdom-goddess. At its terrible pole stood the cult of the wrathful deity. Kertanagara was consecrated, by a jinabhiseka rite, into the fierce Shiva-Buddha form of Bhairava — Shiva at his most fearful and the Buddhist Mahakala at once, the dagger and the skull-cup his emblems. (The colossal four-and-a-half-meter Bhairava often made the type-image of this tantrism, now in the National Museum of Indonesia, is in fact the later deified portrait of the fourteenth-century Sumatran-Malayu king Adityavarman, carried from Padang Roco; whether Kertanagara himself was ever rendered in so terrible a form is a case argued by Andrea Acri, not a documented fact.) Between serenity and violence — the title the art historian Natasha Reichle gave to her study of these works — the Siwa-Buddha cult held its two faces in a single program: wisdom enthroned and wisdom armed.

The funerary logic that governed the dynasty governed Kertanagara too, though in a peculiarly compressed form, for he was deified twice over. In 1289 the colossal seated Buddha now called the Joko Dolog — a Mahaksobhya, the immovable Buddha of the eastern direction — was carved and inscribed in his honor; the long Sanskrit text around its base, the Wurare inscription, records his consecration-name and the religious order of his realm. At the temple of Candi Jawi, near Pandaan, his ashes were enshrined under a sanctuary that is itself a Siwa-Buddha diagram, Shaiva below and Buddhist above, the dead king dissolved into both gods together. To enshrine a ruler as Shiva-and-Buddha was not flattery but a statement about the nature of the world: kingship was a religious office, the realm a consecrated order radiating from a divine center, and the king in death rejoined the godhead from which his authority had always flowed.

The reach toward the islands between

Kertanagara’s piety pointed outward. From early in his reign he framed his ambition in a Sanskrit cosmological term — a vision of the Cakravala Mandala Dwipantara, the disc-mandala of the islands that lie between, the archipelago imagined as a single sacred field with Singhasari at its hub. This was the political theology of the Khmer Empire and its god-kings, who had already raised the cosmos in the towers of Angkor Wat, translated to the sea: not a bordered state but a mandala of clients and tributaries acknowledging a consecrated center.

The instrument of the policy was the long campaign the Javanese remembered as the Pamalayu, the expedition against Malayu, launched in 1275 toward the Sumatran straits that had once been the heartland of the Buddhist maritime power of Srivijaya, by Kertanagara’s day a faded confederation harried by the Cholas of south India and by pirates. A force under the commander Kebo Anabrang was sent to bring the land of Malayu within the Javanese orbit and to secure the Strait of Malacca, the great artery of the China-India trade, against the rising power he most feared. The campaign was as much marriage and gift as war. In 1286 Kertanagara dispatched a magnificent statue of the bodhisattva Amoghapasa to Tribhuwanaraja, ruler of the Malayu kingdom centered on Dharmasraya in the Batang Hari valley of central Sumatra; the gift is recorded in the Padang Roco inscription carved on the statue’s base and dated to that year, where the image is dedicated for the welfare of the land of Malayu and the joy of its people. The Amoghapasa, a Buddhist deity of the lasso who draws all beings to salvation, was an apt emblem for a king who would draw the islands together. Closer to home he extended his authority over Bali, subdued in 1284, and across the Madura strait, and the chronicles credit him with reaching toward Pahang on the Malay peninsula and the coasts of Borneo.

The same anxiety that drove the Pamalayu shaped his diplomacy on the mainland. Kertanagara married a princess of Champa, the long Shaiva kingdom of the central Vietnamese coast, a state as dangerously exposed as Sumatra to the power gathering in the north — the Mongol Yuan dynasty of Kublai Khan, which had swallowed China and was now demanding the submission of the southern seas. The marriage tied the two Hindu-tantric courts of the eastern and western flanks of the Yuan advance into a single defensive understanding. Kertanagara’s whole foreign policy, conqueror and bridegroom alike, can be read as the construction of a maritime bulwark against an empire that had not yet sailed but was certain to come.

The Yuan demand and the king’s last rite

The reckoning began with an embassy. The Yuan court sent envoys to demand that Java acknowledge the Khan as overlord and pay tribute, as so many states had been forced to do. To the last of these envoys, a minister named Meng Qi who arrived in 1289, Kertanagara gave an answer that closed every door: he branded the envoy’s face with a hot iron and sent him home disfigured. It was a calculated insult to the most powerful sovereign on earth, and it guaranteed war. Kublai Khan ordered a punitive expedition against the Javanese king who had defaced his minister — a fleet that gathered in the Chinese ports and would carry, by the chronicles’ reckoning, twenty thousand or more soldiers across the South China Sea.

It arrived too late to find the man it had been sent to punish. Kertanagara’s outward turn had thinned his guard at home, and the old enmity of Kediri had never died. Jayakatwang, the lord of Kediri and a descendant of the dynasty Ken Arok had overthrown at Ganter, rose in revolt while the king’s forces were committed abroad. In 1292 his men took the capital. The Pararaton sets the king’s death amid a tantric rite: Kertanagara, the chronicle holds, was at his sacramental observances when the rebels broke in, and he died as he had reigned, inside the cult that had made him a god. With him the kingdom of Singhasari ended, four reigns after the cursed blade of Mpu Gandring had cut its first king his throne.

Into Majapahit

When the Yuan fleet at last stood off the north coast of east Java in the wet season of 1293, the king it had come to chastise was a year dead and his throne held by the usurper Jayakatwang. The expedition turned its demand on Kediri instead — and into that gap stepped Kertanagara’s son-in-law, the prince Raden Wijaya, who had survived the fall and was clearing a tract of forest to the northeast for a new settlement among the bitter maja trees. He met the Mongols not with defiance but with an offer: alliance against the usurper who held the throne. Together they shattered Jayakatwang’s Kediri. Then, with the rival destroyed and the foreigners burdened with plunder and slowed by the heat and the rains, Raden Wijaya turned on his allies and drove the fleet back to its ships.

The double stroke is the hinge of Javanese history. The kingdom that Raden Wijaya raised on the cleared ground he named for the bitterness of the maja fruit — Majapahit — and it inherited everything Kertanagara had built toward: his Rajasa blood, carried through the daughters he had married to the prince; his Siwa-Buddha cult, which became the state religion of the new empire and whose deified kings would be enshrined as Shiva and Buddha in the Majapahit centuries; and above all his vision of the islands between bound under one consecrated center, the Cakravala Mandala that Singhasari had only sketched and that Majapahit would carry from Sumatra to the spice islands of the east. Kertanagara died at the rite, the foreign fleet broke on the rains, and the empire he had imagined rose — under another name and another king of his own line — out of the field where his kingdom had fallen.

Research and the inscriptional record {#research}

The reconstruction of Singhasari rests on a narrow but vivid body of evidence: a handful of stone inscriptions, the gallery of royal funerary temples in the Malang valley, the later Old Javanese chronicles, and a century of art-historical scholarship on the kingdom’s extraordinary statuary. The cornerstone inscription is the Padang Roco stone of 1286, carved on the base of the Amoghapasa statue Kertanagara sent to Sumatra and discovered in 1911 near the headwaters of the Batang Hari; it fixes the Pamalayu policy in datable epigraphy rather than legend, recording the royal gift to the ruler of Malayu in the king’s own diplomatic voice. The Wurare inscription of 1289, around the base of the Joko Dolog, supplies his tantric consecration-name and the religious order of the realm.

The literary sources stand at a remove and must be read critically. The Pararaton, the Book of Kings, is a Balinese-preserved chronicle compiled long after the events, opening with the legend of Ken Arok and the cursed kris; it preserves the dynastic skeleton but in a frankly mythologizing register. The fourteenth-century Desawarnana, or Nagarakretagama, of Mpu Prapanca — the court poem of Majapahit — looks back on Singhasari as the parent kingdom of the dynasty it praises and traces the royal genealogy through Kertanagara, supplying his consecration-name and the outline of his reign from the standpoint of his triumphant successors.

The modern art-historical scholarship turns on the statuary. Natasha Reichle’s Violence and Serenity: Late Buddhist Sculpture from Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007) is the fullest study in English, organizing the late Buddhist sculpture of Indonesia around individual images — the Java Prajnaparamita, the Amoghapasa mandala, and the colossal Sumatran Bhairava — and reading through them the nature of tantric religion and Shaiva-Buddhist syncretism in the late-thirteenth-century archipelago. The deification of Kertanagara as a Buddhist Bhairava, and the transregional setting of his tantric Buddhism in a Mongol-era Asia crisscrossed by esoteric lineages, are the subject of a focused study by Andrea Acri and Aleksandra Wenta, A Buddhist Bhairava? Kṛtanagara’s Tantric Buddhism in Transregional Perspective. Behind both stands the older synthesizing tradition of George Cœdès and the Dutch Indologists, who set Singhasari within the family of Sanskrit-cosmopolitan states of Southeast Asia — the kinsmen, from the Khmer Empire to the rising Thai power of Sukhothai, against which the East Javanese kingdom is best understood.

The Siwa-Buddha order Kertanagara embodied did not end at Candi Jawi. Carried east with the priests and scholars who fled Java for Bali in the centuries after the island turned to Islam, the synthesis of Shiva and Buddha endures in living Balinese Hindu practice, where the two lineages of priesthood still serve a single sacred order — the late afterlife of a theology first hammered into colossal stone by a king who had himself enshrined as both gods at once.

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