Ancient Indonesian Sculpture

221 Pages·1994·30.087 MB·English

by  Marijke J. Klokke, Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer (eds.)

ANCIENT INDONESIAN SCULPTURE
Cover: Kala head, OD photograph 8999.
VERHANDELINGEN
VAN RET KONINKLIJK INSTITUUT
VOOR TAAL-, LAND- EN VOLKENKUNDE
165
ANCIENT INDONESIAN SCULPTURE
Edited by
MARUKE J. KLOKKE
and
PAULINE LUNSINGH SCHEURLEER
1994
KITLV Press
Leiden
Published by:
KITLV Press
Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde
(Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology)
P.O. Box 9515
2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands
CIP-GEGEVENS KONINKLIJKE BIBUOTHEEK, DEN HAAG
Ancient
Ancient Indonesian sculpture I ed. by Marijke J. Klokke and Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer
-Leiden : KITLV Press. -Ill., krt. -(Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor
Taal-, Land, en Volkenkunde; 165)
Met index, lit. opg.
ISBN 90-6718-076-9
Trefw.: beeldhouwkunst; Indonesie ; geschiedenis.
ISBN 90 6718 076 9
© 1994 Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright owner.
Printed in the Netherlands
Contents
Spelling and abbreviations vii
Marijke J. Klokke and Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer
Introduction 1
Robert L. Brown
'Rules' for change in the transfer of Indian art to Southeast Asia 10
Sara Schastok
Bronzes in the Amarll.vatI style; Their role in the writing of Southeast Asian
history 33
Susan L. Huntington
Some connections between metal images of Northeast India and Java 57
Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer
Bronze images and their place in ancient Indonesian culture 76
Nandana Chutiwongs
An aspect of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara in ancient Indonesia 98
A. de Vries Robbe
A khakkhara fragment from Java 115
John C. Huntington
The iconography of Borobudur revisited; The concepts of sle$a and
sarvalbuddhaJkaya 133
J.A. Schoterman
A surviving Amoghapasa sadhana; Its relation to the five main
statues of Candi Jago 154
Marijke J. Klokke
The so-called portrait statues in East Javanese art 178
Glossary 202
Index 205
Maps 212

Spelling and abbreviations
Notes on the spelling
Names of Hindu and Buddhist divinities and titles of Sanskrit texts are spelled according
to the transliteration system generally used for Sanskrit. Indian place names, if well
known, are rendered according to their usual English spelling. If they are less known
places or places known from ancient sources, they are transliterated according to the
usual Sanskrit or Tamil transliteration systems including diacritics.
In romanizing other South Asian and mainland Southeast Asian languages, we have
employed the practice currently favoured in recent publications.
The transliteration of Old Javanese place names and titles of texts conforms to the
transliteration system used for Sanskrit. It deviates from the transliteration system usually
employed for Old Javanese in a few respects. The labial vowel transcribed by Zoetmulder
als w is rendered by v, and the velar nasal is presented as Ii instead of ng or g. For
present place names and names of temples the modern Indonesian spelling is adopted, as
is customary in Indonesia now (thus Borobudur instead of Barabucj.ur).
Chinese words and names appear according to the Pinyin system, more favoured
among Sinologists than the Wade-Giles system which is usually found in studies on
Southeast Asia. Thus we use Faxian instead of Fa-Hien, for instance.
Abbreviations
The photographs of the former archaeological service in the Netherlands Indies
(Oudheidkundige Dienst in Nederlands-Indie) are abbreviated to OD photographs. These
photographs are kept in the Kern Institute in Leiden, but have been temporarily moved to
the Leiden University Library for preservation and documentation purposes. They have
also been documented on microfiche by IDC Leiden under the title Indonesian
archaeological photographs on microfiche: photo collection of the National Research
Centre of Archaeology of the Republic of Indonesia 1901-1956 at the Kern Institute,
University ofL eiden. Other abbreviations are explained in the text.

MARIJKE J. KLOKKE AND PAULINE LUNSINGH SCHEURLEER
Introduction
The articles in this volume were originally presented as papers at a symposium
on ancient Indonesian sculpture, which was held in the Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam in May 1988, on the occasion of the exhibition Divine bronze;
Ancient Indonesian bronzes from AD 600 to 1600 in the Department of Asiatic
Art. Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, head of the Department of Asiatic Art, was the
initiator of both the exhibition and the symposium. The symposium was
sponsored by the Vereniging van Vrienden der Aziatische Kunst (Society of
Friends of Asiatic Art). This Society was founded in 1918 to propagate the
knowledge of Asiatic art in the Netherlands and elsewhere. It is closely
associated with the Rijksmuseum, because it has given its large collection of
outstanding works of Asiatic art in a long-term loan to the Rijksmuseum. We
wish to extend our thanks to this Society which, despite its limited means, has
firmly supported this project. We are also grateful to the Rijksmuseum
Amsterdam for hosting the symposium.
We regret to have to report the untimely death of J.A. Schoterman, one of the
contributors to this volume, while this publication was in preparation. We are
grateful to Margriet Blom of the Utrecht University Library for her help in
completing the bibliography of his paper. We also wish to acknowledge the
help of Teun Goudriaan and John Huntington in solving some remaining
Buddhological problems.
The theme of the symposium, ancient Indonesian sculpture, is a very broad
one. It may include freestanding sculpture or sculpture in relief, stone sculpture
or metal sculpture, images of gods, narrative reliefs, or ornamental motifs. Most
of the articles in this volume are concerned with images of gods in metal or
stone, a subject in ancient Indonesian sculpture that has not yet received the
attention it deserves. Working on the exhibition and the catalogue made us
realize how little in fact we still know about the ancient Indonesian images of
divinities, and how badly a reference book on this subject is needed.
Krom's Inleiding tot de Hindoe-Javaansche kunst (Introduction to Hindu
Javanese art) contains only a small section on the iconography of Hindu and
Buddhist deities (Krom 1923,1:87-120) and is mainly concerned with the
2 Marijke 1. Klokke and Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer
description of the various archaeological sites and the surviving, mainly
religious, buildings from the 'Hindu-Javanese period' (4th to 16th centuries).
Bernet Kempers' indispensable book, Ancient Indonesian art, contains only a
representative selection of works of art from various places and periods with
detailed descriptions of each item, but hardly any comparative analysis or
contextual interpretation (Bernet Kempers 1959). Jan Fontein's recent catalogue
The sculpture of Indonesia contains the most beautiful and representative
pieces, presents a large number of new finds, and provides much interesting and
detailed information about each of these objects individually, but does not
present a comprehensive and detailed image of Indonesian sculpture in its
various aspects, which, of course, was not the aim of the book (Fontein 1990).
A number of works deal with a particular group or particular collection of
Indonesian sculpture in a separate study. Early examples are the catalogue of
the archaeological collection of the Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en
Wetenschappen (Groeneveldt 1887), now of the Museum Nasional in Jakarta,
and the catalogue of the Javanese antiquities in the Rijksmuseum voor Volken
kunde in Leiden (JuynbollI909). They are, however, handicapped by a scarcity,
or even total absence, of illustrations and present descriptions only, like most
other older guides to particular collections.
Albert Ie Bonheur is the first to have adopted a new approach. He presents
the Indonesian sculpture, mainly bronzes, in the Musee Guimet in Paris in a
catalogue which, for the first time, is well-illustrated (Le Bonheur 1971). Not
only is each of the objects in the Musee Guimet collection illustrated, but also
similar objects in other collections are likewise presented in order to place the
sculptures chronologically on stylistic and iconographical grounds. The
catalogue to the exhibition Divine bronze continues this approach. It presents
an iconographic and stylistic survey of ancient Indonesian bronzes illustrated
with examples in Dutch collections (Lunsingh Scheurleer and Klokke 1988).
A few recent Indonesian Ph.D. dissertations examine the images of one
particular god. One, by Edi Sedyawati on the images of Gal).esa during the
KaQiri and Singhasari periods (Sedyawati 1985), is forthcoming in the same
series as the present publication.
Apart from these major publications, numerous scattered articles on various
aspects of Indonesian sculpture do exist. The older ones are almost exclusively
written by Dutch scholars, the recent ones mainly by Indonesian archaeologists.
We would like to mention one of the older ones, an article by W.F. Stutterheim
in which he attempts to date a number of East Javanese images assembling
information from epigraphical, architectural, iconographical, and stylistic con
texts (Stutterheim 1936).