The Tārā temple of Kalasan in Central Java - article ; n°1 ; vol.85, pg 163-183

Roy E.Jordaan

Description

Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient - Année 1998 - Volume 85 - Numéro 1 - Pages 163-183
21 pages
Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.

Informations

• Publié par: BULLETIN_DE_L-ECOLE_FRANCAISE_D-EXTREME-ORIENT
• Publié le: 01 janvier 1998
• Nombre de lectures: 25
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Roy E. Jordaan
The Tārā temple of Kalasan in Central Java
In: Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient. Tome 85, 1998. pp. 163-183.
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Jordaan Roy E. The Tārā temple of Kalasan in Central Java. In: Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient. Tome 85, 1998.
pp. 163-183.
doi : 10.3406/befeo.1998.2547
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/befeo_0336-1519_1998_num_85_1_2547Tara temple of Kalasan in Central Java The
Roy E. JORDAAN
About ten kilometres to the east of Yogyakarta, the provincial capital of Central
Java, one finds the ruins of a magnificent temple. This temple was first known by the
name of Candi Kaliběning, but since the end of the 19th century has become better
known as Kalasan.
The change of name was largely the result of the attempts of the Java scholar
J. Brandes at deciphering a stone inscription in Pre-Nàgarï script, dating from the year
700 Saka (778 A.D.), which mentions the foundation by a Šailendra ruler of a Tara
temple (Tàràbhavanam) together with a cloister in the village of Kalasa (Brandes,
1887). Though no further details are given about either the temple or the goddess Tara,
there is no doubt that the same sanctuary is meant, since the village where the ruins of
the temple and the adjacent cloister are found has been known by the Javanese as
Kalasan since time immemorial. Moreover, the inscription was found in the near vicini
ty, i.e. "between Prambanan and Kalasan," before ending up in the yard of the Resident
of Yogyakarta where it was eventually discovered by Brandes.
In this short article I want to address the problem of who exactly was the goddess
Tara to whom the temple in Kalasan was dedicated, that is to say, what statue of this
Buddhist goddess once occupied the throne in the main temple chamber. In answering
this question, I will follow two distinct approaches: the historical and the iconogra-
phical. Hopefully, the identification of the presiding goddess will provide a point of
departure for further research into the composition of the pantheon of Kalasan, which
might possibly be facilitated by extant Tibetan and Nepalese texts and ritual paintings.
Historical information
Only little is known about the origin of the Buddhist goddess Tara, and equally little
about the probable period of the ascendancy of her cult in India and the influences of
various Hindu and non- Aryan or tribal elements (Blonay 1895; Foucher 1900; Shastri
1925; Sircar 1967). Concerning the rise of the cult, which she locates in Northeastern
India, Ghosh (1980:16) states that "there is no evidence (whether literary or
archaeologically) of the existence of Tara before the Gupta period" [c. 3th-5th century
A.D.] (cf. Dasgupta 1967:11-17). Although some earlier manifestations of her worship
are known in the Indian literature (e.g., an eulogy by the Buddhist grammarian
Candragomin), the Javanese inscription of 778 A.D. appears to be "the earliest
epigraphic reference to her" (Gupte 1980:117; cf. Sircar 1967: 130).1
1. The Árya-Maňjušrimulakalpa (Chapter LIII, verse 833) mentions Kalasa as one of a number of
places which were seats of Tara (Ghosh 1980:8, n.5). According to Lokesh Chandra, the earliest 164 Asie du Sud-Est ROY E. JORDAAN
Fig. 1 : Candi Kalasan, with an overview of the remains of smaller stupas surrounding the
ambulatory platform of the temple. Photograph OD 9714, taken during the work of reconstruction in
the period 1927-1929 (See Oudheidkundig Ver slag 1929).
Courtesy Kern Institute, Leiden University.
As the Kalasan inscription also happens to be the earliest dated inscription issued on
behalf of a Šailendra ruler, its interpretation has occupied the minds of several scholars
interested in a reconstruction of the role of the Šailendras in the dynastic history of
ancient Central Java. As is known, the Šailendras are connected in Indonesian
with the construction in Central Java in the late 8th and the first half of the 9th century
of many Buddhists sanctuaries, of which Borobudur is the most famous. On this period
of nearly a century, which is known in the literature as the "Šailendra Interregnum,"
very few relics have survived except for the ruins of their temples and some inscriptions
(De Casparis 1950). The origins of the Šailendra dynasty itself still are a great mystery,
in spite of the numerous pages that scholars have devoted to this issue, in which the
Kalasan inscription, or rather its second stanza, plays a crucial role. In the early
translation by Bhandarkar (1887:2) this stanza reads: "Having prevailed upon the great
King Panamkarana by the Preceptor of King Šailendra caused a splendid temple of Tara
to be constructed," which was later amended by F.D.K. Bosch (1928:60) as: "After the
gurus of the Šailendra ruler had persuaded maharaja Dyah Paňcapana, the rakryan
reference to Kalasan is in the Asta-mahdcaitya-vandana of king Harsa-vardhana Šiláditya (A.D. 590),
transcribed into Chinese by Fa-hsien. It is not clear, however, if the name Kalasapura in this text refers
to Kalasan in Central Java or to a place in Suvarnadvipa (Sumatra), as in the 1 lth-century Kathd-sarit-
sdgara text (see Chandra 1985:207-8).
BEFEO 85 (1998) The Tara temple ofKalasan in Central Java 165
Panamkarana, they had a beautiful Tara temple constructed." In the closing lines of the
inscription, the king, r akry an Panamkarana, urges future rulers to maintain the
foundation forever more.
In brief, the controversy hinges on the question of whether two rulers are mentioned
here or just one: an unnamed Šailendra ruler who through his guru(s) had involved a
Javanese king named Panamkarana (known elsewhere as Panangkarana) in the
construction of the Tara temple, or a ruler who also was a Šailendra and was himself
named Panamkarana. Proponents of the first reading believe that Panamkarana was
either a Javanese vassal king or a scion of an originally non- Javanese dynasty.
Regarding the latter possibility they are divided over the question whether he was a
descendant of the kings of Šrivijaya in South Sumatra or of those of Funan in mainland
Southeast Asia, or whether he either directly of indirectly was a scion of an Indian royal
dynasty that had migrated or fled to Central Java. Proponents of the second hypothesis
believe that Panamkarana was the son of a local Hindu king, who had converted to
Buddhism and was to become the ancestor of a separate branch of a bifurcate Šailendra
dynasty, most members of which were Buddhists. Somewhere around the second half of
the 9th century the two branches are supposed to have been reunited through a marriage
of a Buddhist crown princess with a Hindu prince, who, if not born in the second House
himself, was a close ally of it.2
As this is not the place to dwell on the origin of the Šailendra dynasty, I will confine
myself to a few remarks about the Kalasan inscription that are relevant for the present
investigation on the goddess Tara. First, I would like to point to the genuine possibility
of the guru of the Šailendra ruler mentioned in the inscription being the same as the one
who, four years later, according to the Kelurak of 782, was involved in the
foundation of the nearby temple complex of Candi Sewu. The latter inscription further
mentions that this guru, whose name was Kumaraghosa, hailed from Gaudidvïpa, which
name Bosch identified as Gauda (Gaudavisaya), one of the names of the Bengal
kingdom ruled by the Pâla dynasty. 3 The involvement of one or more guru from this
country would offer a plausible explanation for the scriptural similarities that have long
been known to exist between the Kalasan inscription and the inscriptions of the Bengal
rulers Devapàla (c. 810-850 A.D.) and his predecessor Dharmapâla (Bhandarkar
1887:4; Bosch 1928:14-15).
These Pâla rulers are known to have held the goddess Tara in special veneration,
probably in connection with the vital importance of the maritime trade for their country
and with Tara' s role as "Saviouress," which for sea-faring merchants and navigators
primarily meant a patron of navigation (Sircar 1967:108, 113). The importance of the
goddess for Dharmapâla is clear from the fact that he carried her image on his banner
(Dasgupta 1976:12-13; Ghosh 1980:14). According to Sircar (1967:131-132) "Tara of
Dharmapâla' s standard or banner very probably was the dynastic emblem of the Pâlas
2. For the purposes of this article, the discussion of this complicated subject has been kept to a
minimum. The reader is referred to Van Naerssen (1947), Bosch (1928, 1952), and Damais (1952:22-
25) for an analysis of the Kalasan inscription, and to Sarkar (1985) and Chandra (1994) for a
discussion of the problem of the origin of the Šailendra dynasty, these being the most recent
publications on this long-standing question.
3. Though I agree with the general purport of his argument, Dasgupta erroneously suggests that it
is the involvement of the guru from Gauda in the construction of the Tara temple that is explicitly
mentioned in the Kalasan inscription, instead of his part in the consecration of a statue of the
Bodhisattva Maňjusri at th