Violence and Serenity: Late Buddhist Sculpture from Indonesia

y hearing his name, an extraordinary faith and devotion arose in him.
Greatly affected in mind, he joined a group of merchants on their way to
get precious stones from Golden Island, and set out in a great ship.”34
The only Buddhist text that has survived from Śrīvijaya is entitled Durbodhāloka
and is attributed to Dharmakīrti. It exists only in a Tibetan trans-
lation by Atīśa completed under the patronage of a king named Cūd ˙ āman ˙ -
ivarman.35 This same king is also mentioned in the grant called the Great Charter
of Leiden of the Cōl ˙ a king Rājarāja I that was found near Nāgapat ˙ t ˙ inam
in South India.36 According to that inscription, Māravijayōttun˙gavarman,
the son of Cūd ˙ āman ˙ ivarman, constructed a vihāra (monastery) in his father’s
name at that location.37 Once again we have evidence of an Indonesian ruler
establishing a monastery in India; presumably the number of pilgrims from
the archipelago was sufficient to warrant such a construction.
Despite this evidence of the royal support of Buddhism by Śrīvijayan rulers
both at home and abroad, the material evidence of Buddhist practices in Sumatra
itself is far less substantial than one would expect. Reasons for the relatively
small number of artifacts found in Sumatra as compared to Java could
be in part attributed to different settlement patterns, and show the real need
for continued excavation in Sumatra. Nik Hassan Shuhaimi has documented
many of the early Buddhist artifacts in his theses on the art of Sumatra and
the Malay Peninsula.38
After the decline of the Śrīvijayan empire, remnants of tantric Buddhist
beliefs can be seen in the inscriptions and sculpture of Ādityawarman, the
Malāyu king who ruled in West Sumatra in the fourteenth century. These
works, which will be discussed in the chapters to follow, represent the last traces
of the long tradition of Buddhism in Sumatra; by the time of Ādityawarman’s
death, much of the island had already begun to convert to Islam.
Buddhism in Java
In Java we see less of a continuum of evidence of Buddhist practice. Recent
excavations in West Java indicate the presence of stūpa-shaped structures and
Buddhist votive tablets at the site of Batujaya, about forty kilometers east of
Jakarta.39 This site is associated with the fifth-century kingdom of Taruma, although
the Buddhist remains likely date from the seventh or eighth century.
The earliest Buddhist statues found in the archipelago depict standing
buddhas in a style that has been associated with Amarāvatī, but most likely
20 | chapter one