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Sunday, July 20, 2008

Tengger: the Hindu Javanese


Introduction

According to the Javanese legends, when the great Hindu-Buddhist court of Majapahit fell to Muslim armies in the 1520s, many commoners among the vanquished Hindu population are said to have fled to the Tengger mountains, a large massif east of Majapahit.

The Tenggerese

The Majapahit refugees and highland people became the ancestors of the present-day 'Tengger people' (wong tengger). The 50,000 Tenggers residing in 28 settlements are the only Javanese to have preserved a non-islamic priestly tradition directly descended from the Sivasism of the Majapahit era.

Priestly and Popular Interpretations

Until the emergence of a Hindu reform movement in the 1970s, a similar tension between priestly liturgies, deeply Sivate in content, and popular religious culture, much closer to folk-javanism, characterised much of Tengger ritual.

The Priestly Liturgies

Preserved over the centuries in small, palm-leaf(lontar) manuscripts which only the priests read, the liturgies provide a remarkable perspective on the priestly tradition. At many ceremonies, the priests otensibly invoke the ancestors, the priestly liturgies that are recited make no mention of any founding ancestors.Instead, the prayers indicate that the rite is an appeal for world renewal directed towards the god Siva. The liturgies bear a striking resemblance to those of modern Bali's resi bulangga, a commoner and non-commoner priest.

Hindu Reform

The reform movement was pionerred in the Tengger highlands by school teachers and villages who had travelled to and in two instances, studied in Bail. In the early 1970s one of the most learned Tengger priest made a detailed study of Balinese and Tengger prayers and discovered that the two traditions were intimately related. From then on, most villag leaders rallied to support the Hindu reform movement.



Tenggerese children at a wedding in traditional attire



Some ceremony?



A Tenggernese


Luke



[8:33 PM]


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