Javanese folktales, stories which are not dramatized in the wajang but are told orally, are usually called dongèng, in Modjokuto. They include little moral stories and legends centering around certain sacred spots; tales about the Hindu-Javanese period which account for the existence of ruins; similar stories attributing magic power to certain objects—daggers, spears, gongs, and so forth—called pusaka (“heirloom”) stories; and animal stories.
An example of the pusaka stories, of which there are literally thousands, follows :
One of the early district officers of Modjokuto, Pringgokusumo, was very powerful. He had a spear which every night became a snake. The spear’s name was “Kijaji Upas.” (Upas means “messenger,” “office boy.”) It wove around the banyan trees; and all the village guards were afraid of it, for if they slept it bit them. Later this man went with his spear to Tulungagung. When he got there, he caused a big flood all over the city in order to clean it up. His snake-spear also went around among the banyans there. Now, every year in the Javanese month of Sura there are slametans for the spear (which is still in Tulungagung) to which people come from far and wide. Everyone who cooks for the slametan must be clean—with hair washed, no menses, etc. Many dalangs come, and they wajang. And still people who look at the spear disagree as to how big it is. One will say it is a mile long, one an inch. If one sleeps near it, it will lift one up by the feet invisibly.
Many pusaka stories are long and elaborate and have given rise to pusakas which people come for hundreds of miles to “honor”—such as the gong at Ludojo (a nearby town) which is really a transformed tiger (the boom of the gong being his roar) from the time in the past when those Ludojo people who had no crevices in their upper Bps could turn at will into tigers and devour their less fortunate neighbors.
As for the animal stories, there are thousands of these too, the most famous and best loved ones still being those about Kantjil, the sly, tricky, highly intelligent, if somewhat amoral, mouse-deer who makes up for what he lacks in strength by the exercise of his wits.
Tiger was after Kantjil, about to pounce on him. Kantjil ran in fear to a place under some bamboos. The wind blew in the bamboos and they squeaked, rubbing together, and Kantjil said to Tiger: “Hear that? It is a magic flute. If a person can blow this flute, he will be healthy forever.” So Tiger wanted to blow the flute, and Kantjil told him he’d show him how to do it. He said Tiger should put his tongue between the two bamboo trees, which Tiger did, and when the wind blew his tongue got caught and Kantjil got away free.
Another time, Tiger and Kantjil met under a tree where there was a bees’ nest. Tiger was angry at Kantjil because he had been fooled by him. Kantjil told him that the thing hanging up there was a gong, and that if he hit it all the animals in the forest would be frightened of him; and only Kantjil could hit it. So Tiger insisted that Kantjil let him hit it. Kantjil said: “Only if I run away first, and then when you hear me whistle three times you may hit the gong.” Which he did, and then Tiger hit it and was attacked by bees.
Such stories are probably told to children in almost every Modjokuto home. Kantjil is usually taken quite explicitly to symbolize “the little man”; and peasants talking about the gentry often quote the proverb: “When the elephants fight, the kantjil gets crushed between them.” Many animal stories make explicit value judgments, such as this one about the dangers of employing a go-between:
A dog and a cat are fighting over some meat. They meet a monkey and ask him to divide it equally between them. He agrees, but says that he must have payment. He divides the meat in two parts and puts it on the scales, but one part is heavier than the other. So he eats a little, and then the other side is heavier and he eats some off of that side. And so it goes until he has eaten it all and the dog and cat don’t get anything.
The kasar art complex of ludrug, klèdèk, djaranan, and dongèng is admittedly not nearly so interwoven or so integrated as the alus art complex; but all the elements share an expression of a more down-to-earth ethos, one appropriate to a people whose world-view regards high refinement as an excellent ideal but not so attractive a practice.
what I have called the “national art” complex is almost entirely confined to the town and is in any case not always regarded as art by Modjokuto people but merely as entertainment.
Then he got on to talle about the wajang, saying that the wajang was art (kesenian) but a movie was just entertainment (kesenengan), and that the reason one could tell is that it is possible to see the same wajang over and over again. This is because the wajang has content, has meaning in it whereas the movie does not. (He admitted that nowadays even many dalangs don’t know what the meaning is and so can just play one lakon or something and do it automatically; but the good ones know the meaning of the wajang.) Therefore one can keep going back to a wajang over and over again and getting more and more out of it, whereas one gets all there is out of a movie by seeing it once.
Despite the reservations of the conservatives, the forms of national art— not only the movies, but the orchestras, popular songs, novels, and so forth— continue to grow in popularity. I call them national art for several reasons. They are not confined to Java; nor is there much of anything characteristically Javanese about them as compared to other areas of Indonesia such as Sumatra or the Celebes. Insofar as they are literary, they are in the national language, Indonesian Malay, rather than in the “regional” language, Javanese. They are in part presented over the mass media, which of course extend all over the islands—the radio, movies, and nationally circulated magazines. They are practiced and appreciated by the same groups, mostly the urban youth, who have always been in the forefront of nationalism. They are the forms of art common in the large port cities—Surabaja, Djakarta—where indigenous forms of art have been weakened in the general deracination of culture; and they are especially popular among the new political elite which is in power in those cities.
on the musical side, the national-art complex is represented by the orkès, the name derived from orkest, the Dutch word for “orchestra,” and the lagus, or popular songs. The orkès consists of stringed instruments tuned to the Western diatonic rather than the gamelcin pentatonic scale: banjos, guitars, violins, bass fiddles, mandolins, ulceleles. On one occasion at least, in Modjokuto, a trumpet was added. There were three such semi-professional orchestras in Modjokuto, one of which more or less disbanded after a while. They played at such ceremonies as weddings and circumcisions for fees ranging from Rp 50.00 to about Rp 125.00, depending upon the elaborateness of the occasion and upon whether outside talent was imported to improve the band—such as the above-mentioned trumpeter or an outside singer. Most orkès groups had about five or six members and a female vocalist. (Some of the musicians, usually all of them, doubled as male vocalists, there almost never being any purely instrumental numbers.) The members were not fulltime musicians but tailors, chauffeurs, petty clerks, policemen, and the like; but they were not without professional aspirations.
Perhaps because of the similarity in some respects between the Arab-influenced gcimbusan orchestra discussed in the santri section and the lagu orchestras, among the most active of the orkès people were two or three local Arabs, younger men who formed the nucleus of the more vigorous groups. Several of the players were santris, and there was a tendency for such orkès to appear at the rites-of-passage celebrations of richer town santris— such as well-off traders—who wanted to engage in a moderate degree of conspicuous consumption but who would not consider giving a wajang; but I have seen them many times at abangan affairs also. They seem to be characteristic of those among the thoroughly urbanized who have some sort of a relatively steady and more-than-subsistence income.
Although the players take themselves seriously and attempt to improve their art by means of frequent practice, the level of skill is quite low and is generally recognized as being so. It was a commonly voiced complaint among the younger men in town that better orchestras did not seem to grow up in such an unimportant place as Modjokuto and that the ones which did exist did not seem ever to get any better. As the national radio network broadcast little
else except lagu music most of every day (but a wajang wong on Sundays, which was very popular), and many people kept their radios going continually, there was a constant professional standard of comparison against which to measure the relatively inept efforts of the local groups.
The lagus (or, more properly, lagu-lagu populèr—“popular songs”) played and sung by the ensembles are of several types. Some are in a Western (usually Latin-American) form, such as the rumba or samba, and are composed either by Western songwriters and fitted with Indonesian lyrics (which may or may not translate the original words) or composed by an Indonesian, Chinese, or Malayan composer. Sometimes Hawaiian or Chinese tunes are used as models; and sometimes Southeast Asian folk tunes—the lagu Malaju (“Malayan songs”) of Malaya and the Western archipelago, and the kront-jongs of East Indonesia—are so used. The krontjongs, which were originally based on Southern European folic music brought to Indonesia by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century—particularly to East Indonesia: Flores, Timor and the Moluccas, where the Iberian influence was at its greatest, are probably the most popular of all; and, in fact, many Modjokuto people refer to all popular songs in whatever style as “krontjongs.” The lyrics of most of these songs tend to be rather heavily sentimental:
The Handkerchief from South Bandung
A white handkerchief of silk, decorated with colored flowers—
A symbol of a wonderful magic love,
From the south of great Bandung [a city in West Java],
Accompanied by sweet words.
Thank you, little sister [dik, the term of address for a wife, and in general a term of endearment],
Don’t forget My tears are shining.
Your handkerchief I keep.
I kiss the end of your finger.
With a prayer I say,
Goodbye,
Fight on,
Don’t forget South Bandung.
A somewhat less sentimental song is based on the traditional belief (which I heard actually invoked in Modjokuto several times) that before a girl is going to be married she will dream about being bitten by a snake. Here is a song, considered to be slightly humorous, which was tremendously popular during the first part of my stay in Indonesia, being played on the radio mercilessly from morn till night:
Night Dream
(Girl:) Last night, bung (“brother,” “comrade”; here a term of endearment],
I dreamed
I met a snake, bung,
Very large.
The snake bit, bung,
My toe.
After it bit, bung,
The snake went away.
My cuts, bung,
Bled.
I screamed, “Aduh/” [an exclamation of pain, disappointment, grief, etc.]
Then woke up.
What is it, bung,
The meaning
Of the dream last night, bung,
So creepy?
(Boy:) Don’t fear, dik,
Don’t be sad.
Ail is fate, dik,
The will of Allah.
Stories in the night, dik,
Dispel the clouds.
The stars come clear, dik,
Finally certain.
A flower in the garden, dik,
When it has blossomed,
Before very long, aduh,
Is picked by someone.
That’s it, dik,
The meaning of it.
Your dream last night, dik,
Was a dream of happiness.
In addition to sentimental ballads there are humorous, novelty, and political lagus. (One of the most popular of the lagus in Modjolcuto was one beginning, “Let us go/ Let us go/ To the General Election . . .” Another agitated for the turning over of West New Guinea by the Dutch to Indonesia, a hot political issue in Indonesia.) All in all, tirelessly disseminated as it is by the radio and attractive as it is to the urban youth, the lagu is probably at present Indonesia’s most pervasive art-form, no more easily escaped than “hit tunes” in America.
on the literary side, national art consists of modem novels (roman), poems (sjair), short-stories (kissah), and plays (sandiwara) written in Indonesian perhaps most commonly by non-Javanese, Sumatra producing a disproportionate number of Indonesia’s modem writers. The novels and stories are bought either as books or in magazines in the regency capital, after which they are passed around from friend to friend. Several national magazines have Modjokuto subscribers and are eagerly read by the younger urban set. There is a bookstore in Modjokuto but it sells mainly textbooks and, as it is santri-run, Islamic books.
There can be no attempt here to describe this literature except to say that much of it concerns the Revolution—heroic stories of the battles, ill-fated wartime romances, and so on; that it is extremely socially conscious, being more reminiscent of our proletarian novels of the thirties than our present psychological novels; and that it is written, for the most part, in an extremely elevated romantic style. Most commonly, this literature takes for its setting the big-city Djakarta-Surabaja-Medan asphalt jungle in which almost all of the writers live and has for its heroes and heroines young men and women—the group the Indonesians call pemuda (“youth”)—trying to make their way in such an environment, or rather, trying to remake that environment in terms of an ideal largely drawn from Western political theory.
Since Indonesian Malay, the official national language, is taught in all the schools and almost all town children and many village children go to school for at least three years, and since the Indonesian government claims to have reduced the illiteracy rate 40 per cent since the transfer of sovereignty, this literature is almost certainly going to become steadily more important as Indonesia proceeds through her history as an independent state.
The sandiwara, or modern play form, grew out of the stambul or “Malay opera,” which was a play something on the order of our earlier musical comedies or Victor Herbert-type operettas in which a ldnd of artificial and sentimental declamatory plot was interspersed with krontjong singing and popular dancing, the plots being taken from popular folk stories and such sources as the “Thousand and One Nights.” With the appearance of Southeast Asian movies—Indonesian, Malayan, and Philippine, the stambul form shifted into that medium, leaving the sandiwara to develop toward greater realism, until today it displays the same general style and outlook as do the novels, short-stories, and poems—a socially conscious romantic realism.
The sandiwara appeals mostly to Westernized intellectuals, and, facing double competition from the liidrug on the one hand and movies, Western and Eastern, on the other, it almost never appears in Modjokuto. Only one sandiwara was produced in Modjokuto during the period of my stay. A young Modjokuto author wrote a play based upon his sister’s divorce from her titled husband, also a Modjokuto man, and got the local chapter of a veterans’ organization to produce it in the hope (vain, as it turned out) of getting some money for their organization, the sister herself playing the role of the wronged woman.
Indonesian moving pictures are made not only in Indonesia but also in the Philippine Islands and in Malaya. For the most part they are on the stambul pattern, being very stiff light operas usually built around a legendary or folk-story theme. Among the more popular of such films during my stay were one based on the folk story Bawang Merah, Buwang Putih about the stepmother problem and another, made in the Philippine Islands, built on the Siegfried story, both of them done in the stambul form. But there have been a few realistic pictures about the Revolutionary period in Djokjakarta (which was the Republican capital during the war). One movie, written by a well-known Indonesian novelist, included the first kiss ever shown in an Indonesian film and aroused such a violent reaction from various pressure groups that the kiss was eventually censored.
The attitude involved is similar to that which I have noted in connection with the dance. As one Javanese expressed it: “I don’t mind seeing kissing and loving and the rest in an American movie, but in an Indonesian movie it makes me all upset.” (Such actions are in fact more or less symbolic of American movies—and, in part, of America—in the Modjokuto public mind. The street in town which is lined with houses of prostitution is sometimes nicknamed “Hollywood Street.”) Evidently the psychic distance of an Indonesian movie is much less for a Javanese than that of an American film, and so the fantasy fulfillment of forbidden impulses can be carried on more safely in the latter. In any case, American films are heavily preferred to Indonesian ones—usually on the ostensible ground of technical superiority—and it was one of the biggest events in years when the local motion-picture theater (Chinese-owned) brought Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah to town.
Many people, especially younger men and women, go to the movies several times a week; and I was continually being asked such questions as whether I knew Montgomery Clift or how much education Doris Day had before she became a movie star. For Modjokuto people, movies defined the social context out of which I had come into their lives. To convince them that most motion pictures were about as realistic a picture of American life as the wajangs were of everyday Javanese life was nearly impossible. In addition to presenting a picture of American life, the movies also provide a new ideal for those interested in “progress.” True, Indonesians often disparage the movies, as well as other aspects of American popular art—such as comic books and popular songs—as cheap, vulgar, and materialistic, and argue that they want to combine the material skills of the West with the superior spiritual qualities of the East; nevertheless, the Indonesians are in the peculiar position of launching a social effort after a utopia which they do not have to dream up for themselves but can see played out for them every night in the local theater.
the national-art complex reflects for the most part the intelligentsia values of Indonesia’s emergent “youth culture,” a group of restless, educated, urban young men and women possessed of a sharp dissatisfaction with traditional custom and a deeply ambivalent attitude toward the West, which they see both as the source of their humiliation and “backwardness” and as the possessor of the kind of life they feel they want for themselves (minus, of course, the gangsters, the kissing, and the materialism). They are deeply committed to altering society in the direction of their borrowed dreams but have little idea of how this is to be done.
Painfully sensitive, easily frustrated, and passionately idealistic, this group is in many ways the most vital element in contemporary Indonesian society— even more so in the large metropolitan centers than in a town such as Modjokuto. Probably they are the most unpredictable elements as well. They are die Republic’s hope and its despair: its hope because their idealism is both its driving force and its moral conscience; its despair because their exposed psychological position in the avant-garde of social change may turn them rather quickly toward the violent primitivism of other recent youth movements in Europe whose inner need for effective social reform was greater than the actual changes their elders were capable of producing for them.
Chapter 20
Mysticism
Our discussion of the prijajis proceeds from the outer man to the inner man. Having considered their etiquette, language, and art, we turn now to mysticism, the distinctly religious aspect of their life.
In Modjokuto, mysticism is practiced both individually and in sects. The sects are small, voluntary religious groups, usually loosely connected—but very loosely indeed—to other chapters of the same sect in other towns and to a central headquarters in one of the larger cities, usually the court centers. They meet, rotating among the members’ houses in most cases, weekly or monthly, to discuss and meditate. In theory, one can meditate and study one’s inner life as well by oneself as with others, but to do so in a group is considered preferable because individual meditation smacks too much of a hermit-like isolation from daily life of which most people disapprove, it is easier to carry on such activities regularly and undisturbed if one belongs to a group than if one attempts to carry them out at home, and, in a sect, the more advanced people can help and train the less advanced. Nevertheless, some people, most notably a few of the highest prijajis who feel that the sects are not alus enough for them, meditate and study alone or, informally, with one or two close friends.
There are five sects of importance in Modjokuto: Budi Setia (nearly impossible to translate, but, roughly, meaning “Faithful in the Rational Search for Understanding”), Kawruh Bedja (“Knowledge of True Good Fortune”), Sumarah (“To Surrender [to God’s Will]”), Ilmu Sedjati (“True Science”), and Kawruh Kasunjatan (“Knowledge of the Highest Reality”). Only the first three are mainly prijaji in membership, the third and fifth having a large abangan admixture; but even the latter are based on the teachings of high prijaji gurus (teachers) in the court centers and are modeled after the more elevated sects. Although the sects are independent of one another and teach somewhat different doctrines (sometimes kept jealously secret from one another), they share a basically similar philosophical mysticism and as such
form an interrelated structural outlet for prijaji religious beliefs and practices.
In essence, mysticism in Java is applied metaphysics, a set of practical rules for the enrichment of man’s spiritual life, based upon an underlying intellectual analysis of experience. Although different individuals and different sects have somewhat different positions and draw somewhat different conclusions from the same analysis, none questions the basic premises of the analysis. As in, for instance, the Western dualistic tradition from Descartes to Kant, the basic metaphysical presuppositions are common to all. What differs, and much less so in Java than in the Western tradition, is the ways in which these presuppositions are arranged and explicated to account for actual experience. Tliis being so, it is advisable to inspect the content of Javanese mystic metaphysics before going more deeply into its institutionalization, the social forms it takes, in Modjokuto.
In order to provide a framework in which the otherwise rather involved and confusing material I have to present may be seen and ordered, I should like first to state my own summary formulation of this system and then attempt to show how my postulates appear in the formulations of my informants themselves. That there are no more than the postulates which I have set forth, or that this is the most satisfactory presentation of prijaji thought which could be constructed, I have no wish to argue. What follows is merely an outline statement of some of the more important notions about how the world “really” is which, I think, are shared by most Modjokuto mystics.
i would set down my summary in the form of eight postulates, as follows:
1. In the everyday life of man, “good” feelings and “bad” feelings, “happiness” and “unhappiness,” are inherently and indissolubly interdependent. No one can be happy all the time or unhappy all the time, but must vary continually between these two states from day to day, from hour to hour, from minute to minute. This variation is the same for all emotions— love, hate, fear, and so on. Further, the main aim in life is not to maximize the positive emotions and minimize the negative ones, that is, the “pursuit of happiness,” which is, in the nature of the case, impossible, a maximization of one implying a maximization of the other. Instead, the aim is to minimize the passions altogether so far as possible, to mute them in order to perceive the truer “feelings” which lie behind them. The aim is tentrem ing manah, “peace (quiet, tranquility) in the heart (the seat of the emotions).”
2. “Underneath” or “behind” these coarser human feelings there is a pure basic feeling-meaning, rasa, which is at once the individual’s true self (aku) and a manifestation of God (Gusti, Allah) within the individual. The basic religious truth for a prijaji mystic lies in the equation: rasa = aku = Gusti.
3. The religious aim of man should be to “know” or “feel” this ultimate rasa in himself. Such an achievement brings spiritual power, a power which may be used either for good or for evil in earthly pursuits. There is rather little thought about other-worldly rewards; insofar as such a thing is possible, this is a “this-worldly” mysticism.
4. In order to achieve such “knowledge” of ultimate rasa, one must have a purity of will, must concentrate one’s inner life entirely upon this single aim, intensifying and focusing all one’s spiritual resources on a tiny point— much as one focuses the sun’s rays through a burning glass in order to bring their maximum heat to bear on one spot. The main means of achieving such a purity of will and such a concentration of inner effort are: first, the blunting of the individual’s instinctive life, a “rising above” everyday physiological needs; and, second, a disciplined withdrawal from mundane concerns for more or less extended periods of time and concentration upon inward things. Most important among the instinctual disciplines are fasting, staying awake, and sexual abstention. The temporary withdrawal of attention from the mundane world is called semèdi or, in its most intensive form, almost never practiced now, tapa, and consists of sitting absolutely still and emptying one’s inner-life, so far as possible, of all mundane content.
5. In addition to the spiritual disciplines and meditation, the empirical study of human emotional life, a metaphysical psychology, also leads to an understanding and experience of rasa. Such a study amounts to a phenomenological analysis of experience and is considered the “theory” corresponding to the “practice” of fasting and other observances. One range of variation of the several mystic sects—at least in Modjokuto—seems to be along this continuum: according to the amount of weight they give instinctual control and meditation on the one hand and reflection and analysis on the other; but none wholly neglects either, for they support and strengthen one another.
6. As people vary both in their ability to carry out the spiritual disciplines (and no one is really as good at it today as people were in the past)— in the length of time they are able to fast, stay awake, and meditate— and in their ability to carry out a systematic analysis of inner experience (or to understand an analysis a famous guru has carried out), it is possible to rank individuals according to their spiritual abilities and achievements, a ranking which gives rise to the guru-murid (teacher-pupil) system in which an advanced teacher instructs a less advanced pupil and is himself a pupil of a more advanced teacher.
7. At the ultimate level of experience and existence, all people are one and the same and there is no individuality, for rasa, aku, and Gusti are “eternal objects,” the same in all people. Although at the level of everyday experience individuals and nationalities may be said to have different selves and different feelings (although even here there is an important element of commonality), at base they are all the same. The combination of this notion with the idea of a hierarchy based on spiritual achievement gives rise to an ethic urging an ever-increasing inclusiveness of fellow-feeling for others, starting with one’s own family and proceeding through one’s neighborhood, village, district, and country to the whole world (only a few saints—Gandhi, Jesus, Muhammad -—are supposed to have attained such universal sympathy), and a feudal-
organic view of social organization in which individuals and groups have a place in society corresponding to their presumed spiritual abilities.
8. Since the aim of all men should be to experience rasa, religious systems, beliefs and practices are only means to that end and are good only insofar as they bring it about. This leads to a relativistic view of such systems in which it is held that some systems are good for some people and others good for others and all have some good in them for someone. An absolute tolerance is thus enjoined, if not always completely practiced.
in the abangan section I quoted a young man whose wife had recently died and who emphasized the necessity of keeping one’s emotions flattened out, of avoiding wide swings of feeling. He argued that the way to do this was to realize that each person always has periods of happiness and periods of unhappiness. In discussing the prijajis I have quoted a Modjokuto poet on the same point. This theme appears again and again in interviews with members of all the sects.
He said that his science (which he had learned from gurus and from books) also taught that one cannot be happy all the time—there must be some unhappiness as well. “For example,” he said, “when you were just married, you felt that everything was good now and that you would never have any more unhappiness. But you did. A man builds a big factory and says to himself, ‘Now I am happy, I have what I want’; but then another, poorer man builds a little factory, and the first man begins to fear that the little man’s factory may grow and eclipse his own and is unhappy again. My science teaches me to avoid such strong feelings—not to be envious, jealous, or greedy.”
It sometimes seems that what the prijajis most fear is strong feeling, for this implies severe frustration and either the freeing of carefully inhibited aggression or the initiation of an intense depression. Gela, which means “disappointed,” and kagèt, which means “startled,” are two of the feeling states most to be avoided, for the one depresses and the other disorganizes. They are in fact diflerent forms of one and the same thing, gela being normal, that is, not entirely unexpected, frustrated, and kagèt being sudden, unforeseen frustration. One might hypothesize a typical psychological sequence something like this: (1) Aggression may not be directly expressed. (2) Therefore, one in part represses it and in part dissimulates it through the various etiquette forms.
(3) Severe frustration, either in the gela or kagèt form, thus puts the individual in an impossible dilemma of either expressing his suddenly accentuated aggressive feelings, which reaction tends to occur in the more severe kagèt situation,* or of turning the aroused hate inward against the self, bringing depression, more common in the gela situation and among prijajis, whose stimulus-weakening and stimulus-regularizing defenses against startle are better.** (4) In order to avoid this dilemma one tries to calm one’s emotions entirely, to put oneself beyond both disappointment and surprise.
Whether or not this admittedly speculative sequence is actual and typical— and I think there is some evidence that it is—it is certain that the effort of the mystical schools is primarily to still the continual emotional fluctuation of every-day life and reach a state of “peace in the heart,” a theory worked out (or espoused) in explicit detail by the more sophisticated—for example, as expressed by a Modjokuto guru of Kawruh Bedja :
“What is the nature of feelings in life?” he asked rhetorically. “From birth until death only happiness, unhappiness, happiness, unhappiness, in unending alternation. Up and down, happy and unhappy—you can’t be either one all the time. If a man asks why it is that all there is to life is happiness and unhappiness, the answer is that happiness results from the fulfillment of your wishes, unhappiness from their non-fulfillment; and every day there is both fulfillment and frustration, and you can’t get away from this.” I asked: “Can’t you avoid wishing for things?” He said, “No, not completely. The will is an inseparable part of life and to give it up altogether is to give up life. People often forget this basic necessity for happiness and unhappiness to be inwardly connected. If they are happy for a little while, they think they will be happy always; and if they are unhappy for a while, they despair.” I asked if this was bad; and he said, “Well, it isn’t evil exactly, but it means that the person doesn’t understand. It is better to understand. For example: You lose 100 rupiah and you are very unhappy, and you are walking along the road feeling awful, and I come along and you feel happy to see me. We chat a minute, and you are glad to talk with me because you haven’t seen me for a while; and then we part and you become unhappy again, thinking about your lost 100.” He said that often people don’t remember these small happinesses in the middle of unhappinesses and thus don’t get the proper perspective on life. ... In any case, feelings are not certain— one moment one is happy, the next sad; these are connected with one another, necessary implications of one another. This is the difference between bedja (“good fortune,” “the feeling, sensation, experience of good fortune”) and its opposite, tjilaka (“ill fortune”). Bedja means that one has order and peace within—not happiness, not unhappiness—just peace. Tjilaka means that one has uncomfortable feelings, disordered and coarse ones, whether they are happy ones or unhappy ones. Thus bedja is better than happiness, because it does not carry the implication of later unhappiness. Bedja is a rasa, but it is higher than everyday rasa and different in essence from them. . . .
As an example of the difference between these two states, he said: “Suppose you lose something. Now a man who doesn’t know ‘science,’ who is unenlightened, will get angry, disappointed, and generally depressed and upset
* Four separate thieves who were caught in the act of thievery were lynched on the spot during the time I was in Modjokuto; a chauffeur in a nearby town was beaten to death by an aroused citizenry when he stopped after having nearly hit a small girl; and all these events were explained—and excused—by a reference to kagèt— “the people were startled.”
** All the above lynchings were by village people and were attributed by the prijajis in town to the kasar characters of the peasants.
within. However, the man who knows will be peaceful.” I questioned how this was possible if one lost something very important, say an heirloom which had been in one’s family for a long time. He replied: “Well, you would just say, ‘Yes, so it’s lost, it’s lost’; or you would reflect and say ‘Such an object is losable; it is not eternal. Some day it had to be destroyed anyway, so why get upset about it?’ Suppose you break my cup. Since it is valuable, I start to feel angry, but I am advised by my science to remain cool, and so I do. It is hard to believe that this is possible until you do it.” But he added that he couldn’t always do it himself.
if the emotions can be stilled—through various means to which we shall come presently—then “behind” or “underneath” or “within” them one may come face to face with ultimate reality, the reflection of God in the self; a process our poet compares to the cracking open of a coconut:
There is another metaphor which applies :
If, for example, you wish to make coconut oil—
The shell of the coconut may be likened to outward forms of religious discipline,
And the white meat of the coconut
May be likened to the inward forms of religious discipline,
While the oil of the coconut is the truth.
Thus the action
Of breaking open the coconut
Is the method by which can be extracted
The oil which lies within.
Most commonly, the central part of one’s inner life, the place wherein God resides in the individual, is called the “heart” (manah). Sometimes this is identified with a special organ, for example, the liver, or with the heart itself. (Some who are more superstitious will not say the word for “heart” as an organ—djantung—because that is where God is in the individual and to do so might anger Him and bring bad luck.) But generally it is just considered to be the core of the human individual, the deep center of his being. Thus the “heart” in this sense is a kind of spiritual location, the place in the depths of the individual where both his true self and the ultimate rasa, which is God, can be found.
A sect member (a storekeeper by trade) drew the following picture of the situation as he saw it:
This, he said, is a picture of man. The outer, solid line represents man as a thing, as a body. People, first of all, are things, just like other things: rocks, chairs, tables, light-bulbs. Like such things they can be ruined. If one breaks a light-bulb it is ruined forever, and if one breaks a person he also is ruined. This is the same for everyone, and anyone who understands this will not want to hurt anyone else or see anyone in trouble. The second, broken line represents the five senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, talking, and feeling. At this point in just about every one of these catechisms, the informant pinches one and asks if it hurts, and when one says yes it does, he pinches himself and says that it hurts him too, which shows that people have the same sensations, rasa— another reason why one should not want to hurt anyone. The dotted line represents the conscious will, wish as perceived. (“I will drink this water” as a reflective thought was the example given, a conscious intention.) The inner solid circle represents the source of such wishes, the unconscious origin of desires. Wishes, he said, begin unperceived in the inner circle and proceed to the outer, where they are felt.
But we must judge such wishes and intentions, and the question is, what is it that judges?
“Kula (‘I,’ ‘me,’ high Javanese for aku),” I answered. He laughed and said, “Where is ‘kula'? That’s what the last solid circle represents, the essence of the self. Fixed and unchanging, it is always good, and it is that which judges and directs our will, or ought to. It cannot be wrong.” He then went into a discourse on the difference between sensed objects and conceptualized ones. “What is 4 X 4? It is 16. If you say 15, you know it is wrong. How do you know? Because of your inner self. But if you see, say, a match, what is it that sees it? Your eyes; close your eyes and you can’t see it. Or a voice, you hear with your ears; if you’re deaf you can’t hear it. But 4 X 4 is 16 inside; you don’t have to see or hear it. Also, another difference between sensed and conceived objects is that if you ruin a sense object there is a trace. Burn the match and you have a burnt match; a corpse is left when a man dies. But after you’ve stopped thinking about 4x4= 16 there is nothing left, no trace. Some people get far away from their real self, their aku, and in such a case their intelligence just aids in their doing evil. (He gave the atomic scientists as an example). ... At any rate the real self, the aku, the inner solid circle on the chart is the part of the self that is the best. It is not old or young, male or female; and it is not fanatic like the Moslems. Also, it is very hard to get to. You have to semèdi, meditate. . . .”
Separating out the true self from the false self, the ultimate rasa from everyday feelings, the eternal within man from the batin in general, is itself a difficult task. The members of Budi Setia spent three meetings in a row discussing just which feelings could be asserted to come from the swara ing asepi —“the voice in the quiet.” The problem seemed to be whether such premonitions as a feeling that one is going to have an auto accident or that one’s child off in Djakarta has fallen ill could be said to come from the swara ing asepi, which, everyone agreed, was not so much a voice as a feeling and could only be reached by meditation; and whether the voice of conscience is always from this ultimate source or just from the batin generally, the latter being suggested by the fact that some people’s consciences actually lead them astray.
It was finally decided that there were three tilings which are easily confused: (1) swarci ing cisepi, known only through meditation, which is the “voice” of God in the individual, the manifestation of God in the depths of the person’s inner life, and therefore his ultimate “benchmark” which cannot be wrong; (2) “hunches” and “emotional predictions” of accident or good fortune, which can come to the person anytime, with or without meditation, even sometimes in dreams; and (3) the voice of conscience, which is more or less constant but which is identical with the “voice” of God, the swara ing asepi, only in the truly alus man, the man who has gained contact with his real self through meditation.
This kind of phenomenological analysis is an inward-looking but nevertheless empirical attempt to sort out the contingent and the permanent, the human and the divine, within the batin. A quite complex analysis was given by the guru of Kawruh Bedja:
“The soul (cljiwa: ‘soul’ is an unfortunate translation, although I can think of nothing better; for, as the analysis makes clear, this cljiwa is quite unlike our ‘soul,’ being rather the perceived self, the ‘me’ as against the T),” he said, “is a thing, an object, but it is invisible. Although you feel it, it has rasa. Your name is Cliff, and (closing his eyes) you feel (rasa) Cliff. This is called feeling your name.” I said that I didn’t understand this. He said: “Suppose you come here in the dark. No one can see anything and you say, ‘May I come in?’ ‘Who is it?’ I reply. ‘Me,’ you say. ‘Me who?’ I say. ‘Me, Cliff,’ you say. Thus you feel ‘Cliff; this is your soul. Now, that which feels Cliff, which feels the ‘feeling of Cliff,’ is aku, ‘I.’ Aku is not the feeling ‘Cliff’—the soul is that; but the feeling aku is the feeling which feels the feeling ‘Cliff.’ It is the feeling which knows. It is not the soul which knows, it is what is known; aku is what knows. Aku is an eternal object, it can never be destroyed; and some say it is God, so that God is both in the sky and in the individual. But Bedja, dealing only with actually perceived things, takes no position and just says aku is an eternal object.” (In a later interview, however, the guru said that he and everyone else really thought that aku and God were the same, and that the former was only the latter manifested in the individual. The reason he didn’t teach it was that it only confused people, especially at the beginning, and such confusion could be quite harmful and upsetting. Therefore it was better to stick to simple, perceivable things.)
In Ilmu Sedjati, this identification of the “I” in man with God is even more direct, for this semi-secret mystic cult (sometimes called Islam Sedjati, “True Islam,” which infuriates the santris) patterns itself upon the form of Islam and has in place of the Islamic Confession of Faith (“I believe there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His Prophet”) a Confession: “I believe God is in myself and my breath is His representative (Prophet).” The whole confession is rather long and complicated, with secret, “hidden” secondary meanings for all the major words; and a whole set of yoga-like disciplines concerned with breath regulation is built upon it. As one member explained:
Ilmu Sedjati is based on a understanding of God and of life. ... It says that God is in your own body, which means not that the individual is God but that one must look into one’s self in order to find and understand God. It goes on to say that God is manifest in your breath, not so much that He is the breath but that He is what makes the breathing—i.e., you constantly feel yourself breathing and then you refer to what it is that makes this breathing “go” and the answer is God, which is within you.
Thus in Ilmu Sedjati one meditates while regulating his breath (always a part of meditation since meditation involves a severe regulation of one’s physical as well as psychological processes) and hears in his own breathing the mystical word which is the secret core of the “science,” it (inhale), rip (exhale), urip meaning “life.” Over and over again one breathes with perfect regularity and feels the ultimate meaning, u, rip, u, rip. ... A similar discipline in Ilmu Kasunjatan leads to a different word but with roughly the same import: hit (inhale), Allah (exhale), hu Allah, hu Allah. . . . Thus the true self, the ultimate inward feeling, and God are one and the same, an idea the modern santris, at least, realize is diametrically opposed to their own basic tenets.
I told him (a Muhammadijah member) in a lapse of caution that I had been to a Budi Setia meeting. He asked if I knew what Budi Setia was, and I said no. He said that these people thought that God and man were one, in contrast to Islam which teaches that God is God and man is man, that the Lord is the Lord and the servant the servant. I asked: “But aren’t these men Moslems?” He replied: “They say they are, but they don’t carry it out. They don’t follow the Koran, and in fact have no book at all but merely follow their own ideas. There are many people like this in Indonesia, who say they are Moslems but really follow ‘Javanese science.’ ”