IN HIS GROUNDBREAKING ARTICLE ‘A Buddhist mantra recovered from the Ratu Boko plateau: A preliminary study of its implications for Śailendra-era Java’, Jeffrey Sundberg (2003) highlighted an important gold artefact recovered from the Ratu Boko hillock near Prambanan in Central Java. The artefact, an inscribed gold foil consisting of two connected diamond-shaped leaves recalling a vajra, bears the Sanskrit mantra oṁ ṭakī hūṁ jaḥ svāhā repeated on each of its four sides. A unique, and intriguing, feature of the inscription is the engraving of the words panarabvan and khanipas within an exaggerated circular bubble in the two cases of the grapheme ī in the sequence ṭakī. This feature led Sundberg to advance the hypothesis that the artefact, and the mantra(s) inscribed on it, was connected to King Rakai Panaraban (r. ad 784– 803), who is known to us through the inscription of Wanua Tengah III recovered from Central Java, as well as from the 16th-century Old Sundanese historical chronicle Carita Parahyaṇan(Sundberg 2011). Sundberg (2003) discovered instances of very similar mantras (i.e., TAKKI HŪṀ JAḤ, ṬAKKIJJAḤ HUṀ) in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Sino-Japanese Tantric Buddhist texts, and pointed out that in the Sanskrit Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṇgraha(STTS)— a 7th-century mūlatantraconsolidated over time into the Yogatantra tradition (Weinberger 2003: 4)—the mantra occurs in the context of the Buddhist Trailokyavijaya myth or the ‘Subjugation of Maheśvara’ by the Bodhisattva Vajrapāṇi, while in Sino-Japanese sources it is associated with Aizen's subjugation of Īśvara and Nārāyaṇa. In view of these interesting facts, Sundberg concluded that the epigraphic document was Vajrayāna in nature, thus opening the grounds ‘to find expressions of these tantric convictions in the stone temples of Java’ (ibid.: 181); that it might have had an anti-Śaiva character (and purpose)—being a repudiation in strong terms of the religion of Panaraban's ancestor Sanjaya (ibid.: 183); and that it was devised by Panaraban, in order to ‘link himself to the mantra or the cosmic being it points to’ (ibid.). In the conclusion to his essay, Sundberg anticipated that the study of this mantra ‘has hopefully only just begun’ (ibid.), and invited scholars with the necessary philological skills to search for attestations of this mantra in textual sources from South, Central, Southeast, and East Asia…

EVER SINCE THE REDISCOVERY by the French scholar George Coedès (1918) of the Indonesian kingdom of Śrīvijaya, which for more than half a millennium (7th–13th century ad) played a major role in the history of Southeast Asia, the study of this polity has assumed a prominent position in the research of the ancient history of Indonesia. This kingdom and its capital Śrīvijayapura, probably located near the modern city of Palembang in Sumatra, functioned for a long period as a relay station and resting point in the vibrant sea trade between India and China, to which it also contributed an array of products. Apart from this, Śrīvijaya also maintained close contacts with kingdoms on the mainland of Southeast Asia. Its important position in Asian commercial traffic aside, Śrīvijaya was for many centuries a prominent international centre in the Buddhist world. Chinese monks, on their way to India by sea, often stayed in the cpital of Śrīvijaya for some length of time to familiarize themselves with Sanskrit before travelling on to India. Of these Chinese monks the best known was perhaps Yijing, who stayed in the capital for a period of six months in the year 671. However, bhikṣus from India itself also did travel to the famous Śrīvijaya. Thus we read in Tāranātha's History of Buddhism in India (in Tibetan, 16th century) that, after his retirement from Nālandā University, Dharmapāla, originally from Kāncī and a contemporary of Xuanzang, left for Sumatra to stay there for the rest of his life. According to this late Tibetan source he gained immortality (amṛtasiddhi) there, never to be reborn again. This Dharmapāla followed the spiritual tradition of the famous Buddhist scholar Diṇnāga (5th century), who in turn is mentioned in the Old Javanese SaṇHyaṇKamahāyānikan as the proclaimer of the fourfold Yoga.

Because of the many foreign contacts, both commercially and in religious matters, it almost goes without saying that non-Indonesian sources could contain important information regarding the history of Śrīvijaya. Apart from indigenous sources (inscriptions, artefacts, etc.), the Chinese in particular have contributed much to our knowledge of the kingdom of Śrīvijaya.

IN THEIR INTRODUCTION to a recent special issue of History of Religions devoted to (Esoteric) ‘Buddhist Visual Culture’, Jinah Kim and Rob Linrothe (2014) encouraged ‘a geographically wide framing of almost every question that can be asked about Esoteric Buddhism’. They argued:

Espousing an analogous wide-ranging perspective, this volume studies the genesis, development and circulation of Esoteric (or Tantric) Buddhism throughout the vast geoenvironmental area that may be defined as ‘Maritime Asia’, from the 7th to the 13th centuries ad. In doing so, it upholds a trans-regional approach laying emphasis on the mobile networks of human agents (‘Masters’), textual corpora (‘Texts’), and visual/architectural models and artefacts (‘Icons’) through which Esoteric Buddhist discourses and practices spread far and wide across Asia. This extensive Introduction proposes several issues for consideration in surveying recent scholarly literature and in contextualizing the religious, historical, and socio-political dynamics—intervening on a local/regional as well as cosmopolitan/supralocal scale—that shaped these networks as they moved across different geographical and cultural contexts.

Maritime Asia, encompassing ‘Monsoon Asia’ as its core, spans the eastern littorals of the Indian SubContinent (and their hinterlands) in the west to the South China Sea littorals (and their hinterlands), the Philippine islands, Korea and Japan in the east; its geographical fulcrums are the littorals of peninsular and mainland Southeast Asia, and the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago. Spreading across the superimposed geopolitical boundaries of modern nation states, and transcending such equally arbitrary and historically constructed geographical divisions as South/Southeast/East Asia, this largely maritime expanse was influenced by similar environmental and climatic factors, such as the seasonal monsoons. Being the theatre of circulation of people, goods, languages and ideas through sea routes since time immemorial, Maritime Asia may be theorized as forming—just like Eurasia—one interconnected network, and arguably even an integral cultural ecumene with a shared background of human, intellectual, and environmental history.

A KEY FIGURE IN THE 8TH-CENTURY transmission of Buddhism between the Sanskritic and Sinic worlds is a monk known by his Chinese name Bianhong (perhaps a.k.a Ājñāgarbha). To date, Bianhong's life and work have been known primarily from one account circulated in Japan by his more famous fellow student Kūkai. Here Bianhong's career will be examined in the light of the sole work attributed to him: the Ritual Manual for Initiation into the Great Maṇḍala of the Uṣṇīṣa-Cakravartin(Taishō Tripiṭaka 959), hereafter the Manual. Although Bianhong is often discussed in connection with the spread of Buddhism in his Javanese homeland, his Manual has been entirely overlooked to date. No other individual from Java is known to have travelled to the Tang and written in Chinese, but it will be argued here that the author of the Manual was indeed a foreign member of China's most prestigious lineage of Esoteric Buddhism. The Manual 's protocols were however determined not only by the twin–maṇḍalasystem of the Tang masters, but also the more obscure and archaic system of the Uṣṇīṣa kalpas. It was the Uṣṇīṣakalpas that offered the most compelling rituals for the coronation (abhiṣeka) of a universal emperor, a cakravartin —a process that interested many Buddhist cognoscenti in South, East, and Southeast Asia at the time. To facilitate the discussion of these rituals, a preliminary Chinese edition and annotated translation of the Manual is also presented for the first time here.

Bianhong emerges into history in the wake of the first transmissions of soteriology-oriented Tantric Buddhism to Tang China. The novelty of this form of Buddhism lay in the fact that it was transmitted from guru to disciple through initiation, and in its ability to harness the power of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas through mantras and yogic meditation. It had an exclusive character suited to talented monks and adventurous laypersons—especially those in the ruling elite, up to the level of the head of state, for whom the rituals of initiation (abhiṣeka) could be performed with full effect as a coronation (rājyābhiṣeka).

In another venue (Sundberg 2009: 310, n. 45), I have written of my inability to confirm de Casparis' (1956: 312) published reading of the word vālaputra on the Indonesian National Museum's inscription D28, commonly known as ‘Śivagṛha’, the ad 856 funereal stele of King Pikatan. Because his reading stands at the basis of a nexus de Casparis' claims about the history of the Ratu Boko plateau and his interpretation of an end to Buddhist Śailendra rule in Java, it is worth some energy to provide a minute analysis for those interested specialists who read Kawi.

My notes on my original observations on are no longer available to me, but I can offer an analysis de novo to refute de Casparis' reading thanks to an image of the pertinent section of the stone which was kindly furnished by Andrea Acri. The reading of the first six akṣara s of line 10 (marked by the red circle on the photograph) per de Casparis (1956: 312) is ‘hī vā la pu tra//’. In order to register my comments and objections— which are by no means as skillful or nuanced as I would have wished because I have not practised reading the script in over a decade—to most of de Casparis' transliteration, I have imposed Roman letters on to the photograph and will take up the pertinent features of the stone in turn.

1. (A) The concentric arcs to the right of the ‘A’ must be the elements that de Casparis reports as a ha, a character which in Kawi assumes the serpentine form ഗ. The proper form is obviously lacking on the stone.

2. (B) De Casparis reads a long vowel ī. While it is not out of the question that the open semicircle does indeed represent a superscript i rather than a subscripted ga from the line above (nu- merous examples of such an open form exist on the ad 792 inscription of Manjuśrīgṛha), there is no indication of a vowel-lengthening element. (For reference to how the i-vowel is lengthened in Manjuśrīgṛha, see the twenty-first akṣara of line 7).

THE TWO PRIMARY BUDDHIST MONUMENTS of Śailendra Java, Candi Sewu and Borobudur, are impressive but, as little is known about their genesis or ultimate meaning, mute and historically uninformative. On the other hand, as this essay will attempt to show, there is an important and fascinating dynamic locked in the architecturally unremarkable lithic remains on the southern end of the Ratu Boko prominence, a dynamic which is of much greater importance than either Sewu or Borobudur to both Buddhist sectarian history as well as the history of Bauddha-Śaiva relations.

The primary goal of this chapter is to examine the relationship between two chronologically and thematically distinct sets of lithic structures and inscriptions at the southern end of the Ratu Boko promontory in Central Java. The first set of structures is Buddhist and relates to an ad 792 Śailendra foundation inscription (Fig. 14.1) that explicitly identified the occupants as Sinhalese monks of the renowned Abhayagirivihāra. The specific identification of these Sinhalese monks as paṁsukūlika, literally ‘rag-wearers’, is inferred by the telltale presence of their seemingly signature architecture, the double-platform structure. The second set of structures and artefacts is Śaiva in character, and was erected around 856 by a cultivated Javanese blue blood, the raka of Valaing pu Kumbhayoni, one of whose several Gunung Kidul inscriptions mentions him to have once reigned over some kingdom, although obviously not in Central Java itself. Despite the vast acreage of open terrace available on the plateau, Kumbhayoni's Śaiva structures were erected in remarkably tight proximity to the Abhayagiri structure, with sacred Śaiva architecture, inscriptions, and emblems placed just metres from the prākāra walls and surrounding them on at least three sides.

This chapter seeks to explicate these archaeological facts and offer a plausible narrative about how the Bauddha and the Śaiva intersected in 856 on that small patch of Central Java. I conclude that it is difficult to discern any evidence that Kumbhayoni's Śaiva symbology was intended to promote rather than thwart the Abhayagiri group, but rather represented a deliberate attempt to stamp a countervailing Śaiva presence on the plateau.

INTRODUCTION

The effects of the June 2012 communal violence had barely faded away, when the ethnic Rohingya minority people in northern Rakhine (previously Arakan) State found themselves face-to-face with new existential challenges that included food shortages, malnourishment, and health crises. Amid these challenges, the Myanmar Government quickly swooped in and expelled international aid agencies, whose role was to provide aid to the displaced Rohingya. The Rohingya continue to flee their country in droves, fearing continued persecution and threats to their lives. There are about two million Rohingya in Myanmar, approximately 800,000 of whom live in northern Rakhine State. An estimated 328,500 now live in Bangladesh, as documented and undocumented refugees. About half a million have migrated to other parts of the world. Substantial numbers remain, on either side of the Naf River, where they lead displaced lives and face an uncertain future.

Externally, Myanmar's political transformation appears successful, with a large number of communities having gone “home”, as they say, but the future of the ethnic Rohingya minority remains uncertain. Central to their uncertainty is the question of the group's political identity and hence its belonging. The Myanmar Government considers them “Bengali”, “illegal immigrants”, and “never” having been a part of Myanmar's history. Hence, they ought to be excluded from Myanmar's national identity. Meanwhile, the Bangladeshi Government maintains that the Rohingya were not originally from Bangladesh. They were not officially known until 1977, when they first crossed the border from Myanmar in huge numbers because of political upheaval in their land of origin. Hence, the Bangladeshi Government notes, they are rightfully labelled “refugees” and ought to return. Such political denials on both sides increase the complexity of the situation, and prolong the crisis by pushing the Rohingya back and forth across state boundaries. This makes the border an intriguing part of Rohingya identity.

This chapter has two objectives: firstly, it explores how the state created sociopolitical identities for the Rohingya people in the context of the historical development of Myanmar, and secondly, it examines how the Rohingya people define and construct their own identity given the politics of belonging they are enmeshed in within the context of the Naf border.