The UNPAR Department of Philosophy’s Departmental study days at the devotional shrine of Nagara Padang, village of Rawabogo, Ciwidey, West Bandung.
By Prof.Dr Wim van Binsbergen, Erasmus University Rotterdam, May 2010
Photographs marked © Bambang KS are copyright Mr FX Bambang Kristiatmo Subowo, with thanks; all other photographs © 2010 Wim van Binsbergen.
As part of their programme on aspects of Indonesian society, culture and spirituality, around 1st May, 2010, some 40 students of the Department of Philosophy, Universitas Parahyangan (Catholic University) Bandung, accompanied by nearly a dozen members of staff, spend a number of days at the village of Rawabogo, some 50 km South West of the city of Bandung. I know the site, having visited it intensively in 2007, at the beginning of the local fieldwork of my PhD candidate Stephanus Djunatan, M.A., one of the members of staff involved. Three years later I came back
to Bandung in order to supervise the finalisation of the PhD thesis. Since my trip coincided with the study days, I took the opportunity of renewing my acquaintance with the village and its shrine, and see the students and staff in action. The following reflection has been written at the staff’s request.
While equipped with all such common yet breath-taking features as the surrounding mountainous landscape and terraced wet paddy fields, and the less common feature of a recently planted pine forest, the truly distinguishing feature1 of Rawabogo is that it is the site of an extensive devotional shrine up in the mountains (c. 1600 m above sea level). The shrine’s name is Nagara Padang – explained by the guardians, by scholars and by others in various ingenious and mystical ways, but probably with the original meaning, in the Sunda language of West Java,2 of ‘Realm (Nagara) of Splendour (Padang)’, or ‘Realm of Rice-eating’ (as if it is some mythical Land of Cocaygne, of unending abundance). The shrine’s six guardians live down in the valley. The two principal ones (father and son) are informal community leaders in Rawabogo, where their personal dwellings also accommodate pilgrims who come to the shrine. The shrine itself belongs to an area gazetted as a National Park, and its official entrance gate can only be passed during office hours. Although pilgrims have been known to be taken up in their ordinary clothing, the ideal outfit for the pilgrim is a uniform, consisting of a loosely fitting black costume and a variegated grey headscarf (for the
men), or a white top, dark sarong wrapper or trousers, and a variegated brown headscarf (for the women). Apparently the existence of the shrine has given rise to an entire industry dedicated to the renting and cleaning of such uniforms. The overall signature of the shrine’s cult is Islamic, and formal (if sometimes garbled) Islamic prayers and songs mark the beginning, the various successive stages, and the end, of the pilgrimage; appropriately also, the only building to be found at the shrine, just inside the entrance gate, is a small mosque.
Meanwhile, as in many forms of Indonesian popular religion, the devotional idiom proffered here is internally layered, and implicit Hindu, Buddhist, and local Sunda (apparently also including megalithic)3 elements may be identified in addition to the Islamic ones. In fact, the format and purpose of the shrine is perhaps best characterised by saying that it is a natural counterpart of Borobudur. The latter devotional shrine in Central Java, with its dazzlingly lavish decoration in the form of Buddhist sculpture, is not in the first place a depiction of the Buddha’s life but especially a protracted pious lesson, in sculpture, portraying a Buddhist pilgrim’s progress through the phases of life and knowledge, towards ultimate illumination. Distantly comparable is procession through the Stations of the Cross, as depicted on the interior walls of most Roman Catholic Churches, both in commemoration of the Passion of Christ, and as devotional inspiration for the individual worshipper. At Nagara Padang, there are virtually no images shaped by human hands. Instead, salient aspects of the natural rocky landscape – a narrow passage, a set of cliffs, a steep ascent, a jutting rock etc., – have been named and thus made the objects of human pious projections; subsequently they have been joined into a coherent mental map of the spiritual realm of Nagara Padang.4
Complete article can be accessed here : Prof_wim_studydaysat_rawabogo