This document is a book review that summarizes and evaluates the book "Worshiping Siva and Buddha: The Temple Art of East Java" by Ann R. Kinney. The review provides a high-level summary of the book, which chronologically examines Hindu and Buddhist temple architecture and sculptures from the East Javanese kingdoms between the 10th and 16th centuries. While praising Kinney's work as an introductory survey, the review encourages future researchers to conduct deeper analyses of the localized meanings and spiritual functions represented in the temples' artistic programs.

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Worshiping Siva and Buddha: The Temple Art of East Java
Author: McGowan, Kaja M
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Abstract: McGowan reviews Worshiping Siva and Buddha: The Temple Art of East Java by Ann R. Kinney, with
Marijke J. Klokke and Lydia Kieven.
Full text: Worshiping Siva and Buddha: The Temple Art of East Java. By ANN R. KINNEY, with MARIJKE J.
KLOKKE and LYDIA KIEVEN. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003. 303 pp. $60.00 (cloth).
Ann R. Kinney's Worshiping Siva and Buddha: The Temple Art of East Java serves as a welcome introductory
survey to temple sites constructed in the East Javanese kingdoms of Kadiri, Singasari, and Majapahit between
the tenth and the sixteenth centuries. Once described as "magical" by Dutch archaeologist Willem Frederik
Stutterheim because of their apparent propensity to return to pre-Hindu ("Javanized") concepts of construction,
East Java's architectural and sculptural remains have been curiously overlooked when compared with the
scholarly attention directed to the more Indie-inspired Central Javanese monuments from the eighth and ninth
centuries-primarily the Buddhist stupa Borobudur and Hindu candi Loro Jonggrang. Kinney chronologically
reunites the current state of the architectural remains in situ with numerous sculptures once associated with
these temple sites, which at various points historically (for reasons nefarious or otherwise) have been
transported to museums and private collections all over the world. While in most cases we can only guess how
these freestanding sculptures might have originally contributed to prescribed ambulatory patterns of worship,
Kinney's attempted reconstructions based on documented evidence when juxtaposed with the superb color
photography provided by Rio Helmi will undoubtedly ignite scholarly interest and encourage much-needed
future research. Interspersed throughout Kinney's text are generous enticements to scholars, seasoned and
novice, to pursue as-of-yet unsolved and/or underrepresented avenues of inquiry, an invitation promoted still
further by the invaluable inclusion of appendix B ("A Note for Photographers"), in which Helmi offers advice on
the favorable conditions required for the successful photographing of Indonesian temples and their complex
reliefs.
This is a sumptuously illustrated volume including three hundred photographs, and the volume's first section
includes an introductory chapter entitled "Hinduism and Buddhism in Indonesia," by Marijke J. Klokke of Leiden
University. This is followed by a brief overview on the architecture and art of ancient East Java by art historian
Lydia Kieven. The three pieces by Kinney that proceed chart progressively in isolated sections a summary of
each site, followed by the artistic developments in the separate kingdoms of Kadiri (929-1222), Singasari (1222-
92), and Majapahit (1293-1519). Kinney identifies the narrative reliefs depicted episodically in stone, visually
analyzing-still by still-the rivers of stories encircling these temples in unique combinatory patterns.
Worshiping Siva and Buddha is a significant contribution not only to Javanese studies but also to architecture,
art history, comparative religion, Hindu studies, Buddhist studies, and Southeast Asian studies. Although the
book contains invaluable information that is not available en masse in any other publication, the very
introductory nature of this text and its organizational choices would seem to preclude the possibility for deeper
and more-complex readings. Rather than find fault here, however, this review might better serve as a caveat to
future researchers inspired by Kinney's text to challenge themselves to go beyond the issues and problems
dealt with in much of the earlier scholarship on temples in Southeast Asia. It is not enough to be content with
simply identifying the stories carved in stone or divining the possible relationship between surviving texts and
reliefs and what caused certain incongruities, stylistic and otherwise, between the two. Scholars must examine
the possible localized meanings of the stories selected within their architectural context as reflective of a
performative and spiritually edifying experience. I am advocating further exploration of the approach
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4. championed in part by Peter Worsley (and modeled by many of his students, such as Marea A. Johnstone,
Kathleen O'Brien, and Adrian Vickers), who argued that the seemingly confused order of some of the reliefs
sculptured on Candi Surawana, formerly ascribed to mistakes on the part of the sculptor(s), was directly related
to the function of the candi and its cosmic orientation ("Narrative Bas-Reliefs at Candi Surawana," in Southeast
Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries, ed. David G. Marr and A. C. Milner {Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies; Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1986}).
Such localizing of narrative form and function would force emerging scholarship to grapple with the importance
of the relationship between, for example, Judith A. Patt's significant and as yet unpublished 1979 Berkeley
dissertation, "The Use and Symbolism of Water in Ancient Indonesian Art and Architecture," referenced in
Kinney's text but not cited, and the preponderance of stories of deliverance carved on East Javanese temples in
which parental ancestors and holy water (amerta) are wrested from inaccessible places and brought to celestial
candi-like climes. Patt's discovery that in East Java and Bali the selection of sites for temples and monuments
was governed by and indeed often directly harnessed to the auspicious location of particular natural water
sources and their potential mixture quite effectively gives autonomous, physical form to that uniquely Tantric
confluence of Siva/Buddha knowledge, power, and genealogical legitimacy so essential to the phenomenon of
demonizing the divine status of kings and queens in East Java. Suddenly the reason for the preponderance in
stone of a story such as "Bubuksha and Gagang Aking"-which is about two brothers who practice asceticism in
distinctive ways, reflecting alternatively Buddhist and Sivaic paths to enlightenment-requires more than simply
Kinney's cursory treatment where it occurs (pp. 202-4, 236) but to entertain the possibility of interpreting it along
the lines of W. H. Rassers, who in Panji, the Culture Hero: A Structural Study of Religion in Java (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1959) refers to the folktale as quintessentially reflective of that unique amalgamation of Hindu,
Buddhist, and animistic forces (Stutterheim's "magic") serving to shape East Javanese visual sensibilities.
In successive order, the kingdoms of Kadiri, Singasari, and Majapahit not only ruled large parts of Java but also
played a formative role in the course of history of several areas outside Java, especially Bali and Sumatra. To
assume, however, that the influence only traveled unilaterally is to perpetuate certain Orientalist (particularly
Dutch) preoccupations with pre-Hindu Java as a golden age of art and culture before the arrival of Islam.
Kekawin, poems based on the great Hindu epics, were especially valued by the Dutch as direct survivals of that
"classical" Indian or Javanese Majapahit past. The fact that these texts had been copied and recopied for
centuries by Balinese priests and scribes seemed inconsequential to colonial antiquarian collecting practices.
To persevere in referring to Bali as a mere "repository of fifteenth-century Hindu-Javanese culture" (p. 9) or a
"preserver of Hindu Java" (p. 159) is to perpetuate that indifference. It is Hindu Balinese ritualistic and artistic
responses to the memory of Kadiri, Singasari, and especially Majapahit-in all its creative and anachronistic
forms of expression (and genealogical obsession) over the centuries-that has made certain texts particularly
accessible to European collections. The many stones to which Kinney refers in Worshiping Siva and Buddha
are all cases in point. Ball's agency must be reconsidered in light of this shared, albeit distinctive, preoccupation
with East Java's past.
AuthorAffiliation
KAJA M. MCGOWAN
Cornell University
Subject: Book reviews; Nonfiction; Hinduism; Buddhism;
Location: East Java
People: Kinney, Ann R, Klokke, Marijke J, Kieven, Lydia
Publication title: The Journal of Asian Studies
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5. Volume: 64
Issue: 1
Pages: 248-250
Number of pages: 3
Publication year: 2005
Publication date: Feb 2005
Year: 2005
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Place of publication: Ann Arbor
Country of publication: United Kingdom
Publication subject: Social Sciences: Comprehensive Works, Political Science--International Relations, Asian
Studies, Literature
ISSN: 00219118
CODEN: JASNBR
Source type: Scholarly Journals
Language of publication: English
Document type: Book Review-Mixed
ProQuest document ID: 230422445
Document URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/230422445?accountid=25704
Copyright: Copyright Association for Asian Studies, Inc. Feb 2005
Last updated: 2011-08-29
Database: ProQuest Asian Business & Reference,Arts & Humanities Full Text
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