Listen, friend. Let me tell you a story about words that
carry more weight than a loaded freight train barreling through the Maine
countryside on a fog-thick October night. Words that started in one
place—ancient, holy, carved in stone and memory—and ended up somewhere else
entirely, like a malevolent spirit that jumps from host to host, changing
everything it touches.
Bhinneka Tunggal Ika. Say it slow. Let it roll around
your tongue like a piece of hard candy that might just turn bitter if you’re
not careful.
The Man Who Plucked Lightning From the Sky
Muhammad Yamin sat in that sweltering Jakarta meeting room
in 1945—May bleeding into June like spilled ink on hot pavement—and he had an
idea. Oh, he had an idea alright. The kind that comes to you in the
small hours when the world feels thin as cigarette paper and you can almost see
through to the other side of things.
The BPUPKI session, they called it. Bunch of men in white
shirts sticking to their backs, sweat beading on foreheads as they tried to
build a nation from scratch like children building castles in the sand, knowing
full well the tide was coming in.
And Yamin, that clever son of a bitch, he reaches back
through time—way back, past the Dutch and the Portuguese and the blood and the
screaming—all the way back to the kingdom of Majapahit, where the ghosts still
walk if you know how to listen.
The Resurrection of Ancient Words
Five years later—February 11, 1950—those same words would be
carved into the national emblem during a cabinet meeting. Bambang Noorsena
would write about it decades later, probably never knowing he was documenting
the moment when ancient magic got dressed up in modern clothes and sent out to
do a job it was never meant to do.
But here’s where it gets interesting, where the skin starts
to crawl if you’re paying attention.
The Original Sin
Those words—Bhinneka Tunggal Ika—they weren’t talking
about what you think they were talking about. Not at all.
Deep in the shadows of the fourteenth century, when Hayam
Wuruk ruled Majapahit and the air itself seemed thick with power and
possibility, there lived a poet named Mpu Tantular. His name meant “unshaken,”
and maybe that should have been the first warning sign. In Stephen King’s
universe, the unshakeable are usually the ones with the most to shake loose.
Tantular wrote his Kakawin Sutasoma, and in the 139th
verse of the 5th canto, he penned words that would echo through the centuries
like a curse passed down through generations:
It is said that Buddha and Shiva are two different
entities; they are indeed different, but how can they be distinguished? For the
teachings of Jina and Shiva are one, different but still united, there is no
duality in truth.
Divine unity. Sacred truth. The kind of cosmic harmony that
makes the hair on your arms stand up because you know—you just know—that
mortals weren’t meant to mess with this stuff.
But mess with it they did.
The Shape of Things to Come
See, Tantular wasn’t writing a political manifesto. He was
writing about God and gods, about the terrible beautiful truth that lies at the
heart of existence itself. He was writing about Prince Sutasoma—the incarnation
of Vairocana Buddha—who came down into this cesspit of a world during the
Kaliyuga, the age of chaos, when everything good turns rotten and the darkness
creeps in from the edges like black mold in a damp basement.
The story Tantular told would make your blood run cold if
you really understood it. A cannibal king named Purusada who wanted to devour a
hundred kings—and the gods, those cosmic puppet masters, sending the gentle
prince Sutasoma to stop him not with violence but with sacrifice. The kind of
sacrifice that changes everything, that turns the world inside out and upside
down.
And maybe—just maybe—Tantular was trying to tell his king
something. Maybe he was holding up a mirror to Hayam Wuruk’s empire-building,
his conquest and unification of the archipelago. Maybe he was saying: “Look,
you want unity? Real unity? It doesn’t come from the sword. It comes from
something deeper, something that costs you everything.”
The Haunting Continues
But here we are, centuries later, and those sacred words
have been stripped of their divine context, dressed up in nationalist clothing,
and sent out to hold together a nation of islands scattered across an ocean
that seems to go on forever.
The irony would be funny if it wasn’t so goddamn terrifying.
Bhinneka Tunggal Ika lives on, but like all
transplanted things, it’s not quite the same creature it used to be. It’s
evolved, mutated, adapted to its new environment. What was once about the unity
of divine truth has become about the unity of human difference—ethnicity,
religion, ideology, all the messy, complicated, beautiful, and terrible things
that make us who we are.
And maybe that’s not wrong. Maybe that’s just how these
things work—ancient wisdom finds new vessels, new purposes, new ways to matter
in a world that never stops changing.
But late at night, when the Jakarta traffic finally quiets
and the city settles into that uneasy sleep that never quite comes, you might
wonder if somewhere in the darkness, the ghost of Mpu Tantular is watching.
Watching and waiting. Wondering what his words have become, and what they might
become next.
Because in the end, that’s what words do. They survive. They
adapt. They find new hosts.
And sometimes—just sometimes—they remember where they came
from.
Different, but still one. Unity in the darkness.
The motto endures, carrying within it the seeds of something
ancient and holy and possibly dangerous. And we carry it forward, never quite
sure if we’re the inheritors of a blessing or a curse.
But then again, in this world of ours, maybe there’s no
difference between the two.
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