Look, I’m going to tell you about something that happened a
long time ago in West Java—hell, it’s still happening if you know where to
look—and you’re going to think it’s just another dusty story about old books
and dead languages. But you’d be wrong. Dead wrong, if you’ll pardon the
expression.
There’s a place called Ciburuy, hunkered down at the foot of
Mount Cikuray near Garut, and it’s been sitting there keeping its secrets since
before your great-great-grandmother was a gleam in anyone’s eye. They call it a
kabuyutan—a sacred site—but that word doesn’t quite capture the weight
of it, does it? It’s more than sacred. It’s the kind of place where the past
doesn’t stay buried, where ancient things press up against the present like a
hand against a membrane, waiting.
The Dutch knew about it, of course. They knew about
everything, those colonial bastards with their neat handwriting and their
careful reports. In 1867, a man named Karel Frederik Holle—owner of the Waspada
tea estate, which tells you something right there about how the old world and
the plantation world got all tangled up together—published a monumental work
about the manuscripts found at Ciburuy. The title was in Dutch, naturally,
longer than a summer day, something about lontar manuscripts from the Sundanese
lands that Raden Saleh had gifted to the Batavian Society.
But the important thing—the really important
thing—was what those manuscripts contained. Stories. Histories. The Carita
Parahyangan. The Sanghyang Siksa Kanda Ng Karesian. Names that sound
like incantations if you say them right, in the dark, when you’re alone.
Holle understood something that most of his contemporaries
didn’t, or wouldn’t: these manuscripts were proof that the Sundanese people had
once possessed a sophistication, an intellectual depth, that had somehow been
lost. He mourned it, in his own way. He wrote about how the Regent of
Garut—Tumenggung Jayadiningrat, if you want to get formal about it—just
shrugged when a religious leader named R. Hadji Moehammad Moesa tried to
compose new literary works. Like it didn’t matter anymore. Like the light had
gone out and everyone had gotten used to the dark.
But here’s the thing about old manuscripts, about sacred
sites, about places where the veil gets thin: they have a way of turning up in
unexpected places, like pennies from hell.
The Man From Cicanggong
Fast forward to 1912. A different location now, but the same
story wearing a different face. Jasinga, in Bogor Regency, at the crossroads
between Banten and West Java. Another plantation area—funny how these sacred
places always seemed to nestle up against the tea estates and the coffee
plantations, like something wild pressed against a fence. They called this
place Kabuyutan Koleang-Cicanggong, and on March 22, 1912, a man named Manan
sat down to tell his story to an official from the Bataviaasch Genootschap.
Manan was fifty-eight years old. Old enough to remember
things, young enough that the memories hadn’t turned completely to fog. He
spoke in Sundanese, his words carefully recorded in the minutes of some meeting
that nobody reads anymore except scholars with too much time on their hands and
not enough sense to leave well enough alone.
He told them about the keropak—the ancient
manuscripts on palm leaves—that his father Jama had left him. But it wasn’t
just the manuscripts. Oh no. There were other things too. Five kujang
daggers that looked like they’d been waiting for someone’s ribs since the dawn
of time. A trident. A spear. A staff. A horse bridle and stirrups. Two bronze
bells that probably rang with a sound that would make your teeth ache. And a
bottle—a gendul—that you’d be smart not to open unless you knew exactly
what you were doing.
All of it, Manan said, had belonged to his
great-great-grandfather Samidin, passed down through Saripin and then Jama,
each generation carrying the weight of it like a stone in their pocket.
Since time out of mind—or at least since Samidin’s time—the
manuscripts had been used in a ceremony called sidekahan, performed on
the fourteenth day of Mulud. The whole community came out for it, everyone
descended from the original families of Cicanggong, all of them knowing that
some rituals are too important to forget, even if you’ve forgotten why they
matter.
The Prince’s Burden
Now here’s where it gets interesting, in the way that
finding a locked door in your basement is interesting.
Manan claimed—and you could hear the generations of oral
tradition in his voice, the story polished smooth by countless retellings—that
all these heirlooms came from Banten. From the time when the Sultan still
ruled, when power meant something more than a signature on a piece of paper. A
prince of Banten, he said, had stopped in a place called Lembur Gelap—the Dark
Village, and isn’t that a hell of a name?—in the Nanggung area. The prince left
the manuscripts with Samidin.
And here’s the part that makes the hair stand up on the back
of your neck: the manuscripts made Samidin uneasy. That’s the word Manan used. Uneasy.
Like they whispered when nobody was listening. Like they had weight beyond
their physical form. So Samidin did what any sensible man would do when faced
with something that scared him but that he couldn’t destroy—he hid them in a
place called Lebak Kabuyutan.
After Samidin died, a police officer named Mas Nardan told
Samidin’s son Saripan where the heirlooms were hidden. How Mas Nardan knew is a
question nobody thought to ask, or maybe they did ask and didn’t like the
answer. Saripan retrieved them and brought them to Cicanggong, where they
stayed, waiting, the way old things do.
But here’s the kicker, the twist that reality throws at you
when you’re not looking: those manuscripts that supposedly came from the Sultan
of Banten’s time? They were actually older. Much older. Fourteenth to
sixteenth century CE, scholars determined later—centuries before the Sultanate
of Banten even existed.
Which means Manan’s story was wrong. Or the story had gotten
twisted over time, the way stories do. Or—and this is the possibility that
should keep you up at night—the story was right about the important things,
even if the details were off. Sometimes a story knows more than the people
telling it.
The Texts Themselves
The National Library of Indonesia, that great repository of
things that maybe should have been left buried, eventually came into possession
of several manuscripts from Kabuyutan Cicanggong. Scholars Aditia Gunawan and
Munawar Holil catalogued them in 2010, giving them neat labels and catalog
numbers, the way we always try to make sense of things that resist being made
sense of.
Langgeng Jati. Carita Jati Mula. Pakéeun
Raga, later called Sanghyang Tatwa Ajnyana. Para Putera Rama dan
Rahwana. Sasana Sang Pandita. Serat Jati Niskala. A Primbon.
Something called Lontar 1105 Peta 69, which sounds less like a
manuscript and more like coordinates to somewhere you don’t want to go.
Some were written on lontar palm leaves. Others on gebang
leaves. Different scripts—Old Sundanese on some, Buda-Gunung script on
others, that one looking eerily similar to Old Javanese script, as if the same
hand had written across centuries and cultures.
But the real treasure, if you want to call it that—and I’m
not sure that’s the right word—was Para Putera Rama dan Rahwana.
The Ramayana Reimagined
In 1971, a scholar named J. Noorduyn wrote about this
particular manuscript, and you can almost hear the excitement in his dry
academic prose. It was, he said, exceptional. And he was right, though maybe
not in the way he thought.
See, this version of the Ramayana—that ancient Indian
epic that spread across Southeast Asia like a virus, changing as it went—was
different. Different in a way that makes you wonder what the hell the
Sundanese people of Cicanggong knew that everyone else had forgotten.
In this version, Ravana—Rahwana, they called him—is
the son of Sita. Not her abductor. Not the demon king who steals her
away. Her son. Try wrapping your head around that for a minute, feel how
it twists the whole story inside out like a sock.
And there’s more. After Rama banishes Sita from
Ayodhya—because he’s a king and kings do stupid, cruel things even to the
people they love—she’s rescued by a wise priest named Hayam Canggong.
Hayam Canggong.
Canggong.
Cicanggong.
You see it now, don’t you? The name of the priest in the
ancient manuscript is an echo of the place where the manuscript was found. Or
maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the place was named for the story, or
maybe the story and the place are the same thing, folded into each other across
centuries until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
This is what sacred means. Not holy. Not blessed. Just significant,
in a way that persists.
The Dictionary and the Proverb
An Englishman named Jonathan Rigg owned land in Jasinga in
the 1860s, and apparently all this cultural richness was just too much for him
to ignore. He compiled a Sundanese-English dictionary in 1862, working with a
man named Ki Gembang, a tukang pantun—an oral poet, someone who kept the
old words alive in his mouth and his memory.
That dictionary preserved fragments of Old Sundanese that
survived in Jasinga, linguistic fossils that scholars like J. Noorduyn and A.
Teeuw would later use to translate ancient manuscripts, including the three
published in Tiga Pesona Sunda Kuna in 2009. Words are resilient things.
They survive. They persist.
Rigg included an old Sundanese proverb in his dictionary,
and I’ll give it to you now, because it’s the perfect way to end this story
that isn’t really ending, just pausing, waiting:
Beunang guguru ti gunung, beunang nanya ti guriang.
What is learned from the mountain, what is known from the
spirit that guards it.
Think about that. What is learned from the
mountain—knowledge you can study, catalog, put in a library. But what is known
from the spirit? That’s something else entirely. That’s the thing that made
Samidin uneasy. That’s the reason ceremonies are held on the fourteenth day of
Mulud. That’s why old manuscripts written centuries ago still matter.
Because some knowledge doesn’t come from books or
dictionaries or careful academic study. Some knowledge comes from the mountain
itself, and from the spirits that guard it, and from the dark places where
sacred things are hidden, waiting for someone foolish or brave enough to find them.
And those mountains—Cikuray, Nanggung, the hills of
Jasinga—they’re still there, still keeping their secrets, still pressing
against the present like a hand against a membrane.
Still waiting.
Always waiting.
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