The Cosmological aspect of Indonesian Religion

Abstract

The cosmological aspect of religion, and the application of cosmic symbolism to religious architecture and social organization, were discovered relatively late, so that the attention rightly directed to the subject in recent years has engendered a tendency to overestimate its importance in Asian thought. Fortunately this has not escaped the notice of critics. The cosmological aspect of the ziggurat is now recognized to have been secondary. Further, with regard to Indian culture, Prof. A. L. Basham has uttered this timely warning: “It is hardly likely that the complex cosmic symbolism of the Vedic sacrifices was elaborated until long after the sacrifices themselves came into being. Similarly the cosmic symbolism of the Hindu temple seems to us to be a comparatively late and artificial growth, of far less significance than some authorities are inclined to attribute to it. The symbolism seems to have been somewhat esoteric, the preserve of schools of learned men who specialized in trying to explain every aspect of life by this means. We believe that for the early Indian man in the street it was of far less significance than might be believed from the emphasis which some modern students place upon it.” In the present article I shall try to redress the balance in the case of certain non-Islamized peoples of Indonesia, an undertaking which in view of some recent publications seems to be needed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.