Place · Hindu temple complex · Indonesia
Prambanan, Java
The 9th-century Hindu temple complex at Prambanan in central Java, built around 850 CE under Rakai Pikatan of the Sanjaya (Hindu) dynasty, immediately after the Sailendra Buddhist dynasty's Borobudur was completed. The three main Trimurti shrines of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are flanked by their mounts Hamsa, Garuda and Nandi, with the Shiva shrine (47m) as the central tower. The outer wall holds a continuous Ramayana relief programme in a distinctive Javanese version (Ramayana Kakawin) with local characters, costume and iconographic adaptations. The Prambanan Ramayana ballet is still staged nightly at the temple. The complex shows the local Javanese adaptation of Shaiva and Vaishnava traditions, with a Hindu-Buddhist coexistence (the Sewu and Bubrah Buddhist temples sit adjacent). UNESCO 1991.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- -7.752, 110.492
Connections (3)
- Pallava and JavaKānchī / Kānchīpuram / Kanchipuram
The ninth-century Shiva-Vishnu-Brahma complex at Prambanan in central Java is a Javanese Mataram creation, built on a scale no Indian temple of its date matched, but the script of its inscriptions, the iconography of its images and the Ramayana of its reliefs all come out of the south Indian world that Pallava Kanchipuram stood at the centre of. The Javanese took a vocabulary and wrote something of their own in it.
- Contemporary capital withBorobudur, Java
Borobudur and Prambanan were built within a few decades of each other and about fifteen kilometres apart, by the Buddhist Shailendra and the Shaiva Sanjaya lines, and are among the largest monuments of their respective religions anywhere. Central Java produced both within one generation, probably with the same masons and the same corvée labour, which suggests the sectarian rivalry was a matter of court patronage rather than of the population.
- Devotional corpus onKakawin Rāmāyaṇa
The Ramayana relief on the inner balustrade of the Shiva temple at Prambanan follows the Kakawin's narrative rather than Valmiki's, and both date from roughly the same central Javanese century. The panels stop partway through the story and the rest is carried on the Brahma temple — which is one of the arguments for the whole complex having been built and modified over several reigns rather than to a single plan.
On these journeys
- India and Southeast Asia — scripts, Sanskrit and sacred kingship
- The Ramayana across the eastern seas
Sources
ICWA, Mapping India’s Historical Ties with Southeast Asia
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