The Malay kingdom of Srivijaya-Palembang

Buddhism in Palembang

Srivijaya-Palembang’s importance both as a trade nexus and as a Southeast Asian centre for the practice of Buddhism has been established by Arab and Chinese historical sources spanning a long period of time. Its own records, in the form of inscriptions in Old Malay (Malay language written in an Indian-based script), are limited almost entirely to the second half of the 7th century. The inscriptions reveal that the ruler was served by a hierarchy of officials and that he possessed wealth. The period when the inscriptions were written was an agitated one. Battles are mentioned, and the ruler had to reckon with disaffection and intrigue at his capital. Indeed, the main theme of the inscriptions is a curse on those who broke a loyalty oath administered by drinking holy water. The penalty for disloyalty was death, but those who obeyed the ruler were promised eternal bliss.

I-ching recommended Palembang, with more than a thousand monks, as an excellent centre at which to begin studying Buddhist texts. The 7th-century inscriptions, however, are concerned with less-scholarly features of Buddhism. Showing influences of Vajrayana, or Tantric Buddhism, they deal largely with yantras, symbols to aid magical power that were distributed by the ruler as favours to faithful servants. (Some of the ruler’s adversaries also dispensed yantras, however.) The Talang Tuwo inscription of 684, which records the king’s prayer that a park he has endowed may give merit to all living beings, is especially indicative of the presence of Buddhism within the context of royal power. The language and style of this inscription, incorporating Indian Tantric conceptions, make it clear that the ruler was presenting himself as a bodhisattva—one who was to become a buddha himself—teaching the several stages toward supreme enlightenment. This is the first instance in the archipelago’s history of a ruler’s assumption of the role of religious leader.

The inscriptions show that the teachings of the Tantric school of Mahayana Buddhism, with its magical procedures for achieving supernatural ends, had reached Palembang before the end of the 7th century. Tantric Buddhism came into prominence in India only in the 7th century, and the synchronism of its appearance in Palembang reflects not only the regularity of shipping contacts between Sumatra and India but, more important, the Malays’ quick perception of Tantrism as a source of personal spiritual power. The word for “curse” in the inscriptions is Malay, and it is reasonable to suppose that the Malays grafted Tantric techniques onto indigenous magical procedures. The prestige that was accorded the sacred Seguntang Hill, a site visited by those in search of spiritual power, probably also reflects the vitality of Malay religion; it is unlikely that the site would have become such a spiritual centre merely as a result of traffic in Tantric conceptions during the 7th century. The agitation and adversity revealed in the inscriptions, then, are less likely to have been the growing pains of a rising kingdom than the efforts of an already important kingdom to achieve, or perhaps recover, hegemony in southern Sumatra.

The maritime influence

In the centuries before they undertook long voyages overseas, the Chinese relied on foreign shipping for their imports, and foreign merchants from afar required a safe base in Indonesia before sailing on to China. This seaborne trade, regarded in China as “tributary” trade with the “emperors’ barbarian vassals,” had developed during the 5th and 6th centuries but languished in the second half of the 6th century as a result of the civil war in China that preceded the rise of the Sui and T’ang dynasties. Chinese records for the first half of the 7th century mention several small harbour kingdoms in the region, especially in northeastern Sumatra, that were pretending to be Chinese vassals. As illustrated by the militancy of the ruler in the Old Malay inscriptions, however, the rulers of Palembang, hoping for a revival of trade under the new T’ang dynasty, were eager to monopolize the China trade and eliminate their rivals. They indeed succeeded in their aim; before I-ching left Southeast Asia in 695, Srivijaya had gained control of the Strait of Malacca.

The subsequent power of the higher-ranking rulers—the maharajas—of Srivijaya depended on their alliance with those who possessed warships. The fact that Arab accounts make no mention of piracy in the islands at the southern end of the Strait of Malacca suggests that the seafaring inhabitants of these islands identified with the interests of the maharajas; the islanders therefore refrained from molesting merchant ships, and they cooperated in controlling Srivijaya’s potential competitors in northern Sumatra. The maharajas offered their loyal subjects wealth, posts of honour, and—according to the inscriptions—supernatural rewards. But the grouping of maritime Malays in this geographically fragmented region survived only as long as the Palembang entrepôt was prosperous and its ruler offered enough largesse to hold the elements together. His bounty, however, depended on the survival of the Chinese tributary trading system, which needed a great entrepôt in western Indonesia. Early Malay history is then, to an important extent, the history of a Sino-Malay alliance. The maharajas benefited from the China trade, while the emperors could permit themselves the conceit that the maharajas were reliable imperial agents.

The Palembang rulers’ exact span of territorial influence is unknown. The Bangka Strait and the offshore islands at the southern entrance of the Strait of Malacca would have been essential to their maritime power. According to 7th-century inscriptions, the rulers also had influence in southern Sumatra on the Sunda Strait. Elsewhere in the hinterland, including the Batanghari River basin, which came to be known as Malayu (along with other regions of Sumatra’s interior), their authority would have been exercised by alliances with local chiefs or by force, with decreasing effect the farther these areas were from Palembang.

Malay unity under the leadership of the maharajas was inevitably undermined when, as early as the 10th century, Chinese private ships began to sail to centres of production in the archipelago, with the result that the Chinese market no longer depended on a single Indonesian entrepôt. Toward the end of the 11th century, Srivijaya-Palembang ceased to be the chief estuary kingdom in Sumatra. Hegemony had passed, for unknown reasons, to the neighbouring estuary town of Jambi, on the Batanghari River, which was probably controlled by the Minangkabau people of the island’s west-central interior. With the decline of the tributary trade with China, a number of harbours in the region became centres of international trade. Malayu-Jambi never had the opportunity to build up naval resources as Srivijaya-Palembang had done, and in the 13th century a Javanese prince took advantage of the power vacuum.