Aditia Gunawan Phd Oral Defense / 26th May 2023 – Paris

This thesis aims to explore Sundanese religion in the 15th century. It furnishes editions of three prescriptive texts: one in Old Javanese (the Śikṣā Guru) and two texts in Old Sundanese (the Sasana Mahaguru and the Siksa Kandaṅ Karǝsian). The philological study of these three texts is his entry point for identifying the doctrines and religious dynamics in the Sundanese region in the 15^th century. By focusing on the variation in manuscript transmission, it’s about to attempt to determine how scribes interpreted the texts they helped transmit. The three texts he had investigated provide first-hand evidence about religion in the Sundanese region at the time of their writing. The thesis is part of an approach to the pre-Islamic sources in Indonesia that mobilizes digital humanities, notably the standard of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and more specifically the norms defined by the ERC DHARMA project, thanks to which the editions and translations of the texts that he has studied are available online and freely accessible to the public, beside their being included in this thesis. He endeavor to situate these primary sources in their regional context, between the Sundanese, Javanese, and Balinese traditions of the last centuries before Islamization in West Java around the 1570s.

He will comment in detail on the doctrinal aspects developed by the authors, the position of hermits within the social structure, and the practice of religious agents in daily life. Through an intertextual analysis of these texts, cross-referenced with other religious treatises, especially with similar texts in Old Javanese, he is able to provide quite a clear and detailed picture of the religious currents prevalent within Sundanese society in the centuries preceding Islamization and the arrival of the Europeans. More broadly, his approach contributes to expanding the knowledge available about the Śaivism as a world religion, and especially its ramifications in Indonesia.