ILMU BAHASA, ILMU BUMI KEBUDAJAAN INDONESIA - kitlv

THE OLD-JAVANESE RÂMAYANA 503
In the second half of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties.
two important studies were written by Poerbatjaraka, who has admired
this work of art from youth onward,- was in the habit of reading
it through repeatedly and enjoys the enormous advantage of
coaling with his own language, be it in an older stage. His first paper
(I n 42) on the age of the OJR has been discussed by Goris (I n 43)
and Stutterheim, and in his second study (I n 44) — which deals
mainly with five subjects — Poerbatjaraka begins by refuting their
arguments, adding new reasons for his own point of view. The following
five paragraphs will deal mainly with these subjects. It. will
become evident that his work was useful and important, even though
some of his views appear to be untenable.
In order to establish the age of the OJR he compares its language
and peculiarities with those of well-dated edicts, and when Damais
m the BEFEO recently developed a thorough method of dating old
records by exhaustive making use of all their data he left these
dates intact. Poerbatjaraka considered the OJR as being very old
indeed, whereas Stutterheim could not go further back than the end
of the. first quarter of the X. century. This dating of an old record,
be it- a poem or an edict, on the basis of its language, is always a
hazardous affair, as both kinds of work tend to use antiquated
language, but in this case competent scholars appear to have agreed
on ± 925 as the approximate date of composition of the OJR (XIII
p. 5).
In the second place Poerbatjaraka was concerned about the subject
of religion in the OJR. For Stutterheim in his Leiden Ph. D. thesis
on 'Räma-Legenden und Räma-Reliefs in Indonesien' (1924), stressing
too much that Râma is one of the well-known avatars of Wisnu, had
ascribed a Wisnuitic character to the OJR. It was legitimate, no
doubt, to base himself on the glorification of Wisnu (XII), reminding
one of the Sanskrit Bhagavad-Gîtâ, as Poerbatjaraka himself has
remarked. But there are passages of a not less fervent Çiwaitic character
to be found, and P. here gives a new translation of the description
of the (Çaiwa) temple in Lehkä, closely resembling an old.
Middle-Javanese candi, as he points out. Now in the days of this
controversy the relations Çiwa/Wisnu and Çiwa Buddha were discussed,
but Moens' pioneer studies in Tantrism had not yet found
their promotor in Pott, who in his Leiden Ph. D. thesis 'Yoga en