Kejawèn

Kejawèn is a Javanese cultural beleif system that is an amalgam of Animistic, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, spirit cult, and cosmological religions and traditions. Hinduism, which reached the Indonesian Archipelago as early as the first century. Hinduism, and later Buddhism, blended with indigenous tradition and culture. This mix reached the peak of their influence in the fourteenth century. One conduit that preserved Buddhist and Hindu beleifs was the ascetics, called resi, who taught a variety of mystical practices. A resi lived surrounded by students who took care of their master's daily needs. Followers of Kejawèn seek spiritual and emotional relief by engaging in practices that are not performed in churches or mosques, but at home or in caves or on mountain perches that include meditation, fasting, and animistic sacrifices and devotions to local and ancestral spirits. Islam was introduced to Java around 1500 AD. Islam was first embraced by the elites and upper echelons of society. This contributed to its further spread and acceptance. Sufism and other versions of Folk Islam were most easily integrated into the existing folk religion of Java. The Kyai, Muslim scholars, became the new religious elite as Hindu influences receded. Islam recognises no hierarchy of religious leaders and possesses no formal priesthood, but the Dutch colonial government established an elaborate pecking order for the mosque and Islamic schools of preaching. The Kyai perpetuated the tradition of the resi. Students, and even peasants around the school, provided for the needs of the Kyai. The Kyais are the principal intermediaries between the village masses and supernatural realms. Christianity was introduced to Java by Portuguese traders and missionaries, by the Dutch Reformed Church, and in the twentieth century by Roman Catholics, such as the Jesuits and the Divine Word Missionaries. Currently, the Reformed Church is dominant in the larger cities, but some rural areas of south-central Java are strongly Roman Catholic. Kejawèn is also influenced by Theosophy, which became popular among Dutch residents of the Dutch East Indies in the early twentieth century, which inspired many influential Indonesians to join the Theosophical Society. Islam maintains its dominance. The Javanese, like other Islamic societies, recognizes two broad catagories of religious commitment. The main catagory is called Santri (pure ones) includes the majority of Javanese people. These are Muslims who perform the five obligatory daily ritual prayers and are relatively orthodox in their belief and practice. A minority can be catagorized as Abangan (red ones) who do not strictly adhere to Islamic ritual and orthodoxy. Abagan preserve many of their pre-Islamic animistic and Hindu-Buddhist beleifs and practices and emphasize the importance of the purity of the inner person, the batin. Social anthropologist Ernest Gellner notes that syncretic Muslim society, like that of Java, oscillates between periods of scripturalist dominance and relapses into emotional, mystical, and magical folk Islam. He also believes that urbanisation and mass literacy serves to unsettle the balance between the these two extremes and describes the irreversible shift to scripturalist Islam in the East as being analogous to the secularization of the West.