Kebatinan movements
Entry in Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia from Angkor Wat to East Timor, ed. Ooi Keat Gin, Cambridge UP, Santa Barbara, 2004.
Kebatinan refers to Javanese mystical movements and is almost synonymous with 'Javanism' (kejawen). Both refer to Javanese traditions which prioritize syncretic ancestral culture rather than religious affiliation, especially as distinct from Islam, which is statistically dominant. Javanists insist their practices are rooted in a perennial indigenous wisdom predating even Hindu and Buddhist influence. Thus kebatinan refers to a category of spiritual movements, like Bon in Tibet or Shinto in Japan, within which people imagine themselves as activating an ageless consciousness rooted in local ancestral culture.
However the term batin is from Arabic (bathin) which is paired with lahir (Arabic zahir). Lahir refers to outer material realities known through the senses and intellect; batin to inner spiritual realities known only through the spiritual heart or rasa, a Sanskrit term referring in this context to 'intuitive feeling'. Thus kebatinan may be translated as 'the science of the inner' and this framing of the esoteric leads committed Muslims to argue that Javanese spiritual discourse is Islamic at root.
Kebatinan movements appeared early in the 1900s in tandem with the rise of nationalism and the Muhammadiyah (1911), now still the leading modernist Islamic movement. At the same time Hardopusoro, among the earliest kebatinan movement, had strong links with the Theosophical Society. Thus, like nationalism itself, their constitution as organizations reflected all of the influences associated with the rise of the modern state. It is in the context of debate with modernist Muslims that kebatinan movements became a recurrent issue of Indonesian politics, especially during the 1950s and again in the 1970s.
Following independence in 1945 Wongsonegoro, the first Minister of the Department of Information, became the patron of a series of umbrella movements which lobbied, on behalf of several hundred organizations, to establish their legitimacy. Some movements, notably Sapto Darma, argued that as indigenous traditions they deserved the same status given to recognized 'religions', all of which were imported. These debates resurfaced in the Suharto era, at which time kebatinan (renamed kepercayaan or 'beliefs' in 1971) appeared to offer potential as a counter to organized Islam. Although a significant portion of the population still empathizes with Javanism in general the dynamism of kebatinan movements has declined markedly and most adherents now avoid public engagement.
Paul Stange
Murdoch University
Perth, WA, Australia
References
Andrew Beatty, Varieties of Javanese Religion. Cambridge UP, UK, 1999
Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java. U Chicago P, Chicago, 1976
Neils Mulder, Mysticism and Everyday Life in Contemporary Java. Singapore UP, Singapore, 1978
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This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally hosted at freotopia.org/people/paulstange/kebatinan.html, and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.