24/10/2016
THE DIENG PLATEAU TEMPLES
Twelve and thirteen hundred years ago Javanese laborers built stone temples to Hindu gods high up in the mountains in a volcanic hollow called the Dieng Plateau. Dieng comes from the Sanskrit words Di Hyang and means "place of the gods". Worshippers made the long walk from villages further down the slopes to congregate around shrines that the priests entered, treading up steep stairs and over a high entrance stone to face the altar and its image. Small pipes in temple walls brought water for the priests to bathe the sacred images. Inside, in the semi-obscurity, and invisible to the common people outside on the terraces, priests invited the gods to descend to animate their statues and communicate their messages for humans.
Today, some of the temples have been reconstructed; foundations of other remain, their upper sections in ruins. children play in and around them, women sit on sections of fallen shrines, flocks of sheep graze. Farmers have stripped the mountain slopes of trees right up to the summit to plant every centimeter with food crops. A new, white mosque, with Arabic architectural forms of dome and minaret, far more imposing in size than the ancient buildings, is positioned inline with Dieng temples named Bima and Gatotkaca. Around the mosque are the houses and shops of the modern village that supports it. Arabic prayers and Indonesian language sermons broadcast on loudspeakers are the contemporary form of religious liturgy heard in Dieng. Perhaps the mosque, at the western endof a line of Hindu temples, is intended as the natural progression in the development of religious understanding possibly it is in opposition to the past of Java's Indic gods and princes.
(Dikutip dari buku "Indonesia Peoples and Histories", karya Jean Gelman Taylor. hlm. 36-37)