What can actually be known about the Bubat affair of 1357, and how much of the long telling in circulation can be sustained?

Readings accepting the outline of the Kidung Sunda

Scholarly position

Three separate sources — Pararaton, Carita Parahyangan and Kidung Sunda — all record the death of the Sundanese king at Majapahit, and none copies another. Agreement between three separate traditions on one central event is sufficient ground for accepting that it happened and that it took the form of violence against a party that had come for a marriage. The detail in the kidung can be discounted without invalidating the core.

T2 SRC-0230 T2 SRC-0229 T2 SRC-0233

Readings emphasising the distance of the sources

Scholarly position

The Nagarakretagama, the only contemporary source and written at the court where the event is said to have occurred, does not mention it. The Pararaton mentions it in a few lines and was compiled more than a century later. The Kidung Sunda is a Balinese literary work later still, and nearly every circulating detail — the princess's name, the sequence of demands, her death — comes from it alone. What is sustainable is that Sundanese–Majapahit relations deteriorated in that period; the detailed narrative is not.

T2 SRC-0218 T2 SRC-0230 T2 SRC-0247

Sundanese local telling

Community position

This event is not held as a matter of dating but as a statement about how Sundanese standing was treated: that those who came as equals were required to come as subjects. Arguing whether the details can be proved does not alter that, because what is transmitted is the lesson and not the report.

T2 SRC-0242