Serat Centhini

The Serat Centhini arranges its contents through a journey: three children of Sunan Giri, fleeing after Giri's fall, travel across Java, and at every halt they meet someone who explains something. Through that form the manuscript admits accounts of cookery, medicine, plants, gamelan, song, building, agriculture, inward knowledge, ceremony and sexual relations, all in macapat verse running to more than two hundred thousand lines.

The form solves a problem facing any compilation of knowledge: how to order things that have no natural order. The answer here is space — knowledge is ordered by the place where it is met. Such an arrangement makes the Centhini easier to perform and harder to cite, which is why using it as a source requires pointing to a canto rather than to a subject.

The manuscript was compiled at the Surakarta court on the order of the crown prince who became Pakubuwana V, around 1814, by three named compilers. It is therefore not an oral work written down but a commissioned one, and its selection of material is a selection made at a court.

Its modern editions are almost all incomplete. The sections dealing openly with sexual relations were omitted or softened in most twentieth-century publications, and readers of those editions were not always told that anything had been removed. This encyclopedia names this because it is a clear case of undeclared editing: a text abridged without notice gives a false picture not only of its contents but of what was held fit to write in 1814.