Kakawin Sutasoma

The line bhinneka tunggal ika tan hana dharma mangrwa appears in canto 139 of the Sutasoma. In the manuscript it explains the relation between the Buddhist and Shaiva teachings: the two are different yet one, for there is no truth that is twofold. It is a statement about two religious teachings coexisting at one fourteenth-century court, and not a statement about ethnic diversity.

Its use as Indonesia's state motto comes from a proposal by Muhammad Yamin and was adopted with the state emblem in 1950, with the latter half of the line left off. That transfer of meaning is legitimate as an act of state and deserves recording as a twentieth-century event; what this encyclopedia records is that the two meanings are not the same, and that a reader who supposes the motto always spoke of ethnic groups is reading the twentieth century into the fourteenth.

The Sutasoma itself is the story of a prince who refuses the throne and chooses the ascetic life, and who at its height gives his own body to the man-eating king Purusada so that other victims may be released. The poem is a Buddhist work, and its subject is the refusal of violence carried to its furthest limit.

That the line about two teachings being one stands inside such a work is no accident: the whole poem is an argument about how two apparently opposed things may be brought together. Reading the line without the work therefore cuts it from the reasoning that makes it intelligible, and this encyclopedia states the poem's content precisely because this is the part almost never mentioned when the motto is discussed.