Sanghyang Siksa Kandang Karesian

The Sanghyang Siksa Kandang Karesian, dated 1518, is not a chronicle but a teaching on what a person of a given station ought to know and do. Its form is largely lists: occupations and their tools, kinds of weaving, kinds of song and sounding instrument, the names of foreign languages known, kinds of food, and the knowledge belonging to each order of people.

It is precisely the list form that makes it an extraordinary source. A court panegyric names what is fit to name; a list of occupations names what there was. The manuscript therefore gives evidence about everyday life in Sunda in the early sixteenth century available from no other source, including names of tools and materials that permit comparison with excavated finds.

The manuscript shows no system of speech levels of the kind Sundanese has today. That absence is a principal ground of the objection to treating undak-usuk as an old inheritance, and the objection is recorded in the Sundanese language entry; here it is named from the manuscript's side, because evidence about what a source does not contain is as valuable as evidence about what it does, provided the source is one that ought to have contained it.

The manuscript also names a number of foreign languages as knowledge worth having — among them Chinese, Keling, Persian and Egyptian. That naming shows that Sunda in the early sixteenth century was no closed interior, and that the manuscript's date — a year before the Sundanese treaty with the Portuguese — falls in a period of busy outside contact.