Mpu Prapañca

The author of the Nagarakretagama calls himself Prapañca, a Sanskrit word meaning roughly “he who says much” or “confusion”. Some scholars read this as a self-deprecating pen name rather than a personal name, comparing it to the habit of court poets who do not give their real names.

What the text says of him is that he held the office of dharmādhyakṣa ring kasogatan — superintendent of Buddhist affairs at court — inherited from his father, and that he later left the court. The closing sections carry a note of disappointment unusual in a work of praise, and it is those sections that ground most conjecture about his life.

That a Buddhist official wrote the panegyric of a king whose temples were largely Shaiva is itself information about the religious order of Majapahit, which placed the two teachings side by side under one government with a superintendent for each. That order is not the same as toleration in the modern sense, and this entry does not equate them.

The Nagarakretagama known to the twentieth century is a single palm-leaf copy found at Cakranagara in Lombok and taken in the Dutch military expedition of 1894. Without the copying that continued in Bali and Lombok after Majapahit ended, the work would have reached no one.

The circumstances of its taking remain a live matter. The manuscript was held at Leiden for over a century and handed to Indonesia in 1973. That handover is among the early successful returns of a colonial object, and it is recorded here because a record about the author is incomplete without a record of how his work came to be readable at all.

Since 2008 the manuscript has been listed in UNESCO's Memory of the World. Such a listing adds nothing to its contents, but it changes the standing of its keeping and its access, and the difference between the value of contents and the standing of custody is a theme recurring through this encyclopedia.