Oliver Benjamin
Yak’s guru, a wrinkled old yam, was eccentric in the tradition of
cryptic old metaphysicians the world over. He liked, as most spiritual
masters did, to see himself in the center of the known universe.
“Java is the center of the world!” he announced in his sweetly
melodic Indonesian, “You were all born on the edges. Out in the
boondocks.” He laughed. Bundokwas a Filipino word, meaning
“mountain.” Linguistically, Indonesia and the Philippines were
kissing cousins.
Roy knew this was not an unusual perspective. Most dominant
civilizations believed themselves located in the center of the world.
The Mediterranean, China’s Middle Kingdom, Ancient Egypt. And of
course, the United States: Any American-made world map attests to
this, customarily rending Asia, the world’s largest and most populous
continent and the true birthplace of civilization, in two. But Java had
never been a dominant civilization.
Nevertheless, Yak’s teacher was inspired not by only by pride but
also by a debunked Western theory: As recently as the 1940s
European anthropologists were convinced that Java was the
birthplace of humankind because, until then, most of the fossils
intermediary between man and ape had been unearthed in Java.
Then the African bones began to slowly trickle in and it soon became
increasingly evident that the evolutionary Genesis took place in
Africa.
Yak’s spiritual mentor held this revision in contempt. For him,
Java was still the belly-button of all mankind. Anthropology had not
yet proven that man came from Africa. “There are many more bones
to be found,” he assured them and anyone else who would listen.
Javanese mysticism asserted that by recapturing the memory of that
earlier age, the alienated might return home again.
“He’s a nice old guy. But that’s crazy talk,” Roy complained to
Yak as they strolled around the overgrown temple garden. “Java
wasn’t the origin of mankind. Ethiopia was. Everybody knows that.”
Yak looked over to where his teacher was sitting, hurling fish-
food into a filthy pond. “In Java they say life is ngampir ngombe,a
brief stop to drink a glass of tea. Let him believe what he wants. He’s
an old man.”
“Is that what you’ve learned from him?” Roy said. “To believe
whatever you want to believe?”
“No. But the opposite of belief is not disbelief. Disbelief is also a
type of belief.”
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