104

17.000 Didactic-moralistic literature slightly influenced by Islam (group F, 14.000).

In the sixteenth and seventeenth cen turies the Courts of mercantile rulers on the North Coast, and the residences of venerated masters of mystic lore in those districts, were the principal centres of Islamic studies and Javanese scholarship. It was the period of the Pasisir culture. The change in religion and the acquaintance with Islamic literature written in either Arabic or Malay had a far- reaching influence in the field of Javanese letters. Books by Javanese authors of the time, especially religious, historical and belle- tristic books, evidently belong to the sphere of international Islamic civilization. In Part Two, History, and Part Three, Belles- Lettres, of the present Synopsis, the Muslim influence appearing in the period of the Pasisir culture in the sixteenth and seven teenth centuries will be discussed at some length (see 22.200 and 30.460). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, authors of historical and belletristic books continued to cultivate the pre-Islamic liter ary tradition, notwithstanding their Muslim faith. In Parts Two and Three of the present Synopsis this conservatism of Java nese historical and belletristic literature is clearly apparent. Even in the present Part One, Religion and Ethics, there is reason to discuss some moralistic and didactic books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which evidently are imitations or adaptations of pre-Islamic texts. Undoubtedly the authors were Muslims, Probably they were learned Court scholars, colleagues of the lawyers who in the same period, at the Courts of the Pasisir rulers, made adap

tations of Old Javanese lawbooks, or they were at least congenial spirits. The Javanese lawbooks of the Pasisir period (Surya bja- lam, Jugul Muda, Papakëm Cërbon) will be discussed in Part Four of the present Synopsis (47.400 and 47.600). From a social point of view the Court scholars are to' be distinguished from the Muslim divines who made Javanese adap tations of Arabic or Malay books on theo logy and religious law (see 15.700—16.600). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the authors of religious books, those be longing to the mystic current of Islam (see 14.000) and the more rigidly orthodox ones (see 15.700), lived in communities of their own (the pondoks and the kaumans). It seems probable, however, that in the old centres of the Pasisir culture, in East Java and Cërbon, the connection between the Courts and the communities of learned divines was closer than afterwards in Cen tral Java, in the period of the renaissance of classical literature. In the seventeenth century, at the Java nese Courts, a collection of Old Javanese moralistic maxims in Indian metres, called Niti Sastra or Paniti Sastra, was studied. Probably in the circle of Court scholars it was considered as a summary of ancient wisdom in the field of ethics, Muslim in fluence is not in evidence. Several maxims are Old Javanese adaptations of Sanskrit slokas. The seventeenth century Javanese scholars’ text of the Niti Sastra was rather corrupt, and their knowledge of the Old Javanese literary idiom was insufficient.