TheIndosphere

An encyclopedia of Indian civilization.

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Srivijaya

Srivijaya was a Buddhist maritime kingdom centred at Palembang in southern Sumatra from the seventh century, which controlled the trade of the Strait of Malacca for several centuries and was a major centre of Buddhist learning.

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Discovery

Srivijaya was a lost kingdom until 1918, when George Coedès showed that the Shilifoshi of the Chinese sources, the Sribuza of Arab geographers and the Srivijaya named in Old Malay inscriptions from Sumatra and Bangka were the same state, centred at Palembang. Its remains are scanty, since Palembang's buildings were of wood on a riverbank, and the case rests mainly on inscriptions and Chinese and Arab records.

Rise

The inscription of Kedukan Bukit, dated 683, records a sacred expedition, a siddhayatra, by a ruler called Dapunta Hyang, who set out with an army of twenty thousand and founded a settlement. Inscriptions of the following years at Talang Tuwo and Kota Kapur record the dedication of a park for the benefit of all beings and impose oaths of loyalty with curses on rebels. Within a few decades Srivijaya dominated southern Sumatra, Bangka and the Strait of Malacca, and its influence reached the Malay peninsula.

Its power rested on control of the straits, through which ships between India and China had to pass, and on its relations with China, to which it sent embassies regularly. Arab writers described its ruler as the maharaja of the isles and told of his great wealth.

A centre of Buddhism

The Chinese monk Yijing stopped at Srivijaya on his way to India in 671 and spent six months learning Sanskrit grammar. After studying at Nalanda, he returned and lived there from 687 to 695, translating texts, and he advised Chinese monks to prepare in Srivijaya before going to India, describing more than a thousand monks there. In the ninth century a ruler of the Sailendra family, Balaputra, who ruled Srivijaya after leaving Java, founded a monastery at Nalanda, endowed by the Pala king Devapala, as a copper-plate inscription records. In the early eleventh century the Bengali teacher Atisha studied for years under a master of Suvarnadvipa, generally identified with Srivijaya, before going to Tibet.

The Chola raid and decline

Relations with the Cholas of south India were at first friendly; a Srivijayan king endowed a Buddhist monastery at Nagapattinam with Chola permission. In 1025, however, Rajendra I sent a naval expedition that attacked Srivijaya and its dependencies along the straits, and his inscriptions list the ports taken and the capture of the king. Srivijaya survived but was weakened. Its centre seems to have shifted to Jambi, and by the thirteenth century its dependencies had broken away. Expeditions from Java under Singhasari late in the century completed its eclipse. In modern Indonesia and Malaysia, Srivijaya is remembered as an early great state of the Malay world.

Further reading

  • Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
  • Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade. University of Hawaii Press, 2003
  • Ray, Himanshu Prabha. The Winds of Change: Buddhism and the Maritime Links of Early South Asia. Oxford University Press, 1994

See also

  • Chola Empire — The Chola Empire ruled the Tamil country from 848 to 1279, at its height controlling southern India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and produced the Bṛhadīśvara temple and the finest bronze sculpture made anywhere in the world.
  • Hindu civilization in Indonesia — The Hindu–Buddhist civilization that shaped the Indonesian archipelago from roughly the 4th to the 16th century CE, leaving its clearest legacy in Bali's living Hindu tradition and in monuments such as Borobudur and Prambanan.
  • Buddhism — Buddhism is a religious and philosophical tradition founded in northern India in the 5th century BCE by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, centred on the Four Noble Truths and a path to liberation from suffering.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.