The good and the bad of the Javanese calendar

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): The Javanese believe there are good days and bad days for everything. There are good moments and bad moments for every event. You should pick a good day to move into a new house, and never start a journey at noon.

When my parents-in-law discussed the day for my marriage a fierce debate broke out. My mother-in-law picked a certain date, which happened to coincide with the first day of Idul Fitri. My father-in-law feared no one would bother attending a wedding set on a holiday.

My mother-in-law persisted.

"When you buy a fish, you look for a good fish, for a fresh one. You don't buy bad fish. Days are just like fish. There are good days and bad days. And the day I picked is the best day. I want my daughter to get married on that particular day, so that her marriage will last forever. And that is final!" she said.

My father-in-law exploded.

"You cannot equate days to fish! All days are equal. There is just no such thing as good days and bad."

In the end, he capitulated. So we were married on that strange day. It turned out that many people came to congratulate us and our marriage has lasted forty-two years. My late mother-in-law would have said, "Told you so."

Death can also come on good or bad days. Since the moment of death is decided by God the Almighty, the day is considered God's judgment on the deceased person.

Friday is a good day to die. God is considered to have judged the person as good. But dying while being entertained in a massage parlor or the like is considered a bad death. That is dying both in a bad place at a bad moment.

A much desired way of dying among Indonesian Moslems is while performing the fifth Islamic duty, on the haj pilgrimage to Mecca. This is why so many elderly and sickly Moslems insist on performing haj in spite of their poor physical condition. They are not afraid to die on this pilgrimage. They pray to God to be summoned to Him while being on this pilgrimage. If possible, they want to die in Mecca on the Idul Adha day.

People who die on the Idul Adha day -- the day of sacrifice -- are considered to have a good death even if they are not in Mecca. To die on this day is considered an expression of God's approval of the way the deceased person lived.

It was thus natural and decent when House Speaker Wahono said in his speech during the burial ceremony of Mrs. Tien Soeharto, that she died at a beautiful moment, during morning prayer, on a beautiful day, Idul Adha.

It was God's will that she died on that particular moment. Equally beautiful are the deaths of many other people who died on the same day, at the same moment as Mrs. Tien. May Allah the Almighty and the Most Merciful accept their good deeds, forgive their mistakes, and give them their due place beside him.

There are other good days and moments to die. To die while performing one's duty, especially a religious duty, is considered a good death. To die while fighting for God's cause is also considered ideal. To die while conducting a war against the "demons of this world", for instance, is considered a good death. This is called to die while performing jihad. The reward is a journey straight to heaven. This explains why Hamas has no difficulty recruiting suicide bombers.

The expression "to die while performing religious duty" can be interpreted to include any death while performing a good deed. The death of noted intellectual Soedjatmoko is considered by many as a good death because he died while giving a lecture to a group of dedicated young Moslem intellectuals. By extension, it can also be said, I think, that the late Schumacher, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, died in a beautiful way. Each of them died while performing their duty.

How is it decided if a particular day is a good or bad for a planned event?

The Javanese have developed an elaborate system which is basically based upon assigning each day and month a value.

The Javanese follow a seven-day week and a five-day week and add the value of the days together to determine if the particular day is good or not. The seven-day week is familiar to all of us, starting with Sunday and ending on Saturday.

The five-day week consists of five days: Paing, Pon, Wage, Kliwon, and Legi. May 3, 1996, for instance, was Jumat-Pon (a Friday which coincides with a Pon-day in the five-day week system).

This particular day has the value of 13 (6 for Friday, and 7 for Pon). According to a Javanese almanac, this particular day falls on the fifteenth day of a Dhesta month, a month whose value is symbolized by a highly cherished jewel. A good month? Maybe. But babies born on this day will be greedy.

To figure out if a day is good for a planned activity, a guru may have to be consulted. They can figure out what particular day an event should be conducted.

For the lay public, however, certain practical hints are available. A Tuesday which coincides with a Kliwon, for instance, is not a good day for anything. Don't even die on this day, if you can help it. A Friday which coincides with a Kliwon (Jumat -Kliwon), on the other hand, is an important day, a day with a strong, forbidding character. So, do not do anything wicked or foolish on this particular day.

A cynical friend once asked me if I really believed in this system.

"Do you really believe that a person who is a crook during his entire life, and dies on one of your good days, suddenly becomes absolved, and will be remembered as a good and clean person?" the friend asked.

I told him that there are two answers to his question. Answer number one will tell you that the person in question must have repented, and that his repentance has been accepted by God. We ordinary mortals might not be aware of his repentance.

Answer number two was that it didn't matter if I believed in this system. The important question is whether the people who count in this society believe in the system.

The writer is an observer of social and cultural affairs.