The Religious Text ‘Panaturan’ of the Dayak Ngaju Community

Abstract

The ethnic of Dayak Ngaju is one of the Dayaks in Central Kalimantan. This ethic group has a native belief named Kaharingan, which is later on called as a religion. Kaharingan religion was previously called as Naju beliefs, Hiden religion and even Kafir or unbelievers. In its process, in 1972, this belief is associated within Hinduism or Hindu Kaharingan. This religion has a holly book, Panaturan, in which most of the texts are used by most of Dayak Ngaju community for religion purposes. To have a comprehensive picture of this religious text, this article used two approaches: semantic structures and its ideology to have a deeper relationship between text and thought. To see the religious text, two factors were examined, respectively the semantic structure and ideology to see cohesiveness and texture in text-ology. The findings show that Panaturan is a transformation of the Wedanta Scriptures which have been acculturated with local genius of the Dayak civilization. The participants on Panaturan indicate the ideology of this belief.   Keywords: religious text, semantic structures, ideology