Indian influences in early Philippine polities
[6] Some scholars also place the Philippine archipelago within the outermost reaches of the Indosphere, along with Northern Vietnam, where the Hindu and Buddhist elements were not directly introduced by Indian travellers.
Scholars such as Milton Osborne and F. Landa Jocano instead suggest that "indirect cultural influence"[3][2] mostly arrived through these early Philippine polities' relations with the Srivijaya and Majapahit empires.
This updates the theories of earlier scholars, who posited that Indian elements in Philippine culture suggested relations between the two societies as early as the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE.
[3] Historians prior to the later part of the twentieth century such as Zaide and Manuel generally believed that Srivijaya and Majapahit played a significant role in the development of cultures throughout the Philippine archipelago, although the degree of Srivijayan influence was later questioned in seminal works by Jocano and Scott.
Either way, Indonesian islands adopted both Hindu and Buddhist ideas, fusing them with pre-existing native folk religion and Animist beliefs.
"[3]: 23–24 Popular literature and some 20th century history textbooks often suggest that Hindu and Buddhist cultural influences first came to the Philippines through early contacts with the Srivijayan and Majapahit thalassocracies.
"[2]: 142 Because physical evidence regarding the degree to which India influenced the Philippines prior to the Spanish conquista is rather sparse, scholars have held differing views on this matter over the years.
Preeminent Filipino Anthropologist F. Landa Jocano (2001) notes:"Except for a few artifacts and identified loanwords that have been accepted as proofs of Indian-Philippine relations, there are meager intrusive materials to sustain definite views concerning the range of Indian prehistoric influence in the country.
H. Otley Beyer interpreted the image as that of a Sivaite goddess, but with the religiously important hand signals improperly copied by local (probably Mindanao) workmen.
[11] The (LCI) was written in a variety of the Old Malay language, using the Old Kawi script,[11] and contains numerous loanwords from Sanskrit and a few non-Malay vocabulary elements whose origin may be Old Javanese.
Francisco believed that the Ramayana narrative arrived in the Philippines some time between the 17th to 19th centuries, via interactions with Javanese and Malaysian cultures which traded extensively with India.
[18] Philippine anthropologists and historiographers such as F. Landa Jocano suggest that such Hindu influences probably arrived in the Philippines through the extensive trade local cultures had with the Majapahit empire during the 14th through 16th centuries,[18][3][2] although earlier scholars such as Juan R. Francisco and Josephine Acosta Pasricha had suggested earlier dates for this influence, during the 9th to 10th century AD.
[19] French archaeologist, George Cœdès, defined it as the expansion of an organized culture that was framed upon Indian originations of royalty, Hinduism and Buddhism and the Sanskrit language.
Moreover, the island world of Indonesia, with Sumatra and Java controlling the traffic of trade, functioned as a sieve for whatever influence (cultural, social, and commercial) India might have had to offer beyond the Indonesian archipelago.[...
