Arjuna in Java: Myth, Medicine, and the Modern Battlefield

 

I took this photo while wandering through a quiet alleyway in Yogyakarta, Java, in March 2025. I was en route to visit Borobudur, the world’s largest Buddhist temple, and later Prambanan, where I had planned to watch an open-air Ramayana performance under the stars. Yogyakarta offered more than just temples. I spent my days exploring local bookstores, browsing batik masks, and photographing alley murals—an interest that echoes in my living room, where canvases by El Seed hang like visual sutras.

In one of those alleys, I came across this piece of street art. As a physician during the COVID pandemic, I found it uniquely striking: a figure in traditional wayang costume aims not an arrow but a vaccination syringe at the virus. The archer is Arjuna, or Arjuno in Javanese, one of the most beloved heroes in Indonesia’s shadow puppetry tradition. In Javanese wayang, the archer with the distinctive headgear, slender form, and poised longbow is almost always Arjuna, a figure culturally recognized even in majority-Muslim Java.

Indonesia, like India, has long used visual and performance arts—puppetry, street theater, and epic storytelling—to convey civic and moral messages. I had once seen a similar use of katputli puppetry in Rajasthan to promote sanitation and disease awareness. Here in Java, that same tradition lives on.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna urges Arjuna to rise from paralysis and act with clarity and purpose; in Javanese storytelling, Arjuna carries that same spirit of disciplined courage. Arjuna’s paralysis in the face of battle mirrors our own hesitation when faced with overwhelming crises. But Krishna’s guidance is clear: “Yogasthaḥ kuru karmāṇi”—established in yoga, act. 

The mural makes this timeless teaching newly relevant, urging its viewers to meet their moment of destiny not with fear, but with wisdom, resolve, service — and the sharp truth of an injection — and where that ancient call to right action becomes a public health message.