King Surawisesa commissioned the Batutulis inscription to honor his father, Sri Baduga Maharaja, who ruled the Sunda Kingdom from 1482 to 1521. The text, written in Old Sundanese using the Kawi script, reads like a royal resume carved in stone. It names the king twice -- once as Prabu Guru Dewata, once as Sri Baduga Maharaja -- and traces his lineage back through two generations: his father Rahyang Dewa Niskala, who 'vanished at Gunung Tiga,' and his grandfather Niskala Wastu Kancana, who 'vanished to Nusa Larang.' The language of vanishing is deliberate. In Sundanese royal tradition, kings did not simply die; they departed for sacred places, their physical absence a kind of spiritual promotion. The inscription then catalogs what Sri Baduga built: a memorial monument, an artificial hill clad in stone, a ritual ground called a samida, and a holy lake. These were not decorative projects. They were the infrastructure of a kingdom's spiritual authority.

Pakuan Pajajaran was the last capital of the Sunda Kingdom, and the Batutulis inscription is one of the few physical traces that prove it existed here. The city was destroyed in the late 16th century when the sultanates of Banten and Cirebon conquered the Hindu-Buddhist Sundanese kingdom, erasing most of its built environment. What survived were stones -- inscriptions too heavy and too sacred to move easily. The Batutulis site contains several inscribed stones from the Sunda Kingdom period, making it a kind of accidental archive. The samida, or man-made forest, that Sri Baduga Maharaja established to protect rare tree seeds would centuries later become part of the grounds where the Dutch East India Company built an estate in 1744, and where the Bogor Botanical Gardens were eventually founded. The king's sacred forest, in other words, became the foundation for one of Southeast Asia's oldest scientific institutions -- though neither the king nor the Dutch would have recognized the connection.

Scholars have been arguing about the Batutulis inscription since 1853, when Friederich published the first attempt at a reading. Over the next century and a half, Karel Frederick Holle, Pleyte, Poerbatjaraka, and Noorduyn each produced their own editions, refining the translation as understanding of Old Sundanese improved. The most recent edition, by Aditia Gunawan and Arlo Griffiths in 2021, resolved several longstanding ambiguities. The inscription's final line encodes its date using a literary device called a chronogram: 'the five Pandawas guard the earth,' a reference to the five brothers of the Mahabharata epic. The number five corresponds to 1455 in the Saka calendar, which translates to 1533 CE. This kind of poetic dating was common across the Indianized kingdoms of Southeast Asia, where history and mythology were not separate categories but braided strands of the same narrative.

Sri Baduga Maharaja lives in Sundanese culture under his legendary name: Prabu Siliwangi. To this day, he is the most celebrated figure in Sundanese identity -- the wise and powerful king who presided over the kingdom's golden age. Indonesian military units, streets, and stadiums bear his name. The folklore surrounding Siliwangi has grown far beyond anything the Batutulis inscription records. In legend, he is a figure of supernatural power who chose to disappear into the forest rather than convert to Islam, transforming himself and his followers into tigers. The real Batutulis inscription tells a more grounded story: a king who built monuments, managed sacred landscapes, and earned the devotion of his son. Standing at the site today, surrounded by the dense urban fabric of modern Bogor, the small compound feels like a whisper from a world that has been almost entirely paved over -- but not quite silenced.