The Indonesian Dakon Game: A Learning Method to Link Spiritual Values to Economic Praxis

Few spiritual, philosophical, and theological concepts concerning the economy have emerged especially since the Middle Age. One of them centred on the Trinitarian God concept. The concept proposes mutuality, relationship, and unity based on love and grace as shared spiritual values. The question that arises is how to educate people in applying it. This study explores whether the Dakon game, a traditional game mainly used in Java, Indonesia can be used as a learning method to apply that theological concept and their spiritual values to economic concepts and practices. The study method is literature research. The finding shows that the Dakon game causes the players to acquire a tacit knowledge that includes skills, values, and spirituality obtained through the practices of distributing wealth, sensitivity to others, and unity combined with achieving economic objectives. Although various challenges in the Indonesian context need further study, the finding can contribute to the praxis of applying spiritual values to economic praxis in Indonesia.

steadfastly pursue global unity and mutual benefits as the main shared values.Such shared values can be adopted if people learn about them in their spiritual life when they are young, otherwise, economic life will become an arena where competition brings along rivalry, conflicts, and even violence.
Two questions trigger this study: Can the spiritual values embedded in the Trinitarian God concept be taught through the Dakon game?Is it possible for the Indonesian, that the indigenous method of teaching which is through an interactive game can help the learners to adopt and apply such theology or spiritual insight to economic life better than the explicit teaching method that most Christians use?

LITERATURE REVIEW
1. Spirituality and Economic life In contemporary times, economic praxis in the modern world uses either capitalist, socialist, or hybrid systems as the framework.Only a few of the systems make efforts to integrate theology and spirituality into the principles and practices or develop an educational method to prepare the younger generation to adopt such integration.
Concerning spirituality, Collins as cited by Jacob, mentions that the term is more popular in the Roman Catholic context which denotes an element of works of righteousness and piety. 3The framework in such spirituality was a separation between spirituality from secular life as it means more self-denial and asceticism.Thus, at a certain time in the West, spirituality was viewed as related mostly to devotion, and true religion.Spirituality was understood as related mainly to the believer's inner life, often in a devotee's mystical, or as Brazo states "experiential encounter with God". 4 Therefore, the impact of spirituality on daily economic life was limited.
In modern times, Protestant Christian theologians start to accept the concept of spirituality as the term has become more holistic, even including social life and economic reality.Among others, Sheldrake suggests that spirituality means a life that is based on a sense of meaning, spiritual values, and often transcendental experience. 5Thus, spirituality means awareness and practice to relate to the Divine, and experiencing personal transformations as a result, which further makes meaning of reality, and creates beneficial impacts on others by living with a certain spiritual concept.
The spiritual concept as such can gives a holistic set of values to face the economic system that relates to Western Christianity which seems to have given birth to a dualistic view that teaches separation between business and spirituality.It can also answer the criticism of the socialistic system that subscribes to Karl Marx's view that spirituality and religion are the opium of society.Furthermore, it can also appreciate the practices in the Islamic milieu, the effort to incorporate Islamic teachings and faith into economic life emerges in the application of the Shariah economy.Meanwhile, it can appreciate the practices that live in many Javanese small towns or rural communities, where they have retained their inherited culture and indigenous spirituality called Penghayat or popularly known as the Kejawen.They have managed to create an intertwining local culture, philosophy, and spiritual values that define their business practices.

Trinitarian God Concept and the embedded Christian spirituality a. The Trinitarian concept of God and relationality
Christian theology and spirituality are inseparable from the Trinitarian concept of God.The Trinitarian concept has caused long discourses in the church.In the end, the church leaders agree that the concept is very rich yet also emphasizes the mystery in the essence of God that sets the limit for human beings to comprehend and explain the Divine completely.Such acceptance causes them to link together a monotheistic view of a monotheistic God and a richer one, the Trinitarian God.Yet, the part that reveals to human beings is that in essence, the Trinitarian God points to a relational dimension in Divine reality.God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit relate to each other as a unity and the relationship is dynamic.Furthermore, the concept has a set of embedded spiritual values in it: lifegiving, care, sharing, interdependence, mutual support, harmony, and unity in purpose.The popular translation of those words is communion, fellowship, or a sense of commonality.In other words, the main idea is each person of the Trinitarian God mutually shares in the life of the others.Thus, no action or purpose of each person of God isolates or detached from each other.
The Trinitarian concept also teaches that the real meaning of life for human beings is to manifest conditions that foster the values of mutuality, inter-relationality, and unity in humanity as God has in Godself.It can be done if human beings are continuously aware that God wants them to have a loving relationship and union with the Divine besides with each other.
Relationality in church life is called koinonia. 6The term often guides people to realize that as God's children, each person belongs to a community and each community is a part of a larger one which is more than only their church.Through the Trinitarian concept, people can learn that besides the oneness in the Trinitarian God, there is also oneness between God with the universe included with human beings and their activities. 7Then, the spiritual values that the believers in the Trinitarian concept should adopt are our intimacy with God and mutual love, care, and sustainable relationships, added with unity to develop a better global community in all aspects of life, including in material domains.In other words, as God relates to all aspects of life, the Trinitarian God concept including the spiritual values embedded in it logically should be applied to ethics, spiritual life, and church activities.8Robert Vosloo points out that relationality a core concept can be used as an ethical framework and it is also applicable to the economic domain.9It can give direction about the place and roles of humans to foster a sense of a wider community or global community in the world.Without such a view, it is easy for homo economicus to centre on each of their needs and wants to result in manipulation, domination, conflicts, or even war.Thus, even in economic life which permeates the human being, God is involved or takes part.It means that in economic life, children of God should consider fellowship or unity as the basis of their purpose.Why does God want humans to practice such large-scale fellowship that is manifested in all aspects of life?

b. Love and Grace as the core
As the emphasis of such a Trinitarian concept is a relationship, the core concept to understand God's relation with human beings is love and grace.Love and grace in the Trinitarian God concept are translatable into the economic life of believers.First, God gives life as common grace.10By grace, God, the Father, makes the world exist.By grace, God also makes and gives life to human beings according to the Divine's image.Furthermore, God gives them roles and capacities to serve as the stewards and shepherds of God's creation.This capacity includes economic effort, and the potential to utilize and maximize all sources that the Creator gives.It is also the primary teaching of the Christian faith that embedded in such grace, human beings receive the opportunity and ability to choose either to live with God-centeredness or with self-centeredness.The wrong choice brings calamity to human beings and the world.Violence and self-centredness become tendencies and intermittent patterns in their social, political, and economic relationship that eventually can lead human beings to extinction.Spiritual persons, including economic players, have a continuous battle against such a tendency.
Second, God offers special or covenantal grace which is based on love: To free human beings from the consequences and total depravity, special grace is given.God in Christ incarnates and dwells among humans to give redemption.With such a perspective, life should manifest human gratefulness for such an unconditional grace and it should be applied in all human relationships and activities including in economic practices.The economy that is centred on the utilization and maximization of the existing resources either material, technological natural, and human resources should be balanced with relational optimization and gratefulness to Divinity.
Last but not least, God offers transformative grace: After the redemptive grace, those who live in it can have a new life.The Holy Spirit gives them the opportunity and capacity to grow.They could make the right choices to live in togetherness, both with one another and with God.Thus, they can live in a continuous transformation process to live according to the original plan of God including using the sources and opportunities that God has given since the beginning.
Relating the essence of love and grace in the Trinitarian God with the harsh reality of business life, in the One and the Many, Donald Gray posits that the Trinitarian concept provides the key to understanding the whole movement of reality as a process of evolution, changes, or precisely unification, including the growth in economic life. 11In other words, God wants Divine love and grace to permeate those who long for it.
Based on the above literature analysis, this study underlines inter-relationality which emphasizes values of love, care, sustainability, mutual inter-dependency, and harmony as the core of Christian spirituality.Relationality also includes a larger sense of identity or commonality.In reality, applying such values is not an easy endeavour.The permeating self-centredness, sectoral identity, and separateness are dominant in society.11Such spiritual values might be accepted as idealistic thoughts thus, only occupy human cognitive and doctrinal domains.In economic life, many other values and objectives challenge the values of relationality or sharing grace.
Logically, the relationship between spirituality with economic practices and principles anchors in a perspective that economic life is an inherent part of God's creation.The economic players' role mainly is as stewards not the master of creation.The economy should become a process to assure that life sustains and that the potential that God gives will be optimized.Then, economic life functions as a human activity to free people from bondage.Thus, economic values and principles should create a praxis that frees people from poverty and inequality.Lastly, based on the Trinitarian concept, the third dimension of the economy is a transformation that means economic life should bring a sense of relationality, and a wider sense of commonality.It should raise people's awareness and the practice of interconnectedness between companies, regions, and the world at large which will enable human beings to recognize and develop their potential and unity.

The Disassociation between Spirituality and Economic Praxis
With such a complete and holistic concept including its embedded values, why do economic praxis and results not manifest such a concept even among Christian economic practitioners?Three possibilities might serve as the cause.First, the disassociation between Christian spirituality and theology might be caused by the factor that in the past, the language or terms used in spirituality and theology were esoteric.Although the Abrahamic spiritualities or theologies do address economic practices, each or their vocabulary and pattern of methods are quite difficult to understand by their laypersons.Second, disassociation takes place as most of the educational processes in Christian communities rely more on explicit knowledge transfer.They teach spiritual insights and values by using explicit language or communication that does not engage the audience, lay persons, or students.Lastly, the view of modern economic players become a consensus that spiritual, religious, or theological concept and their values ought to be separated from economic or business concepts or discourses.Until today, the dualistic view is popular even among Christian decision-makers in the church life or economic sphere.
The consequences are evident as analysed by Jolly. 12 With the global economy, economic inequality in many countries has been considered one of the necessary and unavoidable consequences. 13Adam Smith stated in the 18th and 19th centuries that inequality was a central issue of their time. 14Today, such inequality has grown wider, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic.A study by the World Bank Group "COVID-19 and Economic Inequality: Short-Term Impacts with Long-Term Consequences" finds that the Gini index for twenty-nine (29) of thirty-four (34) countries in their sample, with an average increase of about one per cent. 15The worse is that people are more accustomed to such a wealth gap and the consequences.Christian von Luebke points succinctly in June 2011, that the number of Indonesian street children is large and probably growing; one report suggests as many as 230,000 in 2010.Meanwhile, the assets of Indonesia's top forty (40) entrepreneurs at that time are equivalent almost to one-tenth of the annual country's GDP. 16The data do not indicate that the government does not do its job.In fact, in September 2017, the Gini Ratio, or the spending gap between the segments of the population was 0,391, a decrease of 0, 0,394 compared to the previous years.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated in his summary for The World Social Report 2020 that, "Inequality in a rapidly changing world' comes as we confront the harsh realities of a deeply unequal global landscape.In North and South alike, conflicts, frictions, and mass protests have flared up, fueled by a combination of economic woes, growing inequalities, and job insecurity.Income disparities and a lack of opportunities are creating a vicious cycle of inequality, frustration, and discontent across generations." 17hile the dualistic view, the esoteric language of theology, and the education method to share spiritual values become the obstacle for educating people to apply the holistic concept of economic praxis that includes spiritual values, the indigenous method of learning in Indonesia, mainly Java can become an alternative method.One of them is the Dakon game as a method of education.

Understanding the Dakon Game
The Dakon History Dakon is a game that comes from the ancient culture of the Middle East.In the Middle East, this game is called mancala which means 'Move'.The oldest mancala game boards were uncovered in a ruined fort of Roman Egypt in the 4 th century AD. 18 Later, this traditional game was brought to mainland Africa and then spread to Asian countries through traders.In Indonesia, it is more often referred to as 'Dakon', especially for the Javanese who live on the most populous island of Indonesia.The Dakon game is inseparable from the local culture and spirituality.Dakon was first mentioned by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles in his "History of Java" in 1817. 19According to Sukirman Dharmamulya a children toys researcher in Yogyakarta, Central Java, in the beginning, was played by children in the farmland, but later quickly the palace dwellers also liked it. 20Today, it is called a non-material Indonesian cultural heritage. 21n his book, Lombard writes that Dakon comes from the word daku which means "me," suggesting the prominence of ego. 22When Europeans in the Indies played it for the first time, they were surprised to realize that the game was not meant to win, as opposed to dam-daman (Javanese chess). 23"The rules are indeed set in such a way that the game can go on for hours and only occasionally stops due to the loss of a seed in a certain hole belonging to one of the players." 24

The elements of the Dakon game
The most important element of the game is the players.Usually, two people play this game for an hour or more.A Dakon game is played on a board.Dakon boards are made of wood.Sometimes, people can use a ground to play Dakon.The board or ground has holes.There are normal holes and storage holes.The normal holes are arranged in two rows that face each other.Each row consists of seven holes.Then, there are two storage holes.Each is larger than a normal hole.One of the storage holes is located at the corners of the left while the other one is at the right end of the board.They function as storage for the moveable pieces that each player collects.

Fig. 1 An Example of the Dakon game
Another element of the Dakon game is a set of movable pieces.They serve as an important element of this game.Traditionally, the pieces are either seeds, seashells, or pebbles.The players pick the pieces and distribute them into the normal holes and their storage holes.
How do people play the game? 25 The objectives of the game are twofold.First, explicitly stated, the player of the Dakon who has gotten more pieces stored in the storage hole which lies on the left side of his or her row will become the winner.The game is over when a player runs out of shells on his or her side of the board.Second, in the game, no player wishes to end the game quickly.Therefore, both players need to calculate and balance between winning by accumulating more pieces and assure the competitor could still stay in the game for a mutually enjoyable time.

The process of the game and its rule
The Dakon game can be played with as many rounds as the player wants.There is a beginning, a continuation, and a final round.

a. The First Round
In the first round, each player places seven pieces into each of the holes on his or her side of the board which means that he has forty-nine (49) pieces as his or her capital.At that point, the storage hole which is the eighth hole on the player's side is purposedly empty.If both players have set their pieces on each of their holes, they will decide who will go first.They might use scissors, paper, and stone method to do so.
The first player who wins will take all pieces out of any hole on his or her side of the board.With seven pieces in the hand, the player will fill in each hole on the left side of the emptied hole where the pieces in his or her hand originate.Thus, the player distributes the pieces by moving clockwise around the board and dropping one shell into each hole including the storage at the end of the board, and then filling in also each of the holes that belong to the opponent.The opponent's storage hole will be skipped.If there are still more pieces in the hand after dropping one piece in the player's storage, the person should continue distributing the pieces.In this first turn, if the player's last piece is dropped in a hole that is empty or has nothing, he or she should stop.
Thus, three possibilities exist in this round.First, if the last piece is dropped in an empty hole located in the player's side, the pieces that a hole across in the opposite row contains will become the player and be placed in his or her storage.The player will be happy because at that point, he or she can amass many pieces of the opponent at once.
The second possibility is the player's last piece is dropped in an empty hole that belongs to his opponent and which means that the player will not get anything and the opponent takes the turn to play.
The third possibility is if the player's last piece is dropped in a hole that has one or more pieces in it, those pieces belong to the player and he or she can grab it and then distribute it clockwise either into the opponent's hole or the player's holes.Along with the game, each player while using his or her turn distribute the pieces to all holes, either his or her own or the holes that belong to the opponent.Each turn will allow the player to add something to the storage hole.The more pieces accumulated, the larger possibility of the player becoming the winner.
If in this round, the first player amasses many pieces that belong to his or her opponent, the player must be happy.However, if this occasion takes place frequently, the opponent will be bankrupt too soon and the game is over.If a player wins that way too often, no one will play with the person.On the other side, the players can learn that no use to play by accumulating too many pieces in one of their holes as the opponent can amass them.They learn to distribute their wealth and accumulate gradually the pieces in storage.Even in this round, each of the players learns not only to obtain pieces, but consider their opponent's capability, the total time for the game, and how to distribute their capital while gradually collecting a sufficient number of pieces.

b. Second Round
When a player has run out of the pieces to distribute, both players take all their pieces out of their storage, in addition to any leftover shells from their side of the board.Then, each player recounts and fills in their holes with seven pieces per hole starting with the hole nearest to his or her storage.If one player has leftovers after putting seven pieces into each hole, she or he can place the leftover shells back into the storage.Since the losing opponent will not have enough pieces to be placed in his or her holes, there will be one or more holes with no pieces.
No one should fill in those empty holes when the game begins again.Thus, the game will proceed with less than sixteen (16) holes to be filled as both players must skip these holes, not drop a shell in them.Thus, instead of using all holes, they play with fewer.At this stage, they learn to adjust themselves to the new environment of the game.

c. End of the Game
The game continues with successive rounds until one player no longer has any piece, or both players agree to stop playing.If they decide to end the game, they would count the pieces to see who has the most and thus, decide the winner.
The Dakon game is seemingly simple enough.However, repeated practice and skill development enable the player to maximize the chances of having at least one shell left in a position to carry on the journey and to create the opportunity to amass the opponent's pieces whenever necessary.At the same time, they learn to allow others to have opportunities to play and enjoy togetherness for quite a time.Thus, it is a multi-faceted game.
The Department of Non-Material Heritage of the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture lists the functions of the Dakon Game as follows: Entertainment, honesty, strategic thinking, logic, democracy, responsibility, obedience, friendship, and openness. 26Senowarsito et al. stated that the Dakon game has considerable benefits for enhancing the cognitive, psychomotor, mental, emotional, and social development of the players in a learning process, mainly children that the researchers studied. 27hus, the players learn through gaming experience that maintaining social relations is considered serious besides material achievement.To do so, they need to understand and manage their emotion and motivations.Such a multi-facet game is very rich in its educational process.That is the reason that the Indonesian government has listed the Dakon games as the nation as one of the material national inheritances.Yet, what specifically does this game teach, especially in economic and spiritual terms?

METHODOLOGY
The study is qualitative as it uses literature research.The literature research covers the study of spirituality, the Trinitarian concept, the dualistic view of life, the Dakon games, and the tacit learning embedded in it.It is an exploration to link Christian spirituality to economic praxis and to identify the difficulties in applying it, the consequences, and then, the possibility to adopt a learning method from the indigenous teaching method which is the Dakon games.
The contribution of the findings is to enhance appreciation of the indigenous method of experiential learning and to give some direction for the Christians to use tacit learning as a method of inheriting spiritual values to the next generation.

RESULTS /FINDINGS Comparing the Indigenous Spiritual and the Trinitarian Spiritual Values
Both Christian spiritualities and theology indicate the recognition of the three elements of life: The Master, the Stewards, and the Sources.The stewards need to realize their role and place in the world is to relate to the Almighty and others.It can be done if they continuously learn of self-awareness and control added to sensitivity to others.They exist in the world as a part of a larger union between God and humans beside between humans.The indigenous beliefs are more poignant in teaching people to teach about such relationships and how to relativize their own self-centred needs and dreams.In short, they emphasize the need to live and work in harmony with others, with God, and even with nature.It does not mean that they avoid conflict, but instead, they manage to create a reconciliation process by placing unity and togetherness as the main values.
As has been described, the Dakon game manages to make people learn about those three elements without explicitly anyone teaching them about those elements.By playing the Dakon, they do not realize the knowledge or wisdom that they acquire yet, the values embedded in the game enter and guide their lives.This is the superiority of the indigenous method.Hidden teachings about values and spirituality gently enter people's lives and they will retain them for generations.
In the beginning, the teaching of Trinitarian spirituality tends to centre on logic.More specifically Western Christianity uses the Aristotelian logic in its theology and teaching methods.First, the believers learn about the teaching through cognition.Then, they try to use their emotional capability to adopt it.The last, they plan to manifest it in their pattern of behaviour including business or economic behaviours and objectives.Each of the learning steps can erode some strength of the teaching.Therefore, the power of theology as such is limited mainly to the academic context or the community of faith environment, but less effective in the context of competitive and scarce resources.The dualistic view of religion and the economy makes things worse.Koinomic will contradict the widely-accepted business logic or practices.
The modern development of Industry Revolution 4.0 in Martin Buber's terms might drive people to practice more the I-It relationship instead of the I-Thou relationship.28Without a holistic economic praxis, the social, cultural heritages, or political practices that give the ability of great civilization to sustain itself for quite a long time will also diminish.29

DISCUSSION
There are a couple of insights when people try to apply Christian spiritual values to economic praxis today.First, there is a need for a method to create tacit knowledge that includes spiritual values for economy practitioners to enable them to apply the Trinitarian concept.This can be achieved by educating them from childhood to play a game such as the Dakon and acquire the concept of three dimensions of economic life through experiential learning.They learn about the Master, their roles as stewards, and the sources.
Second, people need to relate economic life with the presence of the Divine.Success measurement should include a process of creating new opportunities and life, and of sharing grace, caring, self-sacrificing, developing mutual benefit, maintaining sustainability, and harmony, and widening the sense of community as a process of growing toward unity in humanity and closeness with the Divine.Thus, through a traditional game like the Dakon game, they can learn that life is more than just about their own self-centred needs and wish.

RECOMMENDATIONS
Although the spirituality or theology that the West has developed is valuable, to help people adopt and apply the core of their spirituality or spiritual values to economic life, there is a need to enrich the education process.Education of Christian spiritual values and perspective needs to be enriched.To enable people to incorporate economic life with unity, togetherness, and harmony needs experiential learning or tacit educational method.In such a method, people actively engage themselves to delve into the core meaning of their existence in life, their work, and their social or economic achievement.Further research needs to be done on whether Dakon as one of the game methods can also be useful for learners of different age levels besides children.

CONCLUSION
The prerequisite for developing a holistic economic praxis lies in educating people to apply spiritual values to economic principles and practices.A dualistic view that splits the sacred and secular world is the obstacle to applying economic practices that bring creativity, redemption, and growth based on God's love and grace.There must then be an effort to teach the concept as an explicit one or as a transfer of knowledge might not be as fruitful compared to the method that the indigenous Javanese beliefs use such as, using the Dakon game for children that acquire tacit knowledge which includes a holistic spiritual perspective on the economy.
The findings give hints that a potential learning method is to be constructed for the Christians in Indonesia if they want to become the salt and light of the earth or spread God's grace that they experience to all dimensions of life.They need to learn, appreciate, and adopt the indigenous religious believers' traditional ways and their success in integrating knowledge, emotion, values, and worldview into their economic life.