Bundo Kanduang, 'the true mother,' is the queen of Pagaruyung and the moral centre of the Kaba Cindua Mato, the most celebrated of the Minangkabau oral epics. Ruling in a matrilineal frame, she embodies the ideal of womanhood, the limpapeh or central pillar that holds up the great house, and her wisdom and adat-knowledge direct the whole action of the kaba: it is her word that dispatches Cindua Mato to fetch the bride Puti Bungsu for her son Dang Tuanku. In the epic's close she and Dang Tuanku pass out of the ordinary world; sources differ on whether she dies, sails away to the land of Rum, or ascends bodily into the unseen. In modern West Sumatra her name has become an honorific for the senior woman of a lineage and a national symbol of Minangkabau matriarchal ideals.