Praying in the Rain

— By Diana Darling

In Bali, the old holy is in the care of ordinary people: housewives, farmers, schoolchildren. This is one of the reasons why the photographs in this collection are so remarkable. They are all, in some way, about how the Balinese people encounter the divine; but while most images of Balinese ritual — from traditional painting to tourist snapshots — are at once crowded and diffuse, these photographs are about individuals, usually in a quiet moment of ritual practice or in the sort of repose, which is almost a pastime, that the Balinese call bengong, meaning to stare into space.

To enter the world beneath the beautiful surface of the photographs, it is useful to know a bit about Bali’s religion. These days, well into the twenty-first century, most Balinese (apart from the few who are Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist) would tell you that they are Hindu. But this is a recent term for what is a strange and very old religion with roots in animism and ancestor worship, as well as classical Javanese court culture and deep currents of Buddhist and Shaivite Tantra; and it is still evolving. In any case, it is a religion unlike anything found anywhere else. Although Bali is a small island (less than half the size of Connecticut or about a quarter of the size of Wales), it has its own language and script, and its own idiosyncratic music, architecture, poetry, painting, dance and theatrical art forms. And all of this culture is employed in the worship of their gods.

Gods. They — and we and all things — are scintillations in the infinite luminous Emptiness which the Balinese call Sanghyang Embang, whom they address at the beginning of their prayers with empty hands, no flowers.

Yet on a closer level, that holy void is teeming with countless sentient energies that penetrate and operate on the physical world. It is said that these divine beings exist in a fluctuating state of temper — from benign to malevolent — and that this temper is sensitive to the behavior of human beings. In the Balinese view, it is the function of human beings to tend to these energies so that all is harmonious in the world. The Balinese do so through ritual, and it is no simple matter.

In fact, Balinese ritual is indescribably complex, first because the Balinese distinguish minutely among those who inhabit the niskala, the invisible world — from the most exalted cosmic forces to ancestral gods, nature powers, guardian spirits, impish ills lurking in particular places, and many other numinous beings. Second, worship is accompanied by banten, or offerings, very particular offerings, for each type of invisible power. It’s highly systematized, but very few foreign scholars of Balinese culture have ever bothered to research the subject of offerings, because it’s so complicated.

The third complication is the ritual calendar system. Aside from the familiar Gregorian calendar that orders everyday life, the Balinese refer to two calendars that determine when rituals are held. One is a lunar calendar in which the full moon and the dark of the moon are important and require offerings in the home and in temples. The other calendar is based not on the sky but on an abstract 210-day year, which is the same length as the rice-growing cycle. It has 30 seven-day weeks and nine other incremental cycles which regularly intersect, igniting supernatural conditions which require offerings.

The offerings themselves are like a language legible to invisible beings, composed of syllables (bits of food and plants) forming words (palm leaf containers, round, square or triangular, filled with specific ingredients) and statements (particular combinations of increasing complexity, assembled according to codes of number, color, and origin) and all of this rendered lovely with ornaments of tender young coconut leaves, cut and pinned into fantastic shapes and decked with flowers.

This knowledge is carried in the experience, the muscular memory, of the Balinese people. Most women and girls know how to make basic offerings, although almost none would presume to say she understood their meaning. Some women are acknowledged offering specialists, tukang banten, but even they would modestly refer you to a priest if you asked what something “meant.” Balinese priests, who are usually men, know which offerings are required for which rituals, but it is women who know how to actually make them. Until recently, only priests would dare to consult the holy books through which this information is scattered.

You see priests throughout this collection of photographs. These are temple priests, pamangku, and they are dressed entirely in white. Unlike laymen, who may also wear white temple clothes, a priest’s headcloth covers the sacred crown of his head. His duty is nothing less than to magically charge the assembled offerings and offer them to the gods and their attendant ground spirits. The priest does this through mantra and the ringing of a bronze hand-bell, with incense and flowers to carry his message to the invisible realm.

His other important duty is to distribute the gods’ blessing to the worshippers through the vehicle of holy water — that is, spring water which has been infused with the vibration of a deity. Rice grains are also consecrated and distributed; worshippers apply a few to their foreheads and throats (as we see in a photograph of a man sheltering his twin daughters with umbrellas). A priest’s wife is usually initiated with him, and she serves as his equally venerated assistant. She is distinguished by her white temple clothes and white waist sash. If she survives him, she takes up his duties.

It is surprising that such important people as pamangku appear here in humble circumstances, such as planting rice or sweeping temple grounds. Indeed pamangku are often simple farmers, and they are known for their modesty and quiet demeanor. (They are distinguished by caste and function from high priests, sulinggih, who are predominantly Brahmin pedanda, the traditional guardians of esoteric knowledge. Unlike pamangku, high priests are not associated with a temple; their religious function is mainly to create varieties of transformative holy water for important rituals.)

People worship under the open sky in Bali. In this collection, we see people conducting rituals on mountain tops and by the sea, at gateways, lakes, and at the side of the road, in groves and rice fields, and of course at temples. A temple is holy ground, usually with a walled perimeter, with various free-standing shrines to the particular deities honored there. There are village temples, family courtyard temples, shrines in the rice fields, at springs and great trees and crossroads. The only shrine to be found indoors is the plangkiran, a small shelf set above head-height specifically for daily offerings, in a sleeping room, an office, a shop, a bank, or anywhere that there is daily activity.

This daily, myriad devotion is what gives Bali its particular charge or spell, a perceptual sensation that even a tourist might feel, and which inspires the island’s extravagant marketing language. For it is Bali’s modern destiny to be on display, to sell its wit and beauty. And here is another reason why this collection of photographs is so like a magic box. In Bali today, the old holy that we see in this book is being obscured, blotted out, by layer after layer of modern life and modern thought. Most visitors now see only a fabricated pageant of hotel décor and abbreviated “cultural” shows, or menu options where the names of deities show up in spa themes and the names of cocktails.

Forty or fifty years ago, Bali was still innocent of its ability to bewitch. It went about life as if there was nothing extraordinary about climbing up and down a river gorge twice a day to bathe, or catching a snake in your bare hands, or building a house with nothing but a big knife and a grove of bamboo. Or not signing a work of art. Or spending weeks building gigantic works of art in honor of their dead and then burning it all. Or spending the whole night sitting on the ground with your village watching a shadow-puppet play in three languages. There was nothing extraordinary about having to walk everywhere, even in the rain.

Forty or fifty years ago, many foreigners who’d never been there thought Bali was somewhere in the South Pacific, among those islands where the women went around half-naked. Few people had heard of the sprawling nation of Indonesia and didn’t encounter it until they had to get a visa to visit Bali. But Indonesia, huge and shadowy as it was, had special plans for its famous and brilliant little Bali. Like the colonial Dutch before them, the Indonesian government wanted the world to come to Bali — to bring their admiration and their money. And it wanted the Balinese people to do their best to make the world feel welcome.

Bali has an exceptional talent for looking after guests, and a culture of glorious reception. It greets its gods with a profusion of offerings: all kinds of food, flowers, drink, fragrance, music, and dances that are by turns sublime and obscene, so that gods and demons alike are entertained, and this is how the Balinese would welcome their tourists. Nothing the tourists required was too odd or outrageous — how could it be, when the Balinese were accustomed to the antics of demons and understood them to be just another form of the divine?

The tourists were divine in a more prosaic way: they emitted cash like they emitted sweat. They would buy anything you could think up to paint or carve. They fell in love with you in the flash of a smile, and when they fell in love, they gave you presents, took pictures of your family, built you an extra house behind your house, and helped you start a business.

Before long, everyone was rich. No more messy mud walls and gloomy big trees: now you could build a house of cement blocks and put ceramic tiles all over the place, inside and out. Everything in sight was paved. Everyone rode a motorbike. And everywhere there were foreigners, with their money and their admiration, and their crazy money-making ideas.

Among the most popular money-making ideas were those that helped foreigners to pretend they were Balinese. At first it was just getting the tourists dressed up in temple clothes for a picture in a photo studio, complete with the outlandish makeup that is part of ritual costume. Then it was taking them to a holy spring where they could get all wet holding flowers in a sarong. Then it was setting up fake Balinese weddings for them. Serious foreigners studied Balinese dance and music, and a few tried to study Balinese medical magic and learn to go into trance. Not to mention the anthropologists, who thought everything you said was so amazing they had to write it down. All this gave the Balinese the idea that they were very special indeed — not personally, but as a culture. Balinese culture, they were told, and began to believe, was the coolest thing on the planet.

Not everybody was happy, though. Many expats, now rich and ageing and ill-tempered, had plenty to say about how modern Balinese were doing things. They complained about the traffic jams, the noise, the pollution, the plastic trash on the beach and in the rivers and rice fields. They complained that the loudspeakers were too loud, the lamps were too bright, the new buildings were too big, that Bali was ruined and that they were going to sell up and move to Luang Prabang. But no one paid any attention to them. Tourist numbers were higher than ever, and what better proof was there that everything was fine?

But if you looked closely at the new tourists, you’d see that they were not like the tourists of forty or fifty years ago, enchanted dropouts from the West who stayed on. The new tourists came from countries that were glad to have pushed back the jungle and built a shiny new civilization. They were unimpressed with bamboo dwellings and all those primitive folk practices. They wanted shiny new things to do while they were on holiday, and Bali graciously provided them: extravagant theatrical productions, motorized water sports, elephant tours, souvenir malls, ziplines, and swings over scenic views with adjacent restaurants, shops, toilets, and parking lots big enough for buses. The new tourists weren’t looking at Bali. They were looking at themselves with Bali as a backdrop.

Meanwhile, some Balinese went for a shiny new religious life, adding a layer of international neo-Hinduism to the many layers beneath. This was not so much for tourists as for fellow Indonesians, who looked so modern with their conspicuous global religions. This new public Hinduism was proud, flamboyant, very self-assured, even omniscient. It renovated everything in its path, and pushed its horizon to the holy sites of India itself.

Yet underneath, close to the heart, the old ritual rhythms still beat. The private moments captured here are hidden from the view of outsiders, behind the walls of temples or family compounds, or out in the wild mountain air. These photographs are about ordinary life in the sacred space between Balinese people and the luminous hum around them.

M D Morgan

M D Morgan