In Part I of this essay, from a month ago, I outlined here my views on the Balinese as a peasant society, on the society’s origin and its beginnings, critical points in its history and more thoughts on why Bali is so different from other peasant societies. I describe much of Balinese culture through a discussion of its crafts – of the basketry, pottery, spinning and weaving, the production of bronze tools and musical instruments — crafts from the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, the sort I usually pick up when in other countries.
Unfortunately, the quality of Balinese crafts completely escaped my attention when I was there, preoccupied with work and my Indonesian colleagues. Instead, I bought two ordinary souvenirs in an ordinary shop, but even they are worth a comment. One is a wood carving I had made for Ravi’s desk, of his name with the barong hovering protectively over it. The barong, king of the good spirits and enemy of Rangda, the demon queen, is everywhere in Bali, including in a ritual dance between Barong and Rangda that represents the eternal battle between good and evil. It is one of the surviving beliefs from Bali’s Austronesian origins, from a time when their religion was a form of animism, when they honored the spirits of nature and the spirits of ancestors who remain among the living, and all good spirits, like the one whose image I took home with me.
In Bali and Java, ancestral spirits possessing exceptional supernatural abilities are the hyang, spirits that inhabit sacred realms in high places, in the mountains and volcanoes. Since hyang move only in straight lines, a traditional Balinese building has a wall, an aling-aling, just inside the doorway that will stop them from entering. A dance and ritual performance treats possession by the hyang. Anthropological accounts report the Balinese fearing malevolent spirits that move through the village, dangerously, in the dark of night. These beliefs continue and persist alongside and mixed in with later, Indian influenced religious beliefs and the numerous complex rituals that permeate all aspects of Balinese life.
I bought the other souvenir, a statuette only six inches tall, probably because seeing something so thoroughly Indian surprised me, and as with all Balinese crafts, I was impressed with the skillful, highly detailed carving of two figures bonded together as one. But it needs explaining.
It is of the god Vishnu sitting astride Garuda, a giant mythical bird with the head and wings of a bird and the body of a man. In this pose of god and mount, Garuda leans forward, standing with legs splayed. He wears a headdress. Unfortunately, the long beak of my statuette’s Garuda is chipped.
And how did Vishnu and Garuda come from India to Bali? More broadly, how did it happen that Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam are Indonesian religions and part of Indonesian culture?
An aspect of Bali’s culture that usually receives considerable attention, its religion, was not something I noticed while there. I had no time to attend the elaborate public rituals that attract tourists and no occasion to observe private worship. With colleagues and friends I discussed our work and common interests. On one consultancy, a six-month assignment across Indonesia, my assistant/interpreter was a medical student, ethnic Chinese and recent convert to Christianity. He told me about his Christian groups and activities but we avoided talk of his faith. I greatly appreciated Indonesians’ generally open and tolerant attitude toward the religion, or non-religion, of others.
But still, seeing elements of Hinduism and Buddhism in Bali and of Islam elsewhere in Indonesia did seem a bit odd and I had no way to explain it. In the history I learned in school, that of Europe, the adoption of Christianity followed military conquest from Rome, and centuries later Islam followed conquering Arab and Persian armies. Otherwise, colonialism was a factor in spreading the two world religions.
I had wondered how Buddhism moved from India to countries throughout Asia, especially to South East Asia. And how could Islam be found so far from its center? The answer surprised me. It was trade and traders, men from centers of empire in India sailing forth from the Bay of Bengal into South East Asia and the islands to acquire goods, such as spices and cloth and lumber to build their ships, carrying with them their Hinduism, Buddhism, and later, Islam. Reasoning by analogy from what I know of merchants (and wrote of here) who sailed from Portugal in the 16th century to nations around the world, and particularly to Indonesia, I can imagine how the spread of a new religion happened, slowly, over the centuries. Inevitably, some of the tradesmen married locally and settled down in coastal towns, created small communities practicing their Indian faith. People in the vicinity would be attracted to the more complex, more abstract beliefs and mythologies of the Mauryan (322 and 185 BCE) and the Gupta (320 to 550 CE) Empires’ sophisticated cultures, later those of the Chola and of the Gujeratis. Traders brought other innovations as well, such as a script for writing and iron for tools and weapons, all of which would lead to economic growth. The local community increased in size and social complexity and when a chieftain or a king converted, the faith spread. Adopting the king’s religion expresses political loyalty, and his religion becomes the religion of the state.
Java’s agriculture is highly productive and by the 8th century the population on the Kedu Plain of Central Java was large and dense enough to support a sizable, culturally rich Buddhist kingdom ruled by a royal line known as the Shailendra Dynastry. (The royal court is pictured on a Borobudur bas-relief, shown in Part I .) The marvelous Borobudur was built in the 9th century, designed in the Javanese Buddhist architecture style that blends ancient ancestor worship and Buddhist concepts. The word in Indonesian for ancient temples and sacred structures is candi; thus the Borobudur is Candi Borobudur.
One of the world’s great historic figures is Ashoka of the Maurya Empire, and to him we owe the rise of Buddhism as a religion and a philosophy. (I wrote here of Ravi’s childhood visits in Sarnath and his fascination with Buddhism.) Ashoka ruled almost all of the Indian subcontinent from c. 268 to 232 BCE. The center of his empire, Magadha, today’s Patna, was also the birthplace of Buddhism. Ashoka was born Hindu, but, according to legend, after witnessing the devastating effects of war on his people he embraced Buddhism, resulting in Buddhism’s consequent spread across the empire. He promoted economic growth, and as Mauryans began absorbing the ideals and values of Buddhist teachings, discouraged the caste system. Buddhism became the religion of traders and merchants. (Jainism arose in the same period but did not spread beyond India.)
Many Buddhists believe Buddha is an incarnation of Vishnu. In Indonesia, the heroic, mythical Airlangga of the 11th century, ruler of an East Java kingdom but born and raised in Bali, follower of Buddhism, is shown in statues and paintings as Vishnu-like, riding Garuda. I have not read of Airlangga as a Vishnu incarnation but some believers may view him as such. He is associated with the Garuda, a mythical bird that captures the imagination, like the image of the eagle being ubiquitous in European cultures. And the concept of the phoenix, originally from ancient Greece. Indonesia uses the Garuda Pancasila as its national symbol.
I notice that Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, is not included in the Indonesian Vishnu and Garuda. In the Indian original she is Vishnu’s consort and almost inseparable from him, as if his spirituality must be balanced by her practical emphasis on wealth and prosperity, all of which takes me back to a continuing discussion between Ravi and me, sometimes with an edge on it, about American culture. This is too complex for little more than an outline here; maybe I’ll return to it another time in detail. Suffice it to say that Ravi grew up in an extended family where educated Brahmins in the professions or holding a government position had the highest prestige, the Sikhs and their military symbols were admired, but tradesmen and men in small businesses had low prestige. Although somewhat different, it reflected the usual Indian caste system. In American culture, almost the opposite holds; small business, business in general, is prestigious, a job with government is so-so, and except for medicine, professions rank by how much money the person earns. In Bali, traditionally, men did not engage in trade. In the local marketplace women were the traders. (This is a pattern in many cultures.) The more lucrative trade of major commodities was done by outsiders, by men from China, Sulawesi, and of course, from India. Some of the early Indian traders elsewhere in S.E. Asia recognized Lakshmi in their temples as one of their own, but in Balinese culture she had no male advocates to rescue her from obscurity. In the stories of Airlangga, in an East Java statue, he is depicted as Vishnu accompanied by his two consorts, Lakshmi and Sri, the Indonesian goddess of rice and of wealth.
Vishnu and Garuda was part of the Indian traders’ Hinduism but during the early era of their influence in Indonesia, from the 8th through the 11th centuries, when traders and merchants were organizing into guilds and adopting Buddhism as their religion they took Ganesha, the elephant god, as their principal deity.
The elephant is not an animal familiar to me, but Ravi, despite having no contact with them, loved the idea of the elephant. In India, traveling with him, I had the good fortune of occasionally seeing real elephants in their natural setting. I had read of warrior elephants being critical in Ashoka’s expansion of the Mauryan Empire but that had been in India’s past. In the 1980s I watched a row of elephants, obviously working animals, ambling along a rural road; then a bridegroom in Jaipur riding to his wedding on an elaborately decorated elephant, and on another day tourists perched atop an elephant on their way to a palace. I met an elephant while standing in a South India temple as it gently touched the top of my head with its trunk. Once, when Ravi and I were driving on a bridge, crossing a river, we stopped for a few minutes to watch a boy, a mahout, bathing an elephant that lay on its side, stretched out in the shallow water. They both appeared at that moment to be in a perfect state of contentment.
It took me a while, but I came to understand why the elephant could become a god-figure in India and why Indonesian Buddhists would adopt Ganesha into its pantheon. After all, Indonesia has it own elephant, a smaller and separate species, now in danger of extinction. I know of the Sumatran elephant from a Batak wood carving where the eyes, tusks and trunk are suggested.
One of Bali’s earliest known Buddhist sites is near Ubud, in Bedulu, now a small town but in the 9th century the center from where a king ruled over many villages, employed some sort of military force, and where Buddhist priests kept temples for the practice of Buddhism. Today a 9th century sanctuary, the Goa Gajah, Elephant Cave, and the ruins of a temple bathing pool remain. No elephant is pictured anywhere, and no clear idea is given by anyone to explain why the cave has elephant as its name. The elephant was not indigenous in Bali. Available here are photographs and descriptions of what the tourist can see — the ruins of a Buddhist temple that was carved from the rock, with broken carvings and unfinished statues of the Buddha strewn about; of an ancient shrine in the cliff face with statues of Ganesha and two goddesses; of the man-made cave interior for which the Goa Gajah is the doorway and of the ritual bathing pool with seven apsara statues carved into the side walls and from which the fountain water flows. A statue of Buddha from as early as the 8th century is mentioned.
I regret not having seen these historical places and not having visited the Denpasar museum. Here for a discussion of Buddhism in Java and Bali, and here to learn what remains of Buddhism in Bali.
In India, Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge and all literary arts including music, literature and speech and Ganesha is the god of intellect and wisdom. Saraswati did not make it to Indonesia, but the Indian traders took Ganesha with them and today he is the Indonesian god of the sciences.
Another experience I missed while working in Bali was Yeh Pulu. In Bedulu, after visiting the Goa Gajah and surroundings, one goes to the other side of town to see a frieze carved into a cliff face. It is a bas-relief sculpture some twenty-five meters long and two meters high, from the 14th century, depicting in a sequence of scenes the everyday life of Balinese villagers. Some consider it a story enacted by the Hindu god Krishna. I think it the former. Individuals are distinguished from one another, local architecture is shown, people are at work, there are real animals, game is being hunted. At the end of the tale is a statue of Ganesha.
I was struck by the presence of the horse, an animal domesticated on the Asian steppes, not indigenous to Indonesia, nor, as inferred from linguistic evidence, brought along with the Austronesian heritage. Two seemingly unrelated words are used in different parts of Indonesia for horse, but linguistic analysis and the islands’ social history indicate that the horse came from India. A thoughtful, well written and all too-brief discussion is here. It would be fascinating to search further for the roots of the two words in India’s two language families – Dravidian and Indo-European.
This account of a temple touched me.
In Tampaksiring, north east of Ubud, are remains of Gunung Kawi, a temple and funerary complex from the 11th century, shown in Part I of this essay.
In 1354, Majapahit forces from Java, led by Gajah Mada, landed in Bali and captured Bedulu. It changed the course of history for Bali. That next, but first a comment on Bali’s stone and wood carving. An excellent discussion is here.
I like the introductory sentence — “The Balinese seem unable to tolerate unadorned stone. With fanged, bulging-eyed statues guarding every gate and shrine, and walls, benches, and pedestals of traffic signs carved in stone, stone-carving is so ubiquitous on Bali … …” and the urge to carve and ornament surfaces was already flourishing during the Buddhist period just covered. I wonder what happened to the urge for representative art, as in Borobudur and in Yeh Pulu. The men who carved objects from the island’s soft stone and of wood were village farmers practicing their craft to produce the traditional, standardized items required for the community’s religious and ritual life. During the time of medieval kingdoms, they were employed by the royal family to provide ornaments and objects for the royal palaces and temples. Art and creativity were not the craftsman’s explicit goals but certain among them were also artists and we sense that in a good number of the statues and decor we now treasure.
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