Five Basic Hindu Rituals in Bali

Ngusaba ceremony which was held every 50 years 

Hindu Rituals of Bali

Hinduism flourished in Indonesia roughly from the 4^th century CE through the late 15^th century CE, when Islamic trading networks began to play an important role in the politics and economics of the archipelago, and brought about a period that is marked for the predominance of Islam in the religious life of the archipelago. However, Hinduism survived in a number of areas among the islands of Indonesia, most notably in Bali, which today is home to a remarkably colorful and artistic form of Hinduism.

The Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs has recently estimated that 6,501,680 Hindus live in the modern Indonesian state, although the Hindu association titled Parishada Hindu Dharma Indonesia (PHDI) claims that the number is much larger. In Bali, where it is estimated that almost 90 percent of the population follows the Balinese form of Hinduism, religious beliefs and practices have developed various local characteristics that include a focus on worship of the ancestors and ‘animist’ beliefs that distinguish it from Hinduism as practiced on the Indian subcontinent. Balinese religious practices depend heavily on rituals, which can be classified into five groups known as the Panca Yadnya. These are:

(1)  Dewa Yadnya, rituals performed for deities;

(2)  Manusa Yadnya, life-cycle rituals;

(3)  Resi Yadnya, rituals for the initiation of priests;

(4)  Bhuta Yadnya, ritual to appease the demonic spirits so that they are transformed into protective spirits; and

(5) Pitra Yadnya, rituals performed to purify the souls of recently deceased members of the community.

Dewa Yadnya or Rituals for divine beings

Dewa Yadnya are rituals performed for deities, which include especially temple festivals or Odalan that are most often timed according to the 210-day Balinese sacred year or Pawukon, as well as full moon and new moon rituals. During an Odalan, the shrines in the temples are decorated with colorful traditional umbrellas, banners with images of deities and elaborate offerings made from fruits, flowers and meats. People go to the Odalan in their best traditional customs. The men are often busy playing the ensembles of the gamelan orchestra or working in the community kitchen of the temple, while the women are busy with preparing and placing offerings of plaited palm leaves, flowers and foodstuffs or taking part in processions that are a major part of the activity of an Odalan. One of the most lovely aspects of their participation is the stately Pendet dance they perform when they welcome the deities upon their return from a blessing of holy water at the holy spring or point on a river that is sacred for the temple where the Odalan is going on.   Temples are very lively during the festival. People come to the temple not only for praying but also for socializing with other people. The temple festival is the melting point when the sekala and niskala beings (the visible and invisible beings) of this world interact with each other. The physical layout of the Balinese temples is divided into three courtyards that are linked to varying degrees of sacred acitivity. The outer courtyard is a place that has an atmosphere something like a “county fair” and is the place for dances, shadow plays and other performances aimed at pleasing the temple goers. In the middle courtyard final preparations are made to make ready the many offerings that are brought to the temple for blessing by all the community members, and is also the space for special dances like Topeng Sidhakarya that are an important part of the successful completion of a ceremony. This is also the area reserved for the pavilions that house the gamelan ensembles of the temple, and so is often alive with the resonant and exciting sounds of the Balinese gamelan. The innder courtyard is the area for the most sacred shrines, and the more solemn worship of the deities that is accomplished by offering flowers with hands outstretched in prayer-like fashion, and completed with a blesing of holy water. It is a very strict rule in Bali that women who having period or menstruation are not allowed to enter any temples or other sacred places because blood is considered attractiveve to the negative forces and can thus put women in danger. This prohibition is often misunderstood by Western visitors to Bali as being a way to “keep women down” However, this is not the view of Balinese women, who often speak of menopause as a time in their lives that frees them to become closer to the deities and less directly involved in the difficulties and challenges of the reproductive cycle of life.

Temple festival that requires holy water from Tanah Lot Temple

Arts and religious ceremonies can not be separated in Bali

Manusa Yadnya or life cycle rituals

There are several life-cycle rituals that need to be performed during the lifetime of a Balinese Hindu, although not everyone follows each and every one of them. However, the following rituals must be carried out by every Hindu Balinese. Those important rituals are the three months ritual called Telubulanin, the six months ritual called Otonan or Balinese birthday which comes every 210 days of the Balinese calendar system and the tooth-filing ceremony conducted either before the marriage or during the marriage ceremony. The main purpose in carrying out all those life-cycle rituals is to purify one’s physical and spiritual body so that one can appropriately face this mortal life in a proper way as regulated by religious and social norms. In Balinese belief every baby is born with its four siblings called Kanda Empat. Those four siblings are represented physically by the blood, vernix caseosa, amniotic fluid and placenta which are born with the child and personified as potentially divine or demonic beings that can either protect or harm the baby depending on how we treat them. The Otonan ritual, which falls 210 days is also very important for Balinese to get the blessing from the ancestors, so a great deal of thought and preparation is put into putting together the offerings for this ritual. The ceremony is performed for men throughout their lives, but girls will stop getting their Otonan rituals as soon as they get married into their husband’s house, as it is assumed that they then fall under the protection of his ancestors and guardian spirits. The next important ritual which must be done by Balinese is the tooth-filing ceremony. In the “low” or “common” form of the Balinese language this is called mesangih, while the term mepandes from the “high” or “refined” form of Balinese is reserved for use by the the three higher castes (Brahmins, Ksatriya and Wesya). The aim of this ritual is to reduce the influences of our six inner enemies (sadripu) by filing the six upper teeth, especially our two canines, which are believed to be the remnants of our animalistic characteristics. These upper six teeth are the symbols of our six inner enemies: kama, lobha, krodha, mada, moha and matsarya, “lust, greed, anger, drunkenness, spiritual confusion and jealousy.”

While some commentators consider marriage the last of the Manusa-Yadnya others include the mewinten ceremony in this category. This is a ceremony of purification and initiation undertaken before the commencement of a course of spiritual study, including the study of sacred arts like the shadow theater (wayang). Those who hold that marriage should be considered the last of the Manusa Yadnya point out, not without good reason that the mawinten ceremony should actually counted among the Rsi-Yadnya, or ceremonies devoted to initiation into religious study. They point out that this ceremony has many features in common with madiksa ceremony at which a novice High Priest and his wife are symbolically reborn into a state of sanyasa (“spiritual renunciation”), thus assuming the rights and responsibilities of s full-fledged High Priest and Priestess.

An Hindu Balinese wedding ceremony

Balinese Hindu wedding

Pitra Yadnya or Post-mortem Rituals

The post-mortem rituals are very crucial for every Balinese because the main goal of these rites is to liberate the soul (atman) or the non-physical aspect of the self, and allow it to enter the world of deities and ancestors. In the Hindu-Balinese cosmology, the body of human being is a microcosm of the universe, made up of the same five elements as those that constitute the physical universe. These five elements, known as the Panca Maha Bhuta, are pertiwi, apah, teja, bayu, and akasa or earth, water, fire, air and ether. We believe that the soul is confined to a physical form by those five elements; therefore when someone dies the living family must perform a cremation ritual, called ngaben or palebon, to return the five elements to their sources and liberate the atman so that it can join the world of the deities and ancestors who provide protection to their living relatives. In each Balinese compound there is a family temple called a Sanggah (common Balinese language) or Merajan (high Balinese language), which consists of several shrines to worship the deities and the ancestors. A special wooden shrine set atop a stone pillar and divided into three parts is said to be sacred to the three major Hindu deities, Wisnu, Brahma and Shiwa and at the same time represents the deified ancestors of the family.

This ngaben ritual can be simple or very elaborate depending on the economic condition of the family. In high caste family, this ngaben ritual is called palebon can be very elaborate. For royal familie like those of Ubud, Gianyar, Klungkung and Badung the cost of a cremation ceremony can run into the millions of Indonesian rupiah. The high cost of these rituals stems from the need to maintain status and prestige in their communities, and reflects the pattern of what Clifford Geertz famously called “the theater state”, In this form of society higher status families must carry enormous amounts of income in order to support the huge public spectacles that are the basis of their power. In contemporary Bali the “theater state” lives on, but now with the support of income generated by “cultural tourism” and the negotiation of fees allowing the filming of rituals that are highly valued among documentary film-makers with an eye for the exotic complexities of the living culture of Bali.

The body is carried to the cemetery to be cremated

Bhuta Yadnya or Rituals for the chthonic spirits

Balinese believe in both sekala and niskala, or visible and invisible worlds that are inhabited by human beings as well as a host of invisible beings who live alongside us and are the “real owners” of the land and space of the world. We human beings reside in the visible (sekala) world but must remain ever aware and attentive to the needs and wishes of the niskala beings of the invisible world. We live together in this world; therefore we should share this world in a harmonious way, and strive to maintain the balance of life. The invisible beings can be good or bad, divine or demonic. They live with us in the world around us, and also within ourselves. Balinese believe that in order to create and maintain a harmonious relation with the unseen beings we need to make offerings on a daily basis, and more elaborate offerings on particular days within the lunar and Pawukon time cycles, as well as for rituals of all types. As I have mentioned above, the rituals for the divines or deities are called Dewa Yadnya, while the rituals performed for the demonic spirits are called Bhuta Yadnya. The main goal of the Bhuta Yadnya rituals is to placate the demonic spirits in order that they will not bother us while we are carrying out our obligations as human beings. Offerings for the demonic spirits are usually laid on the ground because we believe that they are from the nether world. While the simplest offerings to these spirits, the bhuta-kala, can consist of nothing more than bits of rice on banana leaf and more elaborate ceremonies must include offerings that contain the blood or flesh of animals that are sacrificed especially for ritual needs, and assumed to attain a higher station in future rebirths through their ‘participation’ in human rituals. Offerings made at Bhuta Yadnya rituals include the simplest segehan offerings, which are made of colorful cooked rice placed on a square container made from young coconut leaves and decorated with flowers, fruits and the rice. Each color of the rice of a segehan offering should be placed according to the proper direction of the four-compass points, which each have a corresponding color, sacred weapon, mantra and even place of “being seated” in the human body when carrying out healing rituals. For example, white rice should be placed in the east as the symbol of the deity Iswara, whose demonic form as Anggapati whose role in our body is to occupy the hearth. In Balinese belief, both divine and demonic beings are two sides of a single entity, which can assume one, or another form depending on how we treat them. Those invisible beings are malign and benign at the same time. It is our duty to placate the demonic spirits through offerings and thus enable them to be transformed into divine protective beings.

Hindu minorities are to be found in East Java, Central and East Kalimantan, the city of Medan (North Sumatra), in South and Central Sulawesi, and on the island of Lombok, the eastern neighbor of Bali that was under Balinese rule throughout the 19th century. Indian religious holidays like Holi and Divali are almost unknown on Bali, where a complex local calendrical system based on the pawukon year of 210 days is used to determine the auspicious days for important Balinese festivals like Galungan and Kuningan, which celebrate the victory of dharma, cosmic and social order and goodness, over adharma, the forces of disorder. In addition to the many rituals that follow the pawukon cycle, there are important festivals in Bali that are timed according to the lunar cycle or to the solar-lunar Shaka year. The most important of these festivals in Nyepi, the Hindu “day of silence” that falls on the day following the new moon of the 10th lunar month. On the day before Nyepi a ceremony called caru or tawur is performed aimed at appeasing demonic spirits through a ‘feast’ offering of fresh slaughtered domestic animals. In the evening following this ritual temporary images of demons—called ogoh-ogoh—are carried in procession through the villages and then discarded, in this way entertaining the demonic forces that threaten the peace and solidarity of village communities and then chasing them away. Nyepi itself is a very special day in Bali, that has led to its being designated a national holiday: all use of fire, electricity or motorized transportation is banned; Balinese must stay in their homes, while tourists are confined to their hotels (but given a special dispensation that allows the use of electricity and gas-ranges for cooking). The sense of quiet and tranquility that descends on Bali during Nyepi is remarkable, a reminder of what life might be like if the meditative virtues of the past were brought to the fore again in our troubled, globalized world today.

The largest type of caru: sacrificing a buffalo and many other animals

We pray for the animals before being sacrificed 

Resi Yadnya or ritual for the ordination of priest/priestess

In Bali both men and women can be priests; either they are priests from the the triwangsa (three high-caste groups) or from the commoner group, the largest percentage of the population. After the ordination, the priests from the Brahmin caste are called Pedanda for the male priests and Pedanda Istri for the female priests. If the priests are from the commoner groups, they will be called Pemangku. There are many types of Pemangku depending on the roles they play, and what temples they assigned to be responsible for. For examples: there are pemangku pure Puseh, Dalem and Bale Agung. In addition to those there main pemangkus, there are also minor pemangkus such as pemangku pure Beji, Pemangku Mrajapati/Tunon (the graveyard). The Brahmin priests can be Pedanda Boda, Siwa and Rsi Bhujangga. Those three high priests have their own roles in performing ceremonies, but they have to work together when they perform the rituals. 

A female priest who performs purification ceremony on the beach

A female priest from an high caste

Conclusion

Bali is one of the provinces in Indonesia that still maintains its Hinduism. But the Hinduism of Bali has become a unique religion because in its development it has been amalgamated with important local traditions and beliefs, perhaps most visible in the coalesence of ideas about the nature of divine beings from the Indian side with veneration for the protective nature of family ancestors on the Indonesian side. The characteristics of Balinese Hinduism are distinctive and unique especially in their religious practices, which have carried the art of creating offerings from floral, plant and edible components to a level unknown in any other manifestation of the basic religious instinct of human society. While some modern Balinese are adopting new practices based on recent contacts with the mainstream Hindu practices of India, the ancient ritual aspects of Balinese religion continue to live on in most of the households, villages and temple systems of Bali.