Abstract
Indonesian politics supports religious pluralism only in terms of a modern paradigm of religion as a consistent monotheist doctrine and world religion. The Balinese had therefore to interpret their local traditions of animist and ancestor worship in terms of a doctrinal reform Hinduism (agama Hindu), which replaces traditions of immanent worship with a universal and transcendent religious truth. This chapter describes the journey of a group of Balinese to India as the source of their religion, and it analyzes how an official pilgrimage tour (tirtha yatra) organized to support the agenda of agama Hindu was dialectically transformed by the pilgrims into a performative reappropriation of Balinese animist ontology.
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Notes
- 1.
For details see Picard, this volume.
- 2.
I find the term ‘sacred’ a better fit than ‘holy,’ because places of worship are in Bali often regarded as imbued with ambiguous and potentially dangerous powers (tenget). This applies also to the word ‘sacer’ (Lat.) that is not only the opposite of the ‘profane’ but implies a semantic ambiguity that differs from other terms for ‘the holy,’ as for example ‘sanctus’ (Lat.) or ‘hosios’ (Gr.). Agamben (1998) explains this ambiguity with reference to the ‘homo sacer,’ the ‘cursed man,’ a figure of Roman law that stands beyond divine and human law and can be killed but not sacrificed, which would require pureness or sanctity. Similarly, Dihle has shown that ‘the sacred’ is manifest in specific places within the world, whereas holy (‘sanctus’) is a qualification of the human being, or the circumstances of communion with an unambiguously pure divinity (Dihle 1988; cf. Assmann 2000: 154).
- 3.
- 4.
This matches the fact that Tri Hita Karana (THK) is promoted by the UNESCO as the traditional ‘philosophy’ behind Bali’s unique rice terrace landscape and ‘Cultural Heritage.’ See: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1194; last checked 31.1.2017. It is used to promote sustainable tourism (Pitana 2010), and it was even recommended by the former Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in his address to the International Conference on Sustainable Development in Bali, 2013.
- 5.
The Gita was propagated by Hindu reformers such as Rabindranath Tagore, who visited Bali in the 1920s, and who was also important for the Theosophical Movement. Theosophy was a significant influence for the first Indonesian president, Sukarno, who also appreciated the Bhagavadgita (Ramstedt 2004: 11).
- 6.
Pseudonym.
- 7.
http://wwrn.org/articles/13655/, last accessed: 10.10.2015
- 8.
Turner’s theory was also contested to some degree with regard to Indian tirtha yatra by van der Veer’s (1981) distinction between two types of Indian pilgrimage: a ritual-based pilgrimage that emphasizes caste differences rather than a communitas experience and a ‘spiritual’ pilgrimage to places of bhakti worship that ignores structural differences in favor of the personal and ultimately collective surrender to the ishta-devata, the personally chosen deity. However, neither of these two Indian paradigms fit the Balinese conception of pilgrimage, which was based neither on traditional ritual and social structures nor on personal devotion.
- 9.
The pair of huge rocks was recently found in the sea of East Bali, but they could not even be lifted by a crane until a priest decided that they were a manifestation of divine presence and should be venerated. Currently, the rocks are in a temporary sanctuary where the yoni produces miraculously holy water (tirtha), but a new temple is in the making in Ujung. The officiating priest explained to me that many Muslims from Lombok would come to pray at the Lingga Yoni, asking for its holy water as a remedy for all kinds of problems.
- 10.
A priest in the old Balinese mountain village of Trunyan told me that the holy water (tirtha) in his temple was not ‘made’ by virtue of mantra, but directly taken from the crater lake, which is regarded both as a divinity and as the source of tirtha.
- 11.
Moreover, in South Indian temples, tirtham is also given as part of a puja to the worshippers. Yet, notwithstanding such similarities, tirtha is not necessarily connected to water in the Indian context.
- 12.
I want to thank my colleagues William Sax and Richard Fox for taking the time to improve the English of this essay.
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Hornbacher, A. (2017). Return to the Source: A Balinese Pilgrimage to India and the Re-Enchantment of Agama Hindu in Global Modernity. In: Picard, M. (eds) The Appropriation of Religion in Southeast Asia and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56230-8_6
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