RITES
AND FESTIVALS
SOCIETY
AND RELIGION
These
villages in the least our going in and out of the temples,
we started visiting them systematically, looking for unusual
statues or reliefs, and although from the beginning we received
the impression that there were not two temples exactly alike,
we became aware that there were features common to all;
unlike the forbidding, sombre temples of other Oriental
countries, the Balinese temple is a gay, open-air affair;
one, two, or three open courtyards surrounded by a low wall,
each court leading into the next through more or less elaborate
stone gates, and with a number of empty sheds, pavilions,
and shrines in varied styles, the majority covered with
thatch, some with only one roof, others with as many as
eleven superimposed roofs like pagodas.
There were no soot-blackened rooms filled with incense smoke
for mysterious rites performed in front of great idols;
as a matter of fact, there were no idols at all worshipped
in any of the hundreds of Balinese temples we visited. In
many there were ancient statues from former times, together
with many shapeless stones kept as amulets by the community,
which, because of their antiquity or because they were found
in extraordinary circumstances, came to be regarded as gifts
of the gods, or as their name (peturun) indicates, as heirlooms
from their ancestors. The gods are invisible and impalpable
and in all Bali there is not an image of a Hindu deity worshipped
for the sake of its representation. Most often not even
the priests in charge were aware of the names of the divinities
represented.
Our
interest in temples grew when we tried to understand the
rules that dictated their intriguing design, but the first
attempts left us only more confused than before. Explanations
by the pemangkus, the temple-keepers, did not agree and
the discrepancies were often greater than the points of
agreement. With Spies I started into a more systematic search;
we went into a temple, sought the pemangku, and drew a plan
in which the names and purposes of each unit were indicated.
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