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An Island Unto Itself

The island of Bali is just one of the thousands of islands in the Malay Archipelago—that great chain that straddles the equator from New Guinea to the tip of Sumatra and once, eons ago, formed a land bridge between Asia and Australia. Yet unlike the other islands, Bali has held sway in the world’s imagination for most of the past century. Bali’s special reputation came about for several reasons, but to the visitor its allure and fascination are clear and immediate. The island is physically beautiful and the people, lithe, graceful and full of friendliness, exude a quiet confidence.

To the Balinese, their island is the entire world. Other worlds may exist outside, but theirs is complete and whole in itself, a total provider, bountiful with all the physical and spiritual attributes important to existence. In fact the Balinese cosmos is so rich that the psychic, unseen world is constantly spilling over into the mundane. Daily life is a constant expression of the need to honor, praise and propitiate gods and nymphs, demons and witches. Hardly a day goes by without a procession or temple festival, and at night villages far and wide come alive to opera and dance-drama, accompanied by the strange, hypnotic music of gamelan percussion orchestras. To an outsider, Balinese life seems to be a continuous celebration with brief intervals for rest.

According to legend, Bali originated as a special event during the creation of the universe. Through the purity of meditation, the phenomenal world emerged, magnificently arrayed, layer upon layer, from the base of the cosmos below to the perfumed heavens above. In between, the island of Bali appeared, resting on an immense turtle afloat in a vast ocean.

The scientific explanation of the island’s birth and development is a wonderful story as well. Once connected to the massive Asiatic mainland, Bali became an island after the melting of the polar ice caps nearly 120 million years ago. Bali is considered the last outpost of mainland Asia, separated by a 1,000-foot (300-meter) deep channel from the island of Lombok to the east. This channel also represents an ecological boundary known as the Wallace Line after the 19th-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. He noted that Bali has luxurious vegetation and animals found on the Asian mainland such as elephants, tigers, monkeys and wild cattle, while Lombok and the islands to the east suggest an affiliation with Australia and not Asia. Here , east of the Wallace Line, the climate is more arid and the vegetation thorny and scrub-like. The animals include marsupials, the world’s largest lizards, parrots and cockatoos, and relatively few insect species.

Solemnity marks the beginning of the tooth filing ceremony which is usually conducted when the young approach puberty.

A lone field hand surveys the lush rice terraces of a hillside plantation east of Klungkung.

Bali is just over 2,000 square miles (5,181 square kilometers) in area, barely one-quarter the size of Wales, and densely populated with nearly three million inhabitants. Its tropical richness and the ingenious use of terraced rice fields allow the land to support such overcrowding. Elaborate systems of irrigation bring water down from the high volcanoes to the shimmering emerald-green fields found in most corners of the island. Rice is the most important food in Bali; the crop is the source of life and wealth and is recognized as a gift from the gods. Accord-ing to legend, rice first appeared on Bali when the male God of Water raped Mother Earth to beget rice. Wet-rice farming has been practised on Bali for well over 1,000 years, and today’s amazing contoured landscape is the heritage of 50 generations of farmers.

The need to tend the rice and care for the fields led to the rise of the desa, or village, the chief social unit in Bali. It is much more than just a village, however, it is community, parish and focal point of all life for the Balinese. Cozy and safe within a lush grove, surrounded by walls and bountiful trees—coconut, banana, papaya, breadfruit—the desa functions to maintain the cosmic balance and harmony within the area of its jurisdiction, thus assuring the wellbeing of all. Every desa, and there are hundreds of them spread throughout the island, is thus seen to be fulfilling its obligation to gods and men.

Fertile volcanic soil, a copious supply of fresh water and plenty of sunshine provide Bali with ideal conditions for growing crops.

Balinese women present offerings at a temple festival (left). Temple festivals (opposite) and rituals are an integral part of Balinese life. Some rituals are only held on holy days such as Galungan. Other rituals, such as the tooth filing ceremony, can be organized by anyone who needs them. Balinese rituals are grouped into five ritual categories, or panca yadnya. While each rite has a different meaning, their purpose is the same—to cleanse objects or people and foster a sense of wellbeing and community.

Bali has often been called the “Land of a thousand Temples”. Hindu temples, from small shrines in the rice fields to sprawling complexes belonging to large towns, are certainly the most important institution on the island, and they can be seen everywhere. By the sea, on desolate promontories, in caves, on the highest mountains, even entangled in the roots of banyan trees, large and small temples appear as a natural component to the island’s geography.

From earliest times, before the overwhelming influence of Hindu temple building arrived from Java a thousand years ago, there have been plots of consecrated ground, where altars, cairns, and stone enclosures marked a kind of primitive temple. Such temples still can be seen in the eastern part of the island where isolated villages protected these old forms.

Every Balinese community has at least three main temples: the foundation temple of the original village, often hundreds of years old, a town temple for communal celebrations and the temple of the dead for the gods associated with death and cremation. The reason for this division is to maintain a balance between the innumerable contending forces of the invisible world, which to the Balinese has a trenchant reality.