Pura Besakih

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In March of 1963 the mountain came apart, and the rock that Gunung Agung threw down its own flanks was moving. Pyroclastic surges and lahars ran the ravines toward the sea, and the villages of eastern Bali burned under a sky gone the color of ash. On the southwest slope, terraced up toward the crater, stood the largest temple complex on the island, its priests in the middle of the greatest purification their religion knows. The flows came down. Then, along the ridgelines that cradle the site, they parted and passed on either side, and Pura Besakih was left standing in the smoke. In the retellings the lava halted a few meters short of the courtyard walls. Whether by meters or by the shape of the summit ridge, the mother temple was not taken, and the Balinese have been reading that fact ever since.

Pura Besakih, the “mother temple” of Bali, terraced up the flank of Gunung Agung. Xeviro, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The mother temple on the mountain

Pura Besakih is not a building. It is a sacred landscape: a cluster of more than twenty pura climbing the flank of Gunung Agung at nearly a thousand meters, above Besakih village in the Rendang district of Karangasem, some thirty kilometers east of Denpasar. The standard count gives twenty-three separate but related temples, arranged on six ascending terraces and gathered around one great central sanctuary, Pura Penataran Agung. A visitor climbs a stone stair through a candi bentar, the split gateway whose two halves stand apart like a mountain cleft, and passes upward from courtyard to courtyard with the volcano always ahead and above. The whole is Bali’s Pura Kahyangan Jagat, the temple of the realm, and to the Balinese it is the Ibu Pura, the mother temple — the holiest place of Agama Hindu Dharma, the Balinese form of Hinduism.

Its name carries the mountain’s own guardian. In the etymological tradition of the island, Besakih derives from the Sanskrit and Old Javanese Wasuki, softened to Basuki — the great naga Basuki, one of the cosmic serpents of the creation story, said to have coiled into Gunung Agung and to dwell there still. The word is glossed as safety, security, well-being; to name the temple is to name the wish that the island be kept whole. Like most etymologies told from inside a tradition, this is a sacred gloss rather than a philological proof, and it is best held as the frame’s own account of itself. What it makes plain is that the site has never been separable from the mountain it stands on.

Beneath the shrines lies something older than Hinduism. The stone bases of Pura Penataran Agung and of several other pura are built as broad terraced platforms that resemble megalithic stepped pyramids, and specialists date this manner of construction back at least two thousand years. The reading generally accepted is that a pre-Hindu terraced sanctuary — a place already sacred, already oriented toward the mountain — underlies the present complex, so that the Hindu temple was raised on ground that had been holy for a long time before. This continuity, from a stepped platform on a volcano’s slope to the mother temple of a Hindu island, is the deep genealogy of the place, and it is one the Bali Aga, the pre-Majapahit Balinese, would recognize as their own inheritance.

The record grows firmer in the later centuries. By the fifteenth century Besakih served as the state temple of the Gelgel dynasty — the royal house descended from Majapahit, the Hindu-Javanese empire whose collapse sent its aristocracy, priests, and letters across the strait to Bali. Under Gelgel, and its successor at Klungkung, the mother temple became the ritual center of the whole island: the place where the paramount dynasty performed the rites on which the order of the realm was held to depend. The documentary date for the establishment of Hindu worship at the site is given as 1284, in the first generation of Javanese ascendancy over Bali.

Around that date the tradition tells a founding story. The sage Rsi Markandeya, a teacher of Indo-Javanese lineage, is said to have come to the slope under meditative guidance and to have consecrated the ground by burying the panca datu, the five metals, as the spiritual axis of the island — an act that fixed Besakih as the point on which Bali turns. The historicity of Markandeya and the precision of the date belong to sacred narrative, not to the archaeological record, and are held here as tradition rather than as documented fact. The authoritative modern study, David J. Stuart-Fox’s Pura Besakih: Temple, Religion and Society in Bali, published for the KITLV, sets these layers side by side and reads the complex not as a monument but as a living institution — a working temple of a working religion, whose meaning is made and remade in the rites still performed on its terraces.

The seat from which the island is kept in balance

To stand at Besakih is to stand at the point where the Balinese sacred world is anchored. Gunung Agung is felt as the axis of the cosmos, the Balinese Mount Meru, the abode of the ancestral gods; and Besakih is the great earthly seat of the divine on its slope. The orientation runs through everything. The Balinese order space by kaja, toward the mountain, and kelod, toward the sea; kaja is the direction of purity and of the gods, and on this side of the island kaja means, in the end, toward Agung and toward Besakih. When a Balinese prays, the body is already turned toward the seat on the mountain. The temple is not visited so much as oriented to.

The complex is read as a mandala of the whole. Its many pura answer to the divisions of Balinese society and of the cosmos: particular temples belong to particular clans, to regions, to the directions of the compass and their guardian lords. Nearly every Balinese has a pura here to which the ancestral line is bound, a foothold on the mountain that is theirs by descent, and the great festivals — the complex keeps a dense calendar of them, running on the 210-day pawukon cycle — draw worshipers from across the island to the shrines that are, in the fullest sense, their own. Besakih is where Bali gathers itself into one place.

The internal order of the complex answers to this gathering. The central Pura Penataran Agung is ringed by lesser pura, and the whole is understood to hold within itself the seats of the great gods of the directions, so that the six terraces are not merely a stair up a hillside but a map of the ordered cosmos laid against the mountain’s slope. Some of the temples belong to particular clans or descent groups; others are tied to the island’s regions, or to the paramount dynasty whose state temple this was. To worship at Besakih is therefore never a private act. It is to take one’s place in a structure that runs from one’s own line, through one’s region, up to the seat of the supreme divinity — and to do so on the ground the whole island holds in common. This is why the mother temple can carry the rites no single village could: it is built, in its very plan, to represent the whole.

At the symbolic center, in Pura Penataran Agung, stands the padmasana — the lotus-throne, a tall stone seat from which the divine is addressed, dated to around the seventeenth century. Here it takes its threefold form: a padmasana tiga, the trilinga throne, honoring Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma together not as three gods but as three aspects of the one supreme divinity, Sang Hyang Widhi. The worshiper at the padmasana addresses god as the mountain rises directly behind the shrine, the built throne and the volcanic peak on a single line of sight. It is the most concentrated statement the complex makes: the one divinity, in three faces, seated where the island’s holiness comes to a point.

Pura Penataran Agung, the central temple, whose lotus-throne is the ritual focus of the entire complex. Michael Gunther (G41rn8), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Above all the ordinary festivals stands one rite that the whole tradition measures itself against. Besakih is the place of Eka Dasa Rudra, the “Eleven Rudras” — the greatest tawur, or purification, of Agama Hindu Dharma, meant to be held once in a century. Its calendar is exact: the rite falls when the tens and the units of the Saka year both come round to zero, so that a whole cycle closes at once. Eka dasa is eleven, for the eleven directions — the four cardinal and four intercardinal points, the zenith, the nadir, and the center — and Rudra is Shiva in his fierce, destructive aspect. The eleven Rudra-forces are the powers that, unbalanced, tear the world; the purification is meant to still them and to set the cosmos right, a rebalancing performed at the axis for the sake of everything the axis holds up. Described from the public record, at the ethnographer’s distance, it is a vast sequence of processions, offerings, and sacrifices reaching from the sea to the mountain and gathering the island’s priesthood at the mother temple. It is not a ceremony a village performs; it is the rite by which Bali as a whole is made clean, and the reason it belongs to Besakih is that Besakih is where the whole can be addressed at once. To hold the mother temple is to hold the balance of the island, which is why the Balinese read the temple’s fortunes and the mountain’s temper together, as a single sacred barometer.

Ash, heritage, and the crowded slope

The modern life of Besakih turns on 1963. That year the Eka Dasa Rudra was mounted on the terraces — but its timing was disputed even as it began. By the strict Saka reckoning the century had not yet closed, and some priests reportedly warned that the moment was inauspicious and urged that the rite be postponed; the ceremony went forward anyway, pressed on by the politics of the Sukarno era and, in Stuart-Fox’s account, timed to coincide with a convention. Then the mountain, long quiet, began to speak. The paroxysm of 17 March 1963 was one of the deadliest eruptions of the century — its geological course, and the toll it took on eastern Bali, belong to the mountain’s own account — and the rite went on under falling ash. The flows came down toward the mother temple — and missed it, in the phrase that has fixed itself to the story, sometimes by mere meters.

The Balinese did not read this as luck. In the account preserved by the Volcano World record of “the wrath of the gods,” the sparing of Besakih was taken as a signal from the gods that they wished to show their power but not to destroy the seat the people had raised to them. The geologist notes, without contradicting the reading, that the summit ridge shields the southwest slope, steering flows to either side of the site; the two accounts describe the same escarpment from different distances. What matters for the temple is the meaning the island drew: that the mountain, mid-rite, had spared its own mother temple, and that the balance the Eka Dasa Rudra sought had, in the terrible way of rwa-bhineda, been shown rather than broken. The disputed timing left the rite itself unfinished. It was completed only sixteen years later, when the full Eka Dasa Rudra was held from late February into May of 1979, its great tawur falling on 28 March 1979 — Saka year 1900, the first celebration in a properly centennial reckoning. The sober facts of 1963 — the two thousand dead of eastern Bali, the villages under the flows — are not folded into the temple’s good fortune; they stand beside it, and the tradition holds both.

Running alongside the eruption is a quieter, longer contest over what Besakih should be. As the most celebrated temple complex on the island, it was an obvious candidate for the machinery of heritage and tourism, and in 1995 the central government moved to have it nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The move met stiff local resistance. There were fears, as Stuart-Fox documents in Pura Besakih: A World Heritage Site Contested, that inscription would compromise the religious standing of the temple and that the Balinese would lose control over its management — a matter sharpened by the rivalries the mother temple concentrates, the clan rights and the competing claims of precedence among the island’s ritually senior families. The nomination was eventually withdrawn in 2015. The pattern held: a place that gathers the whole island resists being handed over to a body that answers to no clan.

The most recent chapter is the one still being argued. On 13 March 2023 President Joko Widodo inaugurated a large state penataran, a facilities development of the sacred area — a multistory parking structure sized for well over a thousand cars and buses, hundreds of market kiosks, a plaza, and visitor amenities, built across the Bencingah and Manik Mas zones at a cost of some six hundred billion rupiah. The project was framed officially as protecting the temple’s sacred aura and easing the crush of visitors. It has also drawn criticism over its scale, its commercial apparatus, and the pressure of mass tourism on a place that is, before anything else, a working temple: kiosks stand empty for want of buyers, and the day-tripper’s Besakih — the “mother temple” of the “island of the gods,” reached through a gauntlet of guide fees — sits uneasily beside the pilgrim’s. That branding, and the crowding of worshipers by tourists, are recorded here as the temple’s reception in the world, not as its truth. The fuller reckoning with Bali’s tourist image, and with the twentieth-century history that shaped it, belongs to the account of the Balinese themselves.

For the people of the island none of this displaces the plain fact of the place. Besakih is where their line has a temple, where the padmasana faces the mountain, where the island’s clean is made once in a hundred years. The parking structure and the empty kiosks are the latest thing to have happened to it; the mountain sparing the mother temple in the ash of 1963 is an older thing, and the terraced platform under Pura Penataran Agung is older still. On the slope where the naga Basuki is said to keep the island safe, the worshipers climb the six terraces toward the smoke of the crater, and turn, as they have always turned, kaja — toward the mountain.

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