Pura Besakih

← Encyclopedia

The lava came down the southwest flank in March of 1963 while the priests were still at their work on the terraces, and it stopped short. In the tellings the flow halted a few meters from the courtyard walls of the great central temple; the surges that had buried villages lower on the slope split along the ridgelines and passed to either side, and the highest sanctuary on the mountain stood in the ash, unburned. The priests were mid-rite when it happened — in the middle of the Eka Dasa Rudra, the largest purification their religion knows, a ceremony meant to hold disaster at bay. That the mountain erupted around the rite, and that the rite’s own temple was spared by meters, are the two facts the Balinese have read together ever since. From that spared threshold the complex climbs — six terraces, more than twenty temples, better than eighty shrines — up toward the crater, and at its symbolic heart stands a single stone seat with three thrones on it.

Pura Besakih, the ‘mother temple’ of Bali, terraced up the flank of Gunung Agung in Karangasem. Xeviro, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The mother temple on the mountain

Pura Besakih is not one temple but a network of them. The English-language record counts twenty-three separate but interrelated pura, gathering some eighty-six shrines, stepped up six terraced levels of the southwest slope to roughly a thousand meters, above the village of Besakih in the Rendang district of Karangasem, the easternmost regency of Bali. A visitor climbs a stone stair through a candi bentar — the split gateway whose two halves stand apart like a cleft mountain — and passes upward from courtyard to courtyard with the volcano always ahead and above. The whole is addressed within the tradition as the Ibu Pura, the temple that mothers all others: the Pura Agung Besakih, the largest and holiest Hindu sanctuary on the island. Every Balinese, whatever the home temple of clan and village, has somewhere in this complex a shrine that is theirs by descent, a foothold on the mountain to which the ancestral line is bound.

The name carries the mountain’s own guardian. In the etymological tradition of the island, Besakih is glossed from Basuki — the great naga Basuki, one of the world-serpents of Hindu-Balinese cosmology, said to have coiled into the volcano and to dwell there still — and the word is read toward safety, security, the wish that the island be kept whole. Like most etymologies told from within a sacred frame, this is a devotional gloss rather than a philological proof, and it is best held as the tradition’s own account of itself. What it makes plain is that the sanctuary has never been separable from the mountain it stands on.

Beneath the shrines lies something older than the Hindu order. The stone bases of the central sanctuary and of several other pura are built as broad terraced platforms that resemble megalithic stepped pyramids, and the record dates this manner of construction back at least two thousand years. The site’s origins are documented as unclear, but its sanctity, in the phrasing of the sources, almost certainly dates from prehistoric times: a place already holy, already oriented toward the peak, onto which the Shaiva-Hindu temple was later raised. This is the deep genealogy of Besakih — a pre-Hindu mountain sanctuary drawn upward into the later order, the Austronesian ancestral and animist stratum of the island lying under the Hindu-Buddhist layer rather than replaced by it. It is an inheritance the Bali Aga, the pre-Majapahit villagers of the highlands and the eastern hills, would recognize as continuous with their own.

The documentary record grows firmer in the later centuries. Hindu worship is recorded at the site from 1284, in the first generation of Javanese ascendancy over Bali; by the time of the Gelgel dynasty in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Besakih had become the paramount state temple of the realm. Gelgel was the court that carried the deep imprint of Majapahit — the Hindu-Javanese empire whose collapse around 1527 sent its aristocracy, priests, and letters across the strait — into Bali, and the mother temple remained the ritual center of the island under Gelgel and its successor at Klungkung. To hold Besakih was, for those courts, to hold the point on which the whole realm was said to turn. The authoritative modern study of the complex, David J. Stuart-Fox’s Pura Besakih: Temple, Religion and Society in Bali, reads it not as a monument but as a living institution — a working temple of a working religion, whose meaning is remade in the rites still kept on its terraces by the pedanda, the Brahmana high priests, and the pemangku who serve the shrines.

Where the island comes to a point

To stand at Besakih is to stand where the Balinese sacred geography converges. The island is ordered between two poles — kaja, mountainward, the direction of purity and of the gods, and kelod, seaward, toward the churning lower reaches of the world. On this side of Bali, kaja means, in the end, toward the volcano and toward Besakih; when a Balinese prays, the body is already turned toward the seat on the mountain. The sea temples sit at the other pole, at the island’s outer edge — Pura Tanah Lot on its tidal rock, Pura Luhur Uluwatu on the southern sea-cliff — facing outward to hold the balance against the ocean’s power, while Besakih anchors the kaja end of everything. The complex is not so much visited as oriented to: the fixed point the whole island faces.

Its heart is Pura Penataran Agung, the great central temple, and the heart of that is the padmasana — the lotus throne, a tall stone seat from which the divine is addressed, dated in the record to around the seventeenth century. Here it takes a rare form. Besakih’s is a padmasana tiga, a triple lotus throne, three seats standing together on a single rectangular base — studied by architectural scholars as the paradigm of its type — and it seats the Trimurti, the three great devas together. The complex is read as color-coded to that triad. Pura Penataran Agung, in the center, is for Siwa (Shiva), whose ritual color is white; Pura Kiduling Kreteg, to the south, is for Brahma the creator, whose color is red; Pura Batu Madeg is for Wisnu (Vishnu) the preserver, whose color is black. The three are not rivals but complements, woven into the balance of paired and opposing powers — rwa bhineda — that structures the Balinese cosmos, the same principle that sets a guardian against a witch or the mountain against the sea and calls the tension between them order rather than war.

Above and behind all the named devas stands, in the modern devotional framing, Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa, the formless supreme godhead from whom every deva emanates, honored at the empty throne of the padmasana. It should be marked that the emphatic, explicit framing of Sang Hyang Widhi as the one supreme God was substantially a twentieth-century reform — foregrounded and systematized as the Parisada Dharma Hindu Bali took shape in 1959 and Indonesian state recognition of Agama Hindu followed around 1962, in part to satisfy Pancasila’s requirement of belief in one supreme God. That reform is historical and contested, not a timeless creed; the older Besakih worship is thickly populated with devas, with ancestral bhatara and bhatari, and with the power of the mountain itself, and the fuller reckoning with the reform belongs to Widhi’s own account. Balinese Hinduism is best understood not as a simple branch of Indian Hinduism but as a distinct syncretic tradition — Shaiva and Buddhist and Austronesian ancestral together — and Besakih, with its megalithic bases under its Hindu thrones, is that syncretism in stone.

The complex is read as a mandala of the whole island. Its many pura answer to the divisions of Balinese society and of the cosmos: particular temples belong to particular clans and descent groups, others to the island’s regions or to the guardian lords of the directions, so that the six terraces are not merely a stair up a hillside but a map of the ordered world laid against the mountain’s slope. To worship here is 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. The living water that orders the terraced fields lower down, the gift of the lake goddess Dewi Danu, and the holy springs where the Balinese cleanse themselves at temples like Pura Tirta Empul, belong to the same sacred hydrology that runs down from these heights; Besakih sits at its source. This is why the mother temple can carry rites no single village could. It is built, in its very plan, to represent the whole.

Above every ordinary festival stands one rite the tradition measures itself against. Besakih is the seat of Eka Dasa Rudra, the “eleven Rudra” — the greatest tawur, or purification, of Balinese Hinduism, meant to be held only at the turning of the Saka century, when the tens and the units of the year both come round to zero and 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 Siwa in his fierce, world-dissolving aspect. The eleven Rudra-forces are the powers that, unbalanced, tear the world apart; the rite 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 at the distance of the public record, 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, and it is set down here as history and description, never as an operative account of how it is done. The reason it belongs to Besakih is plain: Besakih is where the whole island can be addressed at once.

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

Ash, the spared threshold, and the managed slope

The modern life of Besakih turns on 1963. That year the Eka Dasa Rudra was mounted on the terraces, an undertaking framed as extraordinary — reconstructed from the old texts because the full rite had not been performed within clear record, and its timing disputed even as it began. By the strict Saka reckoning the century had not yet closed; some priests, reading the mountain’s early rumblings as a warning, called for postponement and were overruled. As the historical record notes, the ceremony went forward under the political weight of the Sukarno era — the government had invited an international tourism convention to Bali and timed it to coincide with the rite. Then the long-quiet mountain began to speak in earnest.

The eruption of Gunung Agung is one of the deadliest of the twentieth century in Indonesia, and its course is set down plainly. Local residents heard loud explosions and saw clouds rising from the crater on 18 February 1963; lava began flowing down the northern slope on 24 February; and on 17 March the volcano erupted catastrophically, a paroxysm rated VEI 5 that threw debris eight to ten kilometers into the air and sent pyroclastic flows — the nuées ardentes, the glowing avalanches — down its flanks. A second major explosive phase came on 16 May. The pyroclastic flows of March killed on the order of eleven to fifteen hundred people, the May explosion some two hundred more, and the cold lahars that rain later drove down the ravines another two hundred, so that the toll of the whole 1963–64 disaster is usually reckoned at roughly seventeen hundred and rises, in the fuller estimates, toward nineteen hundred. These are the sober facts, stated as such: villages of eastern Bali were buried, and the dead are not folded into the temple’s good fortune.

For the temple’s fortune is the other half of the story, and the tradition holds both. As the record of “the wrath of the gods” preserves it, the lava and the flows missed the Besakih complex, sometimes by mere meters, and the Balinese did not read this as luck. Within the living frame the near-miss is a sign: the gods showing their power without destroying the seat the people had raised to them, the balance the Eka Dasa Rudra sought shown rather than broken. A geologist would add, without contradicting the reading, that the summit ridge shields the southwest slope and steers flows to either side of the site; the two accounts describe the same escarpment from different distances, and the tradition takes the meaning while the science takes the mechanism. The disputed timing, in any case, left the rite of 1963 unfinished. It was carried through only sixteen years later, when the full Eka Dasa Rudra was held into the spring of 1979, its great tawur falling on Tilem Kesanga, the dark moon of the ninth month, on 28 March 1979 — the last day of Saka year 1900, and so the first celebration held on the proper centennial reckoning. For the reformed, state-recognized Agama Hindu, the 1979 rite was a landmark: the mother temple’s greatest ceremony performed, at last, on the count the reform had set.

The ethnographic and heritage literature treats Besakih as the ritual capstone of the island, and it is read here critically, as the datable record it is. Miguel Covarrubias, whose Island of Bali of 1937 fixed the complex in the outside imagination as the paramount temple of a sacred landscape, wrote from within the romantic gaze of his decade; the later scholarship — Fred Eiseman’s Bali: Sekala and Niskala frames the visible ceremony, the sekala, as the surface of an unseen order, the niskala, and Stuart-Fox’s institutional history sets the complex’s layers side by side — corrects and deepens him without dislodging the central observation. Besakih gathers the island. What none of these accounts is asked to bear is the weight of Bali’s grave modern history entire; the fuller reckoning with the twentieth century — the puputan against the Dutch, the mass killings of 1965–66 in which Bali was among the worst-hit regions — belongs to the account of the Balinese themselves. At Besakih the load-bearing modern fact is narrower and singular: the eruption that came during the Eka Dasa Rudra, and the threshold the flows did not cross.

Today the mother temple is at once a working pilgrimage center and a heavily managed tourist site, and the two do not always sit easily. The dense calendar of odalan — the temple anniversaries that fall on the 210-day pawukon cycle — draws worshipers from across the island to the shrines that are, in the fullest sense, their own; the same slope draws a steady traffic of visitors, and the site has long drawn criticism for aggressive guide and donation practices at its approaches. In recent years a large state redevelopment reshaped that approach, with new parking, terraces, and visitor buildings below the temple — an intervention welcomed by some as overdue management and faulted by others as the further handing of a sacred place to the machinery of tourism. The tension is real and is set down as reception, not adopted as the temple’s meaning. What Besakih is, under the crowds and the ticketing and the concrete of the new approach, is what it has been since a stepped platform was first raised on this slope: the point at which the island’s holiness comes to a peak, on the flank of the mountain that, in 1963, erupted around its greatest rite and left the mother temple standing.

→ Related: Tanah Lot · Uluwatu · Pura Tirta Empul · Sang Hyang Widhi · Dewi Sri · Dewi Danu · Barong · Rangda · The Balinese · The Bali Aga · The Majapahit