Pura Tirta Empul

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The spouts stand in a row along the wall of the tank, a dozen and more carved stone mouths pouring ropes of clear water into the pool below. A worshiper steps down over the stone lip, waist-deep in water cold enough to catch the breath, and begins to move along the line. Hands come together; the head goes under the first fall so the water breaks over the crown and runs down the face; a prayer is murmured, a little water cupped to the mouth, and then a single pace to the next spout, and the next after that. It is less a wash than a procession made of single steps. And every step of it repeats an older one. In the story the Balinese tell of this water, the spring was struck from the ground by the god Indra to loose the water of life against a tyrant’s poison — so that the everyday bathe re-enacts, spout by spout, the moment the earth was pierced and the deathless water welled up.

A petirtaan at Pura Tirta Empul, where worshippers move in order beneath the row of spring-fed spouts. Anandajoti Bhikkhu, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The water that wells up

The temple takes its name from its own spring. Tirta is holy water; empul is a spring that rises of its own accord, unbidden, out of the ground. Pura Tirta Empul is therefore the temple of the water that wells up — and the water does exactly that, here, in the black sand of a spring that has never stopped flowing. The place lies at Manukaya, in the Tampaksiring district of Gianyar Regency, in the central highlands of Bali where the land begins to fold into river gorges. One of those gorges is the Pakerisan, and this spring is its head. The temple is not perched on a height or thrust out over the sea like the island’s famous cliff and tidal sanctuaries; it sits low, in the ground, at the precise point where the water comes up, which is the whole of its reason for standing where it does.

The firmest thing the record holds is a stone. In the village stands an old inscription now called the Prasasti Manukaya, cut in Old Balinese script on both faces of a single slab and dated to the Saka year 882 — 960 to 962 of the common era — issued in the name of a king of the Warmadewa house, the dynasty that ruled Bali in the centuries before the Javanese ascendancy. The charter commands works on a spring and on the embankments that hold it, so that the bathing place might be made and kept. On the strength of that stone the temple is dated to around 962 CE, founded around the spring under the Warmadewa. That much is scholarly consensus. What the weathered slab cannot fix is the finer reading. Not all of its engraved lines survive; the king’s name has been given as Sri Candrabhayasingha Warmadewa and, in a later re-reading, as Indra Jaya Singha Warmadewa, and the epigraphers who worked the stone — Willem Stutterheim in the earlier generation, Louis-Charles Damais after him — did not agree on every word. The inscription and its spring have since been studied on their own as a document of Bali’s early hydraulic religion, and its decipherment was carried through only in 1969. Whether the year marks a founding or the restoration of a place already holy, and whether the charter’s spring is exactly the present pools, rests on lines that are in many places no longer legible. These are the seams where the certainty runs out, and they are named here as seams.

The stone is not kept at the bathing temple. It stands in a shrine at Pura Sakenan in Manukaya village — a local temple of that name, not the island sanctuary of the same title near Denpasar — where the community has honored it as its own founding record, washing the slab in a rite tied to the full moon of the fourth month of the Balinese year. That a village should wash the stone that records the making of its spring is of a piece with everything the place is about. The water and the memory of the water are kept together.

Beneath the charter lies the deeper genealogy, the one the Balinese themselves tell, and it is a genealogy of the water rather than of the stonework. In the tradition preserved by the island’s tellers and its tourism board alike, the spring is amerta — amrita, the elixir of life, the deathless water — and it was struck from the earth by Bhatara Indra. The tyrant Mayadenawa, a mighty but ungodly king who had proclaimed himself divine and forbidden the people to make their offerings, so angered the gods that Bali fell to sickness and famine; and when Indra came down against him, the raja crept into the god’s camp by night and conjured a beautiful, poisoned spring, so that Indra’s soldiers, drinking at dawn, sickened and fell. To revive them the god drove his weapon into the earth, and from the wound rose water that was not poison but its opposite — the living spring that healed the army and set it on its feet. The spring is that wound in the ground of the world. And in the temple’s inner court the lord of the living water is Wisnu, addressed here as Narayana, he who moves upon the waters — so that the site’s pedigree is at once a tenth-century royal water-work on the Pakerisan and an act of the gods older than any dynasty. Both accounts are kept. Neither is asked to defeat the other.

The religion of holy water

Balinese Hinduism is sometimes called Agama Tirtha, the religion of holy water, and Tirta Empul is one of the places that most plainly earns the name. Water here is not a symbol of the sacred but its medium: the channel by which the unseen order the Balinese call niskala reaches into the seen world of sekala, and by which a person is made clean and whole again. The temple is built to receive and to order that water. Its plan follows the three-court pattern of the island’s sanctuaries — an outer court, the Jaba Pura, where the worshiper enters and settles; a central court, the Jaba Tengah, that holds the bathing tanks; and the inner sanctum, the Jeroan, kept for the shrines and the spring itself, the clear pool where the water can be seen boiling up from the sand. The living spring feeds the tanks below it, and along their walls run the petirtaan: rows of carved stone spouts, the courtyard’s pools carrying on the order of thirty in all, the main purification pool commonly counted at a row of thirteen.

In those spouts the Balinese perform melukat, the ritual self-cleansing that draws people to this temple from across the island. Having first made offering, the worshiper enters the tank and moves along the line of spouts in order, each with its own name and dedication, letting the living water pass over the head and washing away spiritual impurity, sickness, ill fortune, and the residue of the world. The pools carry names that read as a passage through cleansing — Pengelukatan, Pebersihan, Sudamala — and near the end of the line the sequence does something a stranger might miss: it passes two spouts by. These are the Pancuran Cetik, the poison spouts, and no head goes beneath them. They belong to the rites of death and misfortune, not to the ordinary cleansing, and the worshiper leaves them pouring. The rite is old and living, guided by the pemangku who serve the temple and hedged with prayers and offerings that mark it off from the tourist bathe; it is set down here at the distance of the public record, as description and never as an operative account of how the cleansing is done.

The reason the passage matters is the reason the spring exists. The water is amerta, the elixir won in the story of Indra, so that the ordinary bathe re-enacts the cosmic loosing of the water of life against poison and tyranny. That the poison spouts are not fought but simply passed by is itself the teaching. The tyrant in the legend is defeated not by a counter-poison but by the release of pure water; the temple does not destroy the venom so much as order the spring’s power over against it and set the two in their places, the healing water and the poison rising, as the tellers have it, from the same rock. This is the Balinese sense of rwa bhineda, the balance of complementary opposites whose tension is the order of the world rather than a war within it — the same principle that pairs a guardian with a witch or the mountain with the sea. Here it is water and poison, and the point is not the annihilation of the one but the ordering of the whole.

Dedicated to Wisnu the preserver, lord of the waters, Tirta Empul stands within the dense network of pura that covers Bali, each temple bound to its own calendar of odalan, the anniversaries that come round on the 210-day ritual cycle. Within that network it is one of the island’s principal temples of purification: a place people come to before undertakings, after loss, at the turnings of the ritual year, to be made ready again for the gods. The living water that cleanses the person is the same water that, running down the Pakerisan and its sister streams, orders the terraced rice fields lower down — the gift, in the island’s sacred hydrology, of the rice-mother Dewi Sri whose fields the spring ultimately feeds. To bathe at the source is to stand at the head of that whole descending order of water, at the point where it first comes up out of the ground.

The spring, the palace, and the crowd

In the modern record Tirta Empul is at once a working purification temple and one of the most-visited sites on the island, and the two conditions do not always sit easily together. Its founding is anchored, unusually, by a hard date. Bali’s religious past is otherwise reconstructed from scattered inscriptions and archaeology, and the Manukaya stone — Saka 882, 960 to 962 CE — gives scholars a firm Warmadewa-era horizon for the island’s hydraulic-religious landscape, of a piece with the wider evidence of a Hindu-Buddhist Bali present from the eighth to the tenth centuries. The temple sits in the same central-Bali sacred country as Goa Gajah, the “elephant cave,” and the rock-cut monuments of the Pakerisan valley, a stretch of gorge and terrace whose subak irrigation the wider record counts among the oldest known on the island. The spring at Manukaya is the head of that watered country.

Downstream the myth turns dark, and the living tradition supplies its own commentary on the site. When Mayadenawa fell, the tellers say, his blood ran into the river that is still called the Petanu, which was held cursed for a thousand years — its water making the rice grow too fast and reek of blood, so that for generations it could not be used. And the day of the tyrant’s defeat is remembered every 210 days as Galungan, the festival on which dharma is held to triumph over adharma and the ancestral spirits return to the island. That a purification temple should stand at the head of a river the same myth curses is the tradition’s own way of saying that the water of life and the water of death rise together, and that the work of the temple is to keep them ordered. These are matters of the living oral and textual tradition, told from within it, and they are set down here as the tradition’s account of itself.

A view over the inner court of Pura Tirta Empul, above the bathing tanks fed by the spring. Anandajoti Bhikkhu, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Much of the temple’s modern fame owes to what was built above it. On the ridge overlooking the spring stands the Istana Tampaksiring, a presidential palace that President Sukarno had raised in the years after independence: he appointed the architect R.M. Soedarsono in 1957, and construction ran from that year into the early 1960s, a modernist complex softened with Balinese elements and set on higher ground with a view down over the temple and out toward the volcano. Sukarno meant it to show the new republic’s culture to visiting heads of state, and the choice of Tampaksiring drew the eye of the state — and, in the decades that followed, of mass tourism — to the spring below. The ethnographers who fixed Bali in the outside imagination framed such water temples as central to how the Balinese order the sacred and the profane: Miguel Covarrubias, whose Island of Bali of 1937 wrote from within the romantic gaze of its decade, and later Fred Eiseman, whose Bali: Sekala and Niskala reads the visible ceremony as the surface of an unseen order. Read critically, as the datable accounts they are, they converge on the same observation the temple makes of itself: that in Bali the holy is reached through water.

The pressures of that fame are part of the temple’s present life. Accounts note the sheer volume of visitors, the negotiation of sacred use against the photographable bathe, and a 2017 inquiry that raised concerns about the quality of the water in the pools — the ordinary tensions of a living temple that is also a landmark, set down as reception and not adopted as the temple’s meaning. What the crowds do not touch is the working core of the place: the pemangku and the worshipers who come for melukat, the offerings, the passage through the spouts, the spring boiling up in the inner court as it has since a Warmadewa king first set stone around it.

Two framings, finally, are best marked rather than flattened. The cosmology kept at Tirta Empul is Balinese Hinduism’s own syncretic weave — Shaiva and Vaishnava and ancestral together, a holy-water religion grown on the island rather than a province of the Hinduism of India, an inheritance that predates the deep imprint left on the island by the Majapahit after their empire’s fall in the early sixteenth century. And the explicitly monotheistic framing of the one supreme godhead, Sang Hyang Widhi, behind the devas is best read as a documented twentieth-century reform rather than a timeless creed. The fuller reckoning with that history, and with the grave modern century of the Balinese themselves, belongs to their own accounts; at the spring the load-bearing fact is narrower and older. The spring has not stopped. It rises now as it rose for the king who first walled it, cold and clear and unbidden out of the sand, and the worshiper who steps down into the pool steps into the same water Indra was said to have struck from the ground — made ready, once more, to stand before the gods.

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